It's not just returning a matched image, though. It's also returning a confidence level, and in the cases they've discovered, it's returning 100% confidence. That's clearly wrong.
You have to take nonbinding referenda with a grain of salt. It's easy to wave the flag and claim nationalism when you don't have to deal with the difficulties of actually running a country when you do.
I'm not saying that the Greenlanders don't genuinely want independence. I'm just saying that 75% is the high-water mark. At least 25% genuinely don't want independence, and that were it to come down to a binding vote, they could well find another 26% who get cold feet at the prospect of having to deal with the consequences.
If Denmark does indeed manage to win them trillions worth of oil, they may well decide to keep it all for themselves, and vote for that. And then the sticky wicket would be getting to a binding referendum, which the Danes would not permit easily. The easiest route to it would be to buy their independence by promising a fraction of that oil revenue.
We have an odd kind of expectation of privacy even in public places. I'm not saying we don't; I'm just pointing out that the expectation strikes me as not obvious. The Fourth Amendment calls out "their persons, houses, papers, and effects", which notably omits anything outside your immediate control.
The expectation comes from a pre-technological age, and I certainly don't fault the Fourth Amendment for failing to see how technology would change the ways in which we expect to be private even in public. But I do think it ends up calling for a recalibration of both the law and our expectations.
Ideally, I'd like to see that codified in a new amendment. Unfortunately, given that even simple, popular legislation seems impossible to pass, I can't imagine getting agreement on something with even the faintest whiff of controversy past the rather higher bar of a Constitutional amendment. So I'd be happy for a decent national conversation on the topic.
Personally, I wouldn't have thought that the law extended to an expectation of privacy on your front lawn, since you already expect your neighbors to be watching. It's interesting to see a court disagree. I wouldn't be surprised if this is overturned at a higher level, though unfortunately, at this point I've given up thinking of the Supreme Court as anything other than an ideology engine, so really just figure out which side is which and assume that it'll go that way.
But I don't think they've fully integrated the software. Google Maps apparently gets "reports" from Waze, but they seem to otherwise still be separate. They generate different routes and different estimates.
Based on my purely anecdotal experience, I've found that Maps has smarter routing but that Waze does a better job of being current on traffic. So I use Waze when I expect traffic to be an issue (i.e. during rush times), and Maps at other times. (Maps also has a more pleasant interface. Waze's voice is especially over-talkative.)
At least one set of judges, the 9th Circuit, disagreed that the previous decision applied here. The current court disagrees (unanimously) with them, and what they say goes, but the fact that it made it to the Supreme Court at all suggests that there is real disagreement about the meaning and applicability of the previous decisions.
So there's plenty of blame to go around, but it includes all nine of the current justices as well as the past ones. And the current Congress, who could easily remedy this (to popular acclaim), but the leadership won't even try.
I'm surprised this hasn't been put to the test already. There are about 200 accidents and 1-2 fatalities per 100 million miles driven. Uber and Lyft must be closing in on that number by now, and since they're primarily about accident-prone city driving I'd expect it to be faster.
Surely something has happened by now that would have provoked the insurance companies' ire and make them start sending out warnings, but I haven't heard about it. Am I just missing it? Or have they handled it all in house so far?
I've read the review, but not the book, but a key element seems to come down to "Maybe it's real, but nobody knows". It seems a fairly simple procedure for him to order some of it and have it tested, and then he'd know. Yeah, that's a legal gray area, but it would make his case a lot stronger to be able to say "Yeah, I ordered a bunch of Russian Viagra and it tested out as 75% as good as the real stuff".
I know that means taking a risk of being prosecuted, but isn't that something we commend journalists for? At least, better than making allegations about what corporate execs and government employees are thinking without evidence.
I really miss my iPod Nano, the 5th generation, the last one that was really a dedicated music player rather than an iOS device. It was very small and did one thing really well, which made it perfect for running.
But eventually I got a smart phone, and since I'd be carrying it on runs anyway... it's more cumbersome to use as a player, but at least it's able to update itself without having to go through iTunes. I suspect that iOS-based Nanos can as well, but I just didn't need a separate device any more.
I'd also like to see it controlled against a pepperoni pizza, which practically everybody seems to like. (Oddly, except for me. I'm just not into fermented sausages. Not into salami, either. I'll eat pepperoni pizza, but I'd rather have sausage.) Once you exclude the obvious failures (e.g. vegetarians) I bet you could get 98% approval.
If that 98% figure means that they can differentiate vegetarians from non-vegetarians just by watching their eyes with near-perfect accuracy... that actually sounds like an interesting result all by itself.
Thanks for the tip. I do have a stone, and get tolerable pizza out of it, but your physics makes sense and I may have to give it a try the next time I'm feeling flush.
Meantime... we've got a place that brought a pizza oven over from Naples, and their pizzas do in fact come out in 90 seconds.
There's a lot of great cuisine in England. It's got some amazing chefs, like Heston Blumenthal and Fergus Henderson. The "gastro pubs" are serving some amazing food. The influences of south Asian cuisine are incredibly creative.
OK, they're not the French, who make great food an extremely high priority, so there's a lot of great food and very little bad food. The English got a bad reputation in the mid 20th century, having depleted their agricultural system to keep from being conquered, but that ended a while back, and they're no longer tolerating bad food. English cuisine is now on par with anywhere else in Europe or the US. Even Italy (where I've had some surprisingly mediocre pizza).
You can still get crap, of course, but it's not at all difficult to find really good food in the UK. (I'm not a resident there, just an occasional visitor and fan of food.)
iTunes remains an astonishingly bad user interface. It wasn't originally an Apple product, which explains some of it, but they took it over a decade ago, and it's still incredibly bad. (Caveat: I finally gave up on my iPod, so maybe it's gotten better in the last two years. But given how abominable it was, with massive and obvious bugs being ignored, for so long, I doubt it.)
I don't know why Apple has a blind spot for an incredibly bad user interface for a flagship product (I mean the music store, rather than the iPod), but it does. So any accusations of bad design rather than malice seem credible, even though in general that's a bad heuristic when applied to Apple.
I got the impression that the idea was to use the breast itself as the scattering medium, in an attempt to focus on something inside the breast, namely a cancer. The chicken breast was used to simulate breast material, which would probably be pretty clever if it weren't so confusing.
Chicken breast is very different from mammalian mammary tissue, but it was probably the cheapest source of meat. It may also help that it's relatively uniform, to simplify things, while simultaneously being sufficiently random at the tissue level.
Both the floret and the katana are designed to allow blades to slide along and be kicked away. A crossguard like this is often used to trap, or even snap, incoming weapons.
I like to think that the choreographers will find clever and interesting things to do with this. They always have in the past. It is a little odd that it appeared to have a metal nub near the base, where it could potentially be damaged by an energy blade, but it wouldn't surprise me if they were still able to use it to trap an incoming blade (and perhaps counter by pivoting around that point and using the crossguard offensively).
The lens flare that was there was actually well used, when the Falcon went up into the sun. It helped highlight a dramatic moment. I thought that was good work.
At the very least, the Democrats are fighting back with the same dubious tactic. Here in Maryland, we just squeezed out another Republican seat with some extremely sketchy-looking districts.
That's one, mind you, compared to the three or four they were finding in North Carolina. It would take decades for Democrats to try to regain control of the legislatures. It would be much better to replace the system with one less easily corrupted (or at least, less immediately corrupted), but I do expect both parties to live down to the tactics of the worst. It's what gets you elected.
The Democrats happen to be worse at it (for now), and I'd love to see them be able to use that to campaign for a less corrupt system. The trick will be getting people out to vote for it. It's not on most people's priority list. That list consists primarily of pocketbook issues.
I'd like to give PR a try, though I don't expect it to be the end of the two-party system. Minority parties tend to be subsumed into one of the two leading parties, because any vote on legislation ends up dividing people into "yes" and "no" camps. Ideally, the coalitions would differ from vote to vote, but since the best way to get to "yes" on some issue is to trade off a vote on another issue, the coalitions tend to be fairly stable over time.
The advantage of PR, in the United States, is that increasingly people are voting for party over personality anyway. Personality tends to serve mostly as a liability: if you end up calling attention to yourself it's usually for something you screwed up. In a safe seat (as so many are), a distinctive personality will help you keep winning the primary, but in competitive seats the names you remember are largely the ones who committed some terrible "gaffe" (often manufactured or blown out of proportion by the press and the opposition party).
Once elected, they tend to vote the party line. If they do anything distinctive, it's most often just grandstanding, with little effect on the legislative outcome. A good politician actually can do some real wheeling and dealing behind the scenes, getting a favorable position for their district, but the effects are usually hard to see. The most prominent things they do are to vote the same way as anybody else would with the same letter after their name.
So since we're voting for parties over personalities anyway, we might as well give PR a try. Don't expect it to cure the ills you expect it to, since what we end up with is going to look a lot like a two-party system anyway, but it will at least allow us to reconsider the system. It might even end the practice of voting against whichever politician is most easily tagged with negative personality traits, so that they can focus on the party most in line with their ideology. (I'm not crazy about that, either, but at least it's slightly more real.)
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It's not just returning a matched image, though. It's also returning a confidence level, and in the cases they've discovered, it's returning 100% confidence. That's clearly wrong.
You have to take nonbinding referenda with a grain of salt. It's easy to wave the flag and claim nationalism when you don't have to deal with the difficulties of actually running a country when you do.
I'm not saying that the Greenlanders don't genuinely want independence. I'm just saying that 75% is the high-water mark. At least 25% genuinely don't want independence, and that were it to come down to a binding vote, they could well find another 26% who get cold feet at the prospect of having to deal with the consequences.
If Denmark does indeed manage to win them trillions worth of oil, they may well decide to keep it all for themselves, and vote for that. And then the sticky wicket would be getting to a binding referendum, which the Danes would not permit easily. The easiest route to it would be to buy their independence by promising a fraction of that oil revenue.
We have an odd kind of expectation of privacy even in public places. I'm not saying we don't; I'm just pointing out that the expectation strikes me as not obvious. The Fourth Amendment calls out "their persons, houses, papers, and effects", which notably omits anything outside your immediate control.
The expectation comes from a pre-technological age, and I certainly don't fault the Fourth Amendment for failing to see how technology would change the ways in which we expect to be private even in public. But I do think it ends up calling for a recalibration of both the law and our expectations.
Ideally, I'd like to see that codified in a new amendment. Unfortunately, given that even simple, popular legislation seems impossible to pass, I can't imagine getting agreement on something with even the faintest whiff of controversy past the rather higher bar of a Constitutional amendment. So I'd be happy for a decent national conversation on the topic.
Personally, I wouldn't have thought that the law extended to an expectation of privacy on your front lawn, since you already expect your neighbors to be watching. It's interesting to see a court disagree. I wouldn't be surprised if this is overturned at a higher level, though unfortunately, at this point I've given up thinking of the Supreme Court as anything other than an ideology engine, so really just figure out which side is which and assume that it'll go that way.
But I don't think they've fully integrated the software. Google Maps apparently gets "reports" from Waze, but they seem to otherwise still be separate. They generate different routes and different estimates.
Based on my purely anecdotal experience, I've found that Maps has smarter routing but that Waze does a better job of being current on traffic. So I use Waze when I expect traffic to be an issue (i.e. during rush times), and Maps at other times. (Maps also has a more pleasant interface. Waze's voice is especially over-talkative.)
Why is ACH cheaper? What fee is involved in the A2A? I'd expect at the very least that they could eliminate a middle man and save money there.
Download me some Natty Boh while you're at it.
At least one set of judges, the 9th Circuit, disagreed that the previous decision applied here. The current court disagrees (unanimously) with them, and what they say goes, but the fact that it made it to the Supreme Court at all suggests that there is real disagreement about the meaning and applicability of the previous decisions.
So there's plenty of blame to go around, but it includes all nine of the current justices as well as the past ones. And the current Congress, who could easily remedy this (to popular acclaim), but the leadership won't even try.
I'm surprised this hasn't been put to the test already. There are about 200 accidents and 1-2 fatalities per 100 million miles driven. Uber and Lyft must be closing in on that number by now, and since they're primarily about accident-prone city driving I'd expect it to be faster.
Surely something has happened by now that would have provoked the insurance companies' ire and make them start sending out warnings, but I haven't heard about it. Am I just missing it? Or have they handled it all in house so far?
Thanks! I literally just decided to get into this the day before this article was published, and your review is very helpful. Thanks.
Really? It's illegal just to run the test? (Or at least, too close to a gray area to even consider it?)
Wow, that sucks.
I've read the review, but not the book, but a key element seems to come down to "Maybe it's real, but nobody knows". It seems a fairly simple procedure for him to order some of it and have it tested, and then he'd know. Yeah, that's a legal gray area, but it would make his case a lot stronger to be able to say "Yeah, I ordered a bunch of Russian Viagra and it tested out as 75% as good as the real stuff".
I know that means taking a risk of being prosecuted, but isn't that something we commend journalists for? At least, better than making allegations about what corporate execs and government employees are thinking without evidence.
I really miss my iPod Nano, the 5th generation, the last one that was really a dedicated music player rather than an iOS device. It was very small and did one thing really well, which made it perfect for running.
But eventually I got a smart phone, and since I'd be carrying it on runs anyway... it's more cumbersome to use as a player, but at least it's able to update itself without having to go through iTunes. I suspect that iOS-based Nanos can as well, but I just didn't need a separate device any more.
I'd also like to see it controlled against a pepperoni pizza, which practically everybody seems to like. (Oddly, except for me. I'm just not into fermented sausages. Not into salami, either. I'll eat pepperoni pizza, but I'd rather have sausage.) Once you exclude the obvious failures (e.g. vegetarians) I bet you could get 98% approval.
If that 98% figure means that they can differentiate vegetarians from non-vegetarians just by watching their eyes with near-perfect accuracy... that actually sounds like an interesting result all by itself.
Thanks for the tip. I do have a stone, and get tolerable pizza out of it, but your physics makes sense and I may have to give it a try the next time I'm feeling flush.
Meantime... we've got a place that brought a pizza oven over from Naples, and their pizzas do in fact come out in 90 seconds.
There's a lot of great cuisine in England. It's got some amazing chefs, like Heston Blumenthal and Fergus Henderson. The "gastro pubs" are serving some amazing food. The influences of south Asian cuisine are incredibly creative.
OK, they're not the French, who make great food an extremely high priority, so there's a lot of great food and very little bad food. The English got a bad reputation in the mid 20th century, having depleted their agricultural system to keep from being conquered, but that ended a while back, and they're no longer tolerating bad food. English cuisine is now on par with anywhere else in Europe or the US. Even Italy (where I've had some surprisingly mediocre pizza).
You can still get crap, of course, but it's not at all difficult to find really good food in the UK. (I'm not a resident there, just an occasional visitor and fan of food.)
iTunes remains an astonishingly bad user interface. It wasn't originally an Apple product, which explains some of it, but they took it over a decade ago, and it's still incredibly bad. (Caveat: I finally gave up on my iPod, so maybe it's gotten better in the last two years. But given how abominable it was, with massive and obvious bugs being ignored, for so long, I doubt it.)
I don't know why Apple has a blind spot for an incredibly bad user interface for a flagship product (I mean the music store, rather than the iPod), but it does. So any accusations of bad design rather than malice seem credible, even though in general that's a bad heuristic when applied to Apple.
And I bet it delivers something that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike pizza.
Thank you for that incredibly lucid explanation. (Sorry, no mod points today, but you were at 5 anyway.)
I got the impression that the idea was to use the breast itself as the scattering medium, in an attempt to focus on something inside the breast, namely a cancer. The chicken breast was used to simulate breast material, which would probably be pretty clever if it weren't so confusing.
Chicken breast is very different from mammalian mammary tissue, but it was probably the cheapest source of meat. It may also help that it's relatively uniform, to simplify things, while simultaneously being sufficiently random at the tissue level.
Both the floret and the katana are designed to allow blades to slide along and be kicked away. A crossguard like this is often used to trap, or even snap, incoming weapons.
I like to think that the choreographers will find clever and interesting things to do with this. They always have in the past. It is a little odd that it appeared to have a metal nub near the base, where it could potentially be damaged by an energy blade, but it wouldn't surprise me if they were still able to use it to trap an incoming blade (and perhaps counter by pivoting around that point and using the crossguard offensively).
The lens flare that was there was actually well used, when the Falcon went up into the sun. It helped highlight a dramatic moment. I thought that was good work.
Once. The problem is that he over-uses the trick.
At the very least, the Democrats are fighting back with the same dubious tactic. Here in Maryland, we just squeezed out another Republican seat with some extremely sketchy-looking districts.
That's one, mind you, compared to the three or four they were finding in North Carolina. It would take decades for Democrats to try to regain control of the legislatures. It would be much better to replace the system with one less easily corrupted (or at least, less immediately corrupted), but I do expect both parties to live down to the tactics of the worst. It's what gets you elected.
The Democrats happen to be worse at it (for now), and I'd love to see them be able to use that to campaign for a less corrupt system. The trick will be getting people out to vote for it. It's not on most people's priority list. That list consists primarily of pocketbook issues.
I'd like to give PR a try, though I don't expect it to be the end of the two-party system. Minority parties tend to be subsumed into one of the two leading parties, because any vote on legislation ends up dividing people into "yes" and "no" camps. Ideally, the coalitions would differ from vote to vote, but since the best way to get to "yes" on some issue is to trade off a vote on another issue, the coalitions tend to be fairly stable over time.
The advantage of PR, in the United States, is that increasingly people are voting for party over personality anyway. Personality tends to serve mostly as a liability: if you end up calling attention to yourself it's usually for something you screwed up. In a safe seat (as so many are), a distinctive personality will help you keep winning the primary, but in competitive seats the names you remember are largely the ones who committed some terrible "gaffe" (often manufactured or blown out of proportion by the press and the opposition party).
Once elected, they tend to vote the party line. If they do anything distinctive, it's most often just grandstanding, with little effect on the legislative outcome. A good politician actually can do some real wheeling and dealing behind the scenes, getting a favorable position for their district, but the effects are usually hard to see. The most prominent things they do are to vote the same way as anybody else would with the same letter after their name.
So since we're voting for parties over personalities anyway, we might as well give PR a try. Don't expect it to cure the ills you expect it to, since what we end up with is going to look a lot like a two-party system anyway, but it will at least allow us to reconsider the system. It might even end the practice of voting against whichever politician is most easily tagged with negative personality traits, so that they can focus on the party most in line with their ideology. (I'm not crazy about that, either, but at least it's slightly more real.)
Well, yeah. The comet rotates. The direction of its rotation is east. It's as good a coordinate system as any.
Huh. I never knew that.
Well, now that's a brain cell that I'm never getting back. Now if I can just remember to call the MCI Center the "Verizon Center".