The P=NP aspect is just geekiness. You didn't solve it, and the movie had better not be about solving it. That would be stupid.
You can, however, make a thriller using that as a MacGuffin. The better you know the math, the more rich-sounding the dialogue around the MacGuffin will be, but it must remain a MacGuffin. It's the Lost Ark from Raiders, or the Maltese Falcon. Either is a fine thriller, with interesting characters and snappy dialogue.
You never want to read too much into a trailer, but I'm not seeing much of either of those here. It put way too much on its surface: the blue wash to look cold, the deep dissonant chords on the piano, the "oh my god this is the end of the world" dialogue. I got no sense that I might care about the characters, or that they might do anything interesting or distinctive.
Geeks love a movie where their geekiness gets tickled. Everybody loves a movie about themselves, and getting that aspect right makes the characters feel more real. I'm a geek. But I'm also more than a geek. I'd rather not be patronized, and the one thing I know for certain is that you didn't actually do anything about P=NP. Use it as background for solid performances, deep characterizations, and interesting visual composition, not instead of it.
Maybe I'm wrong. Trailers are often not representative of the movie, and maybe there's good, non-trite dialogue in the rest of it. But I'm not hopeful.
According to TFA, the idea is actually somebody else's and previously published. This is an extension of the idea that uses a training phase, presumably a part of the Trojan where the user interacts with the phone for benign reasons (perhaps playing a game or entering data for a legitimate purpose) that it uses to calibrate the correlation between taps and the accelerometers.
It's pretty clever. Presumably, it can be defeated by refusing to allow background apps to have access to the sensors, though I can imagine applications where you want to allow that kind of thing (pedometers, for example).
You need to ensure that the check is written to their Super PAC, rather than to the candidate or to their campaign committee. The politician him/herself is forbidden from taking more than token gifts (under $20, IIRC). The campaign committee is limited by the FEC to $2,500 (though you can donate twice, once for the "primaries" (even if they are incumbent and face no opponent) and again for the general election.
Checks bigger than the limits get returned. You can, however, dump as much money as you like into "unrelated" political action committees which are "forbidden" from communicating with the candidate directly. However, you can be pretty sure that a check of that size would cause a completely unrelated, totally out-of-the-blue phone call from the candidate's staff, at which time you can ask if perhaps the candidate has a few free minutes the next time they're in tow.
$250k actually gets you more than a few minutes, but not nearly as much as you might think. Presidential candidates are going to raise a billion dollars this year and a quarter-mill gets you not much more than a grip-and-grin. House candidates need to raise several million, and $250k gets you noticed, though you'll find that it does you a lot less good than you might imagine unless they're on a powerful committee. For powerful committee chairmen, $250k will get you noticed, but it won't get you more than lunch.
Dammit, I was gonna joke about how that was only 85 billion American reasons, but right now the Canadian dollar is at almost perfect parity with the US dollar.
I recently had to stop editing a document in LibreOffice because it couldn't handle the change tracking. That's an important feature to me, and for a document that size (about 30 pages) it was far too slow to use.
It's also under-powered, and lacks some important tools that MS Office has had for years. I found an old copy of Word 2003 laying around, and it handled my document just fine.
I still use LibreOffice; in fact, for most stuff I find that Google Docs suffices and has the advantage of not having to install anything and I can edit from anywhere. But when I need to use change tracking, that old copy of Word is the only option.
And Interleaf about 20 years ago, for those who prefer something WYSIWYG. I have yet to encounter a visual editor as good as that one, that did what I need for those kinds of documents.
Word and other word processors do have that all-things-to-all-people-who-put-words-on-paper (or now, on-the-web) problem. But they've all spent decades pursuing features I can't imagine anybody using, while missing stuff that anybody who has to set up a large document will use all the time, and that Interleaf and LaTeX had forever.
Can you find a source for this information a bit more reliable than Infowars? I accidentally clicked on it and now I have to go wash my mouse and monitor.
The problem in this case is the fixture, which includes a globe held in with screws. I could scrap the globe and use an attractive, well-diffused bulb instead. But that would also cost more, plus I'd have to have the changing device.
A bulb in my stairwell just burned out. The only way to replace it is to stand on the part of the ladder that says "not a step", or rent a taller ladder (and I'm not certain that I could maneuver one into place). I'd happily pay $60 not to have to replace this bulb again.
What? Everybody loves to cite the great extra stuff we get out of NASA as justification for spending ten billion per year on gigantic phallic symbols with people on them.
I would love to see NASA be a space program, operating on half its present budget and getting ten times as much science done because 90% of it isn't spent on the propaganda of being able to put people in space. (And then using that to justify correspondingly large cuts in the blowing-people-up portion of our budget, which is 50 times as large.)
But if we're going to have it, we can at least get some kind of bennies out of it.
Actually, some do. The IRA was famous for telling people where their bombs were going to be. Real bombs, too. It achieves an awful lot of terror with less blood on your hands: they know that the bomb could have gone off. As long as there's some blood on your hands, your opponents know that you're willing to do it. Most of the terror, far less mess.
The goal of terrorism is to make people so upset that they give in to your demands. In this case, it may be simply to make people upset. It's working very well.
That sounds about right, and it's a little perplexing and odd. It's lower than in the general population, fortunately, but you'd expect it to be even lower than that, given that the site favors people who have at least some grasp of science. We're mostly intellectuals, and the anti-intellectuals shouldn't want to be here. It's got a dearth of creationists, though there are still some of those as well.
I guess in the end, self-interest goes a long way. They don't want to believe it, plus you get to feel all superior to a whole lot of very smart people.
I'm still surprised by it, since scientists and engineers are supposed to be good at dismissing the things they want to believe rather than what the data actually shows. And perhaps that's why I actually gave up on this issue long ago; I'm resigned to the fact that nothing is going to get done, so I don't even have to feel sad about it. I do, however, continue to feel sad about the continued anti-intellectualism that lets it happen, and prevents so much good from being done.
The "not a climate scientist" argument applies pretty damn well to engineering managers and bodies packaged in space suits for a ride that was literally performed by a monkey.
The boundaries of this field, as with every scientific field, are vague and fuzzy. But fuzzy doesn't mean that everybody is inside, and it's clear that these guys are well outside of it.
And worse, they're trading on credentials that specifically do not apply here because their employer was NASA. NASA does climate, but not everybody at NASA does climate. These guys could just as easily have been working for Boeing or even Komatsu: they made big machines. These machines happened to do something in space. But that doesn't mean that they're experts in space, especially not the climate aspect.
If that all sums up to "not a climate scientist" to put it in one sentence, so be it. They don't actually need credentials, just a cogent argument, and they're not providing it. They're providing nothing but credentials, in the form of a NASA badge, and I reject it with the same facileness that they're presenting it.
One would like to think that those with an education are less likely to buy into the "climate scientist conspiracy" theory, which is a necessary consequence of what they're claiming. And it's true: out of a few tens of thousands of NASA employees, they dug up a few dozen to buy in to the conspiracy theory. Which does make it "less likely", while simultaneously reminding us that you can have an MS and a PhD and still for the same old BS.
At least (or perhaps "unfortunately") they've finally seized on something at which they're not blatantly, objectively wrong. For years it was "HOCKEY STICK!" and "MARS IS WARMING" and "HIDE THE DECLINE!" and "GRAPH THAT STARTS IN 1998!".
That's been unsupportable for years, and pushed them into the ludicrous position of pretending that there was a vast conspiracy of climate scientists. That was just stupid.
It's still pretty stupid, in that they're still left with "climate change happens for random reasons that just coincidentally happen to be occurring at precisely the same time that your model predicts precisely the events we've seen but these unknown things still trump your known things", which isn't actually impossible. It's merely very stupid, in the sense that no sane human being would buy an argument like that if they weren't desperate for the conclusion to be true.
Because when I want an opinion on climate change, I automatically turn to astronauts
I'll make a deal with you guys: you shut your mouths about science you don't understand, and we'll stop reminding you that you were "spam in a can". Deal?
Given that they'd have to pony up $185 grand to start, they'd have to count on getting a LOT of money before some government starts impounding their web sites due to fraud.
The high price doesn't make scamming absolutely impossible, but it's not something you can do with a cheap rented botnet.
I'd like to think that when there's that much money on the line, ICANN isn't going to just tell everybody "caveat emptor" when a TLD is being used for a scam. That was an excuse they could use when a domain name cost five bucks and it would be too difficult to adjudicate millions of claims. But when six figures crosses the table, they can take five minutes to look at a few domains and say, "Hey, that looks suspicious."
Maybe I'm wrong about that, but the high dollar figure makes me not worry so much.
Yep. The.com TLD has been the default ever since the beginning, and with the exception of.edu, all of the other TLDs are primarily for people who couldn't score the.com version (or those who do trying to keep people from duplicating it in another TLD.)
There's value in a curated TLD like.edu, though only as long as people know that it's curated. The expense of scoring a vanity TLD will keep scammers out to at least a small degree. And maybe somebody will establish a well-known, well-curated additional TLD. (Though I suspect not, since.museum didn't really take off.)
I could see, for example, a mail TLD for companies who are scrupulous about keeping spammers out, making whitelisting more effective. (That's just a guess, not a worked-out example.)
I have to admit, I'd be a bit more confident going to my bank's web site if I could see that their TLD cost money. Right now I have to worry about typosquatting any time I type it in rather than use a bookmark.
I meant, we've had a lot of scientists looking at this problem for a while. If there was a correlation between HFCS and CCD, even if it only appeared in the last few years, I'd have expected somebody to notice it before now. The fact that it wasn't the HFCS itself, but the pesticide in it, would eventually have followed from that.
I'm sure the HFCS itself is a fine substitute for the bees, as long as the fructose is all they're getting. But I'd have expected somebody to note the correlation.
If you want to blame Big Agriculture, the culprit this time is Bayer, not Monsanto. They're the ones who make imidacloprid. There are plenty of other things to lay at Monsanto's feet without having to point the finger at them this time.
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The P=NP aspect is just geekiness. You didn't solve it, and the movie had better not be about solving it. That would be stupid.
You can, however, make a thriller using that as a MacGuffin. The better you know the math, the more rich-sounding the dialogue around the MacGuffin will be, but it must remain a MacGuffin. It's the Lost Ark from Raiders, or the Maltese Falcon. Either is a fine thriller, with interesting characters and snappy dialogue.
You never want to read too much into a trailer, but I'm not seeing much of either of those here. It put way too much on its surface: the blue wash to look cold, the deep dissonant chords on the piano, the "oh my god this is the end of the world" dialogue. I got no sense that I might care about the characters, or that they might do anything interesting or distinctive.
Geeks love a movie where their geekiness gets tickled. Everybody loves a movie about themselves, and getting that aspect right makes the characters feel more real. I'm a geek. But I'm also more than a geek. I'd rather not be patronized, and the one thing I know for certain is that you didn't actually do anything about P=NP. Use it as background for solid performances, deep characterizations, and interesting visual composition, not instead of it.
Maybe I'm wrong. Trailers are often not representative of the movie, and maybe there's good, non-trite dialogue in the rest of it. But I'm not hopeful.
That sounds like the range I'd expect. Hardly server-crashing numbers.
At $185k apiece, I wouldn't think you'd get that many applications to sort through.
According to TFA, the idea is actually somebody else's and previously published. This is an extension of the idea that uses a training phase, presumably a part of the Trojan where the user interacts with the phone for benign reasons (perhaps playing a game or entering data for a legitimate purpose) that it uses to calibrate the correlation between taps and the accelerometers.
It's pretty clever. Presumably, it can be defeated by refusing to allow background apps to have access to the sensors, though I can imagine applications where you want to allow that kind of thing (pedometers, for example).
You need to ensure that the check is written to their Super PAC, rather than to the candidate or to their campaign committee. The politician him/herself is forbidden from taking more than token gifts (under $20, IIRC). The campaign committee is limited by the FEC to $2,500 (though you can donate twice, once for the "primaries" (even if they are incumbent and face no opponent) and again for the general election.
Checks bigger than the limits get returned. You can, however, dump as much money as you like into "unrelated" political action committees which are "forbidden" from communicating with the candidate directly. However, you can be pretty sure that a check of that size would cause a completely unrelated, totally out-of-the-blue phone call from the candidate's staff, at which time you can ask if perhaps the candidate has a few free minutes the next time they're in tow.
$250k actually gets you more than a few minutes, but not nearly as much as you might think. Presidential candidates are going to raise a billion dollars this year and a quarter-mill gets you not much more than a grip-and-grin. House candidates need to raise several million, and $250k gets you noticed, though you'll find that it does you a lot less good than you might imagine unless they're on a powerful committee. For powerful committee chairmen, $250k will get you noticed, but it won't get you more than lunch.
Good question. My Droid won't even run the latest release, and I have no idea how good they are about security updates for out of date releases.
Dammit, I was gonna joke about how that was only 85 billion American reasons, but right now the Canadian dollar is at almost perfect parity with the US dollar.
Damn you, reality.
I recently had to stop editing a document in LibreOffice because it couldn't handle the change tracking. That's an important feature to me, and for a document that size (about 30 pages) it was far too slow to use.
It's also under-powered, and lacks some important tools that MS Office has had for years. I found an old copy of Word 2003 laying around, and it handled my document just fine.
I still use LibreOffice; in fact, for most stuff I find that Google Docs suffices and has the advantage of not having to install anything and I can edit from anywhere. But when I need to use change tracking, that old copy of Word is the only option.
And Interleaf about 20 years ago, for those who prefer something WYSIWYG. I have yet to encounter a visual editor as good as that one, that did what I need for those kinds of documents.
Word and other word processors do have that all-things-to-all-people-who-put-words-on-paper (or now, on-the-web) problem. But they've all spent decades pursuing features I can't imagine anybody using, while missing stuff that anybody who has to set up a large document will use all the time, and that Interleaf and LaTeX had forever.
Can you find a source for this information a bit more reliable than Infowars? I accidentally clicked on it and now I have to go wash my mouse and monitor.
Obscene, no. But it's a little creepy.
The problem in this case is the fixture, which includes a globe held in with screws. I could scrap the globe and use an attractive, well-diffused bulb instead. But that would also cost more, plus I'd have to have the changing device.
A bulb in my stairwell just burned out. The only way to replace it is to stand on the part of the ladder that says "not a step", or rent a taller ladder (and I'm not certain that I could maneuver one into place). I'd happily pay $60 not to have to replace this bulb again.
What? Everybody loves to cite the great extra stuff we get out of NASA as justification for spending ten billion per year on gigantic phallic symbols with people on them.
I would love to see NASA be a space program, operating on half its present budget and getting ten times as much science done because 90% of it isn't spent on the propaganda of being able to put people in space. (And then using that to justify correspondingly large cuts in the blowing-people-up portion of our budget, which is 50 times as large.)
But if we're going to have it, we can at least get some kind of bennies out of it.
Actually, some do. The IRA was famous for telling people where their bombs were going to be. Real bombs, too. It achieves an awful lot of terror with less blood on your hands: they know that the bomb could have gone off. As long as there's some blood on your hands, your opponents know that you're willing to do it. Most of the terror, far less mess.
The goal of terrorism is to make people so upset that they give in to your demands. In this case, it may be simply to make people upset. It's working very well.
That sounds about right, and it's a little perplexing and odd. It's lower than in the general population, fortunately, but you'd expect it to be even lower than that, given that the site favors people who have at least some grasp of science. We're mostly intellectuals, and the anti-intellectuals shouldn't want to be here. It's got a dearth of creationists, though there are still some of those as well.
I guess in the end, self-interest goes a long way. They don't want to believe it, plus you get to feel all superior to a whole lot of very smart people.
I'm still surprised by it, since scientists and engineers are supposed to be good at dismissing the things they want to believe rather than what the data actually shows. And perhaps that's why I actually gave up on this issue long ago; I'm resigned to the fact that nothing is going to get done, so I don't even have to feel sad about it. I do, however, continue to feel sad about the continued anti-intellectualism that lets it happen, and prevents so much good from being done.
The "not a climate scientist" argument applies pretty damn well to engineering managers and bodies packaged in space suits for a ride that was literally performed by a monkey.
The boundaries of this field, as with every scientific field, are vague and fuzzy. But fuzzy doesn't mean that everybody is inside, and it's clear that these guys are well outside of it.
And worse, they're trading on credentials that specifically do not apply here because their employer was NASA. NASA does climate, but not everybody at NASA does climate. These guys could just as easily have been working for Boeing or even Komatsu: they made big machines. These machines happened to do something in space. But that doesn't mean that they're experts in space, especially not the climate aspect.
If that all sums up to "not a climate scientist" to put it in one sentence, so be it. They don't actually need credentials, just a cogent argument, and they're not providing it. They're providing nothing but credentials, in the form of a NASA badge, and I reject it with the same facileness that they're presenting it.
One would like to think that those with an education are less likely to buy into the "climate scientist conspiracy" theory, which is a necessary consequence of what they're claiming. And it's true: out of a few tens of thousands of NASA employees, they dug up a few dozen to buy in to the conspiracy theory. Which does make it "less likely", while simultaneously reminding us that you can have an MS and a PhD and still for the same old BS.
At least (or perhaps "unfortunately") they've finally seized on something at which they're not blatantly, objectively wrong. For years it was "HOCKEY STICK!" and "MARS IS WARMING" and "HIDE THE DECLINE!" and "GRAPH THAT STARTS IN 1998!".
That's been unsupportable for years, and pushed them into the ludicrous position of pretending that there was a vast conspiracy of climate scientists. That was just stupid.
It's still pretty stupid, in that they're still left with "climate change happens for random reasons that just coincidentally happen to be occurring at precisely the same time that your model predicts precisely the events we've seen but these unknown things still trump your known things", which isn't actually impossible. It's merely very stupid, in the sense that no sane human being would buy an argument like that if they weren't desperate for the conclusion to be true.
Because when I want an opinion on climate change, I automatically turn to astronauts
I'll make a deal with you guys: you shut your mouths about science you don't understand, and we'll stop reminding you that you were "spam in a can". Deal?
Given that they'd have to pony up $185 grand to start, they'd have to count on getting a LOT of money before some government starts impounding their web sites due to fraud.
The high price doesn't make scamming absolutely impossible, but it's not something you can do with a cheap rented botnet.
I'd like to think that when there's that much money on the line, ICANN isn't going to just tell everybody "caveat emptor" when a TLD is being used for a scam. That was an excuse they could use when a domain name cost five bucks and it would be too difficult to adjudicate millions of claims. But when six figures crosses the table, they can take five minutes to look at a few domains and say, "Hey, that looks suspicious."
Maybe I'm wrong about that, but the high dollar figure makes me not worry so much.
Yep. The .com TLD has been the default ever since the beginning, and with the exception of .edu, all of the other TLDs are primarily for people who couldn't score the .com version (or those who do trying to keep people from duplicating it in another TLD.)
There's value in a curated TLD like .edu, though only as long as people know that it's curated. The expense of scoring a vanity TLD will keep scammers out to at least a small degree. And maybe somebody will establish a well-known, well-curated additional TLD. (Though I suspect not, since .museum didn't really take off.)
I could see, for example, a mail TLD for companies who are scrupulous about keeping spammers out, making whitelisting more effective. (That's just a guess, not a worked-out example.)
I have to admit, I'd be a bit more confident going to my bank's web site if I could see that their TLD cost money. Right now I have to worry about typosquatting any time I type it in rather than use a bookmark.
I meant, we've had a lot of scientists looking at this problem for a while. If there was a correlation between HFCS and CCD, even if it only appeared in the last few years, I'd have expected somebody to notice it before now. The fact that it wasn't the HFCS itself, but the pesticide in it, would eventually have followed from that.
I'm sure the HFCS itself is a fine substitute for the bees, as long as the fructose is all they're getting. But I'd have expected somebody to note the correlation.
If you want to blame Big Agriculture, the culprit this time is Bayer, not Monsanto. They're the ones who make imidacloprid. There are plenty of other things to lay at Monsanto's feet without having to point the finger at them this time.
Even without noticing the presence of the pesticide, shouldn't somebody have noticed earlier that bees fed HFCS die faster than bees that don't?