Get the rest of the difficult AI problems into CAPTCHAs. We've finally figured out a way to finance AI research!
Not really.
The way they've worked around it probably goes like this: "Free pr0n sets! See more of this hot chick! We don't want automated downloads of these sets, so you need to solve this code to get the download. What? It looks just like the hotmail cpachas? Yeah, we're using the same advanced technology here."
So I guess this approach would also solve other AI problems - by having bored RIs solve them. Maybe not such a bad solution after all?
I just want it to show up as a thumb drive, drop songs on it from explorer, in any directories I choose, and have it play the music. I don't understand why they have to make everything more complicated.
Well, good for you. There are a variety of other players out there, as you point out yourself, and you are welcome to them. Apple seems to be targeting the market segment that does want their music player to organize their music and keep track of things (import date, play counts, skip counts, last played, rating, etc) for them.
Based on Apple's market share, compared to the rest of the market combined, it looks like they have a better idea of what will sell than you do. But feel free to vote with your wallet.
All of the editors for several Elsevier journals with which I'm familiar deal with the journal entirely through their web site. All of the papers are submitted as PDF files. All of the reviewers get their papers as PDF files. All of my contact with reviewers and those that submit papers is done through an interface on the Elsevier web page that has to be freeware, it's so awful.
I've been an editor for an Elsevier journal, and I second everything the parent says, except for the web interface being freeware. That web interface - oh my God - is so bad that no self-respecting developer could have released it as freeware. It has got to be a consultant or in-house hack job. It is simply absurdly bad.
Strangely, the non-profit University of Chicago journals I've refereed for don't seem to have this problem, only the for-profit Elsevier ones. Make of that what you will.
I don't really see the point of having images paid for by the US government being subject to copy restictions for any amount of time, nor do I see the need for them to be held onto. I've never seen a reasoning anywhere
Let me address this: space-based astronomy is incredibly competitive. We put a lot of effort into proposals, and student PhD projects take time. A proprietary period just gives the successful proposer a head start on the analysis of their data. If they can publish it in that time, well and good; if not, the wider community of astronomers will pounce on unpublished observations when the period expires.
There is certainly a case to be made for no proprietary period at all. For some very long observations, or for target of opportunity observations, the data do go public immediately. For the rest, well, having been a PhD student working on HST data once upon a time, I'd certainly have liked a longer proprietary period...
So basically, the proprietary period is a courtesy, not a conspiracy. And I have to say that, or the Grand Astronomer Cabal will take away my paycheck.
Here it is:
the HST archive. You can download everything that is over a year old; proposers have exclusive rights for one year. Unfortunately, the data are really raw, so they won't be usable without packages like IRAF (PyRAF).
Or were you not really making a legitimate point?
For other astronomers who might get their news from slashdot before other sources:
HST entered inertial safe mode on Saturday January 27. Preliminary indications are that this event was associated with an ACS anomaly. GSFC and STScI engineers and scientists are still investigating the situation, but it appears unlikely that ACS CCD observations (both WFC and HRC) will be available in Cycle 16. Current indications are that ACS/SBC can be restored using operational workarounds, so observers should assume that the ACS/SBC configuration will be available in Cycle 16.
The formal Cycle 16 deadline was 8 pm EST on Friday Jan 26. We received a total of 747 proposals, including 498 to use ACS/WFC or ACS/HRC. The latter proposals are unlikely to be viable. In order to ensure that we accommodate the science areas covered by those programs, we are extending the HST Cycle 16 deadline.
We encourage Principal Investigators who submitted proposals for ACS observations with either WFC or HRC to consider whether those observations could be made with WFPC2.
The new deadline is Friday 9th Feb, extended from 26th Jan.
Jargon alert for non specialists: ACS = Advanced Camera for Surveys; WFC = Wide Field Camera; HRC = High Resolution Camera; SBC = Solar Blind Channel; CCD = charge coupled device; WFPC2 = Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (an older instrument); STScI = Space Telescope Science Institute; and GSFC = Goddard Space Flight Center.
Wow. I don't have an argument for you, just a few quick notes:
Mankind's desire to blame itself for this occurrance is, I think, I misplaced attempt to delude ourselves into thinking we are more powerful than we really are.
Thank you for your attempt at global armchair psychology. Please look at this graph from the NOAA.
While you personally may be convinced, I and a host of climatologists are not and I would thank you to stop spending my money on your fantasies.
Fantasies? Strong words! Would you care to identify this "host" of climatologists for the rest of slashdot? I wonder why they have no peer-reviewed publications in the last 3 years? Must be the bias of their peers. Yeah, that's it.
even if it is occurring, you, me, them... we'll all be dead before it's a real problem.
Yes, like I said above,
"Global warming is not happening; and even if it is, we didn't do it; and so what if we did, so what - we should write off Bangladesh, forget the polar bears, and be happy to grow wheat in Canada instead." Sure.
Somehow, this is all about fear and foot dragging - how can you not see the staggering advances in clean technology that are possible if we put our minds to it? Why such a defeatist, can't do attitude?
(I really don't have the time or energy to personally argue this with you - I apologize in advance.)
If you'd bother to click on any of the stories at
the link, you could read this:
Early Signs: Reports From a Warming Planet is a joint project of the U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, Salon and NPR's "Living on Earth." The series runs Fridays through May 5 in Salon, and you can find radio versions of each story on "Living on Earth's" Web site. Read about how the series came into being
here.
Just because the movie happens to sponsor the day pass at Salon - well, whatever.
And some more: In recent years, evidence has been emerging from various parts of the globe that climate change is not only real, it is beginning to have significant political, economic and human impact. Much of the reporting on the subject in the U.S. has focused on the "debate" over whether warming is occurring, and if so, whether humans are partly the cause. Scientists, however, have already answered these questions -- resoundingly in the affirmative -- as represented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which comprises more than 2,000 scientists representing over 100 nations.
It is too late for this argument; global warming is here. Salon is running a great series called
Reports from a Warming Planet. They provide a free daypass - please read a couple of the reports, at least.
I'm sure I'll hear that the plural of anecdote is not data, that it is too expensive to fix, that we should throw up our hands and accept things. Global warming is not happening; and even if it is, we didn't do it; and so what if we did, so what - we should write off Bangladesh, forget the polar bears, and be happy to grow wheat in Canada instead. Sure. But please, read some of these stories.
Since most people won't bother to read TFA to get the answer to the tease:
Griffin said NASA was not looking to outsource some of its work to ISRO. NASA was looking to combine the resources both agencies to undertake ventures of mutual interest.
(Yeah, yeah, I know I'm enabling bad behavior, but slashdot needs all the help it can get.)
One of the scariest things I read - a long time ago - was a piece by Bruce Sterling called "Bitter Resistance". Literary freeware - here are some legal links: at vt.edu; and
at Buffalo. Or google your own.
He spells out how bacteria acquire their antibiotic resistance: The runoff of tainted feedlot manure, containing millions of pounds of diluted antibiotics, enters rivers and watersheds where the world's free bacteria dwell.
In cities, municipal sewage systems are giant petri-dishes of diluted antibiotics and human-dwelling bacteria.
Bacteria are restless. They will try again, every twenty minutes. And they never sleep.
If you haven't read it already, click the link - it is well worth it. It still scares the hell out of me, and it looks like his dark vision is coming true...
I thought the idea of Universal Binaries was that the packages were compiled for multiple architectures, selectable at runtime? The same binaries are now running on Macintels and G5s, so Apple should be able to continue running apps on either architecture...
IAAA (I am an astronomer). Started on Solaris as a grad student, moved to Linux halfway through (when my boss could buy two Dells for the cost of one underpowered Sun), and while my desktop machine is still a Linux box, I have a high-end Powerbook as my daily laptop.
The primary reason I abandoned my Thinkpad was, I think, that I outgrew tinkering. It used to be fun to make ALSA work and to figure out the winmodem and all that, but after one more broken kernel upgade, I just didn't want to do it any more. Meanwhile, OS X was just the right thing at the right time for me.
Now (postdoc) I know at least three colleagues who have moved to Mac desktops, and since all our processing software (mostly GPL/BSD licensed) is just as happy on the Mac platform as on Linux, I might do so too. (See, for example,
Professional Astronomy Software for Mac OSX.)
Conclusion 1: I "switched" (partly), and I was counted as leaving Windows (my Thinkpad can still boot WinMe, I think), but I actually left Linux.
Conclusion 2: Lickable hardware is *nice*. I bought a nano last weekend!
I don't believe in their formula, and would rather take the work of a statistical mathmatician over the math skills of a paleo-climatologist who refuses to release the source code of his test
NCAR press release: New Analysis Reproduces Graph of Late 20th Century Temperature Rise.
Excerpt: Ammann and Eugene Wahl of Alfred University have analyzed the Mann-Bradley-Hughes (MBH) climate field reconstruction and reproduced the MBH results using their own computer code. They found the MBH method is robust even when numerous modifications are employed. Their results appear in two new research papers submitted for review to the journals Geophysical Research Letters and Climatic Change. The authors invite researchers and others to use the code for their own evaluation of the method.
I'm hoping you will take them up on the offer, and try out their code for yourself.
RealClimate is a site run by professional climatologists who do this for a living. If you can put aside your knee-jerk reaction of "biased!" (Why would they bother? Can you imagine the huge grants that would come pouring in if someone could prove that climate change was not happening?) it would be worth your while, I think, to read these reviews.
So we're flying a large, noisy, semi-empty garage in space, and it is so under-staffed (2 people instead of 2.5 required to maintain it) that we can't even use it for scientific experiments. The only reason it got built is that NASA had spread out pork in too many states to kill it, and the space shuttle needed something to do. Meanwhile, the only reason the space shuttle will fly again is to finish the ISS.
And to top it off, both are death traps and we don't even have accurate building plans any more...?
On the other hand, we're cancelling the Hubble servicing mission because of safety concerns - which are very real concerns, but unfixable only because of a political decision that we'd rather go to Mars.
I'm all for the ISS, actually - I love the idea that humanity will not have all its eggs in one basket ever again. Even if the other basket is in a very low orbit around the first one for now, it's a start! But it's sad to watch the old pioneering spirit reduced to election campaign sound bites and random mismanagement, while we shortchange the real science.
Online sales are great - the convenience of finding exactly what I'm looking for on Amazon or Alibris (or whatever else floats your boat) is hard to beat. And used books are logical online: ever-lower transaction costs, an ever-more frictionless exchange of one man's mildewy junk for another man's prized first edition.
But books... there's a certain romance to browsing piles and piles of old books, never knowing what gem you'll find in the next shoebox.
I miss the huge "Friends of the Library" booksales in Ithaca (at one time, the largest used book sale in North America): for ten bucks, you could stagger out with shopping bags full of stuff.
Now, living in New Mexico in the middle of nowhere, I do appreciate Amazon. And I do understand that public libraries need to make a buck, because rich people need their tax breaks more than they need a thriving community around them. But I'll be sad to see the used book sales go.
...the bio lab, a rainforest of orchids and bromeliads and water lilies and trees reaching up to the ceiling, interspersed with catwalks and robot arms. This is Uma's domain. On the other side, behind an enormous door, is the computer lab Ben is about to disappear into. When he emerges, three years later, it will be with his memory wiped. But on his way in, he captures Uma's attention. Mischievously, she hits him with a blast of air almost strong enough to bowl him over. "I give up! I give up!" he cries, slicking back his hair. In a flash a robot arm swings in front of him, halting an inch or two from his face. In its pincers, a yellow orchid.
"Don't give up," Uma says softly.
Hmmm. How come I haven't seen any previews for this? It's a great article, BTW: the table at the end is hilarious. For Minority Report, which grossed $132 million, Dick got $130. That's it. I'll refrain from the obvious "he got dick" joke...
...both survived. The Mafia doctors arrived on site and a pizza delivery car pulled away at high speed, remember? So it was a draw, with both living to fight another day.
My personal favorite is the Topoleski design, "If you can read this, you belong here." And I really like the Morse code (Russ Clarke) design too. Don't really get any of the cheesy cartoon ones... but to each his own, I guess.
Slashdot Mirror
This work has only been presented at the AAS, and is unpublished so far. Look for it on the preprint server in the next month or so, I guess.
Not really.
The way they've worked around it probably goes like this: "Free pr0n sets! See more of this hot chick! We don't want automated downloads of these sets, so you need to solve this code to get the download. What? It looks just like the hotmail cpachas? Yeah, we're using the same advanced technology here."
So I guess this approach would also solve other AI problems - by having bored RIs solve them. Maybe not such a bad solution after all?
It does not. Every ipod can be used in disk mode, should you so choose.
Well, good for you. There are a variety of other players out there, as you point out yourself, and you are welcome to them. Apple seems to be targeting the market segment that does want their music player to organize their music and keep track of things (import date, play counts, skip counts, last played, rating, etc) for them. Based on Apple's market share, compared to the rest of the market combined, it looks like they have a better idea of what will sell than you do. But feel free to vote with your wallet.
I've been an editor for an Elsevier journal, and I second everything the parent says, except for the web interface being freeware. That web interface - oh my God - is so bad that no self-respecting developer could have released it as freeware. It has got to be a consultant or in-house hack job. It is simply absurdly bad.
Strangely, the non-profit University of Chicago journals I've refereed for don't seem to have this problem, only the for-profit Elsevier ones. Make of that what you will.
Let me address this: space-based astronomy is incredibly competitive. We put a lot of effort into proposals, and student PhD projects take time. A proprietary period just gives the successful proposer a head start on the analysis of their data. If they can publish it in that time, well and good; if not, the wider community of astronomers will pounce on unpublished observations when the period expires.
There is certainly a case to be made for no proprietary period at all. For some very long observations, or for target of opportunity observations, the data do go public immediately. For the rest, well, having been a PhD student working on HST data once upon a time, I'd certainly have liked a longer proprietary period...
So basically, the proprietary period is a courtesy, not a conspiracy. And I have to say that, or the Grand Astronomer Cabal will take away my paycheck.
Here it is: the HST archive. You can download everything that is over a year old; proposers have exclusive rights for one year. Unfortunately, the data are really raw, so they won't be usable without packages like IRAF (PyRAF). Or were you not really making a legitimate point?
Jargon alert for non specialists: ACS = Advanced Camera for Surveys; WFC = Wide Field Camera; HRC = High Resolution Camera; SBC = Solar Blind Channel; CCD = charge coupled device; WFPC2 = Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (an older instrument); STScI = Space Telescope Science Institute; and GSFC = Goddard Space Flight Center.
Nah, just tubes.
- Mankind's desire to blame itself for this occurrance is, I think, I misplaced attempt to delude ourselves into thinking we are more powerful than we really are.
- While you personally may be convinced, I and a host of climatologists are not and I would thank you to stop spending my money on your fantasies.
- even if it is occurring, you, me, them... we'll all be dead before it's a real problem.
Somehow, this is all about fear and foot dragging - how can you not see the staggering advances in clean technology that are possible if we put our minds to it? Why such a defeatist, can't do attitude?Thank you for your attempt at global armchair psychology. Please look at this graph from the NOAA.
Fantasies? Strong words! Would you care to identify this "host" of climatologists for the rest of slashdot? I wonder why they have no peer-reviewed publications in the last 3 years? Must be the bias of their peers. Yeah, that's it.
Yes, like I said above, "Global warming is not happening; and even if it is, we didn't do it; and so what if we did, so what - we should write off Bangladesh, forget the polar bears, and be happy to grow wheat in Canada instead." Sure.
(I really don't have the time or energy to personally argue this with you - I apologize in advance.)
Early Signs: Reports From a Warming Planet is a joint project of the U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, Salon and NPR's "Living on Earth." The series runs Fridays through May 5 in Salon, and you can find radio versions of each story on "Living on Earth's" Web site. Read about how the series came into being here.
Just because the movie happens to sponsor the day pass at Salon - well, whatever.
And some more:
In recent years, evidence has been emerging from various parts of the globe that climate change is not only real, it is beginning to have significant political, economic and human impact. Much of the reporting on the subject in the U.S. has focused on the "debate" over whether warming is occurring, and if so, whether humans are partly the cause. Scientists, however, have already answered these questions -- resoundingly in the affirmative -- as represented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which comprises more than 2,000 scientists representing over 100 nations.
I'm sure I'll hear that the plural of anecdote is not data, that it is too expensive to fix, that we should throw up our hands and accept things. Global warming is not happening; and even if it is, we didn't do it; and so what if we did, so what - we should write off Bangladesh, forget the polar bears, and be happy to grow wheat in Canada instead. Sure. But please, read some of these stories.
What goes on at 77 Mass Ave? (Genuinely curious: 77 Mass Ave in Cambridge is an MIT address, isn't it?)
So move the dock to the side (as the previous reply said) and turn on auto-hide in the same Preferences panel. See, that was easy.
Griffin said NASA was not looking to outsource some of its work to ISRO. NASA was looking to combine the resources both agencies to undertake ventures of mutual interest.
(Yeah, yeah, I know I'm enabling bad behavior, but slashdot needs all the help it can get.)
He spells out how bacteria acquire their antibiotic resistance: The runoff of tainted feedlot manure, containing millions of pounds of diluted antibiotics, enters rivers and watersheds where the world's free bacteria dwell. In cities, municipal sewage systems are giant petri-dishes of diluted antibiotics and human-dwelling bacteria. Bacteria are restless. They will try again, every twenty minutes. And they never sleep.
If you haven't read it already, click the link - it is well worth it. It still scares the hell out of me, and it looks like his dark vision is coming true...
I thought the idea of Universal Binaries was that the packages were compiled for multiple architectures, selectable at runtime? The same binaries are now running on Macintels and G5s, so Apple should be able to continue running apps on either architecture...
The primary reason I abandoned my Thinkpad was, I think, that I outgrew tinkering. It used to be fun to make ALSA work and to figure out the winmodem and all that, but after one more broken kernel upgade, I just didn't want to do it any more. Meanwhile, OS X was just the right thing at the right time for me.
Now (postdoc) I know at least three colleagues who have moved to Mac desktops, and since all our processing software (mostly GPL/BSD licensed) is just as happy on the Mac platform as on Linux, I might do so too. (See, for example, Professional Astronomy Software for Mac OSX.)
Conclusion 1: I "switched" (partly), and I was counted as leaving Windows (my Thinkpad can still boot WinMe, I think), but I actually left Linux.
Conclusion 2: Lickable hardware is *nice*. I bought a nano last weekend!
NCAR press release: New Analysis Reproduces Graph of Late 20th Century Temperature Rise.
Excerpt: Ammann and Eugene Wahl of Alfred University have analyzed the Mann-Bradley-Hughes (MBH) climate field reconstruction and reproduced the MBH results using their own computer code. They found the MBH method is robust even when numerous modifications are employed. Their results appear in two new research papers submitted for review to the journals Geophysical Research Letters and Climatic Change. The authors invite researchers and others to use the code for their own evaluation of the method.
I'm hoping you will take them up on the offer, and try out their code for yourself.
Review Part One
Review Part Two
The posts on that site are well worth it - at least, you'll learn more than you would in arguing with slashdot trolls.
On the other hand, we're cancelling the Hubble servicing mission because of safety concerns - which are very real concerns, but unfixable only because of a political decision that we'd rather go to Mars.
I'm all for the ISS, actually - I love the idea that humanity will not have all its eggs in one basket ever again. Even if the other basket is in a very low orbit around the first one for now, it's a start! But it's sad to watch the old pioneering spirit reduced to election campaign sound bites and random mismanagement, while we shortchange the real science.
But books ... there's a certain romance to browsing piles and piles of old books, never knowing what gem you'll find in the next shoebox.
I miss the huge "Friends of the Library" booksales in Ithaca (at one time, the largest used book sale in North America): for ten bucks, you could stagger out with shopping bags full of stuff.
Now, living in New Mexico in the middle of nowhere, I do appreciate Amazon. And I do understand that public libraries need to make a buck, because rich people need their tax breaks more than they need a thriving community around them. But I'll be sad to see the used book sales go.
Hmmm. How come I haven't seen any previews for this? It's a great article, BTW: the table at the end is hilarious. For Minority Report, which grossed $132 million, Dick got $130. That's it. I'll refrain from the obvious "he got dick" joke...
OTOH, I agree, it could have been less cryptic.
Congratulations to the winners.