#1) Adjusted for inflation the NASA budget is not significantly different from the moon-visit era. Getting to Mars, the Moon, etc is more a problem of social engineering than it is technical. BTW, our current hot-air-bag-in-chief has claimed this as a priority but actually done jack squat in terms of actual leadership.
#2) Nobody has to die, and it isn't even particularly risky. Also, the first trip to Mars can, at the same time, be the first colonization of Mars. Once again automation comes to the rescue.
Step 1: Send an unmanned craft to Mars, with a return vehicle as it's payload. Land it on the surface, and verify that the return vehicle is launch-capable. At the same time the launch vehicle is also a habitation unit. Risk to human life: 0.
Step 2: Send the *same* unmanned craft + return vehicle to Mars, this time with people on board. Land it on the surface. If *this* return vehicle didn't break, that is great, leave it there. If it did, there is still a way home because the other one works. If they both work, even better -- leave one behind as a backup for the *next* crew.
Meanwhile, the launchers start accumulating on the surface and form the a growing permanent base of operations on Mars.
FYI, I forget who's idea this was, but it isn't mine.
The ruling by the judge has nothing to do with the naivity of the subject or automaticity of the software, but specifically with the lack of concrete evidence. Copyright (civil) laws are quite a bit different acts of *criminal* negligence such as drug trafficking or even driving violations.
""" A plaintiff alleging copyright infringement must establish two elements: "(1) ownership of a valid copyright, and (2) copying of constituent elements of the work that are original."... "without actual distribution of copies . . . there is no violation [of] the distribution right."... a plaintiff's obligation to provide the 'grounds' of his 'entitle[ment] to relief'... requires "[f]actual allegations [which are] enough to raise a right to relief above the speculative level." """
Normal, intelligent people don't care much about national politics because they know that as individuals they have zero impact on the operations of the broken and corrupt system. That is the *rational* response. The *irrational* response when presented with a non-responsive system is to engage in some sort of behavior that at least devotes more resources to the cause than the situation merits (obsessive stalking of women comes to mind as an example).
In my estimation, people who are very... talkative... about their favorite candidate also tend to be at least slightly insane. A good friend of mine who is a libertarian (a lobbyist, actually) and RP supporter (who is only slightly insane, but in a good way for the most part) told me that a significant portion of the people at the local RP meetup were seriously proposing to "take to the streets" (i.e. guns and rioting) if RP wasn't elected president.
Here are some more that can be derived automatically:
- Code cleanliness (e.g. consistent camelCase, whitespace, comment styles) - Statistics of commits over the same section of code (may imply that it is buggy) - Rate of API breakage -- how long does a function last before it's name/args/return value changes. This metric could be "weighted" by evaluating the prevalence of the function. A high rate implies an unstable design.
Some of the ones I don't like that Ohloh uses:
- "Mature" meaning that the project has a long history. That tells me nothing. Some of those projects had such pathetic early versions that it would be insane to use them today. On the other hand, there are probably millions of active Apache 1.3 installs. I would call a project mature when its currently maintained major version(s) have a long history.
- "Very Large Development Team". e.g., Drupal (contributions) with 575 developers. But does it really make it better? In my experience 95% of that project is junk. The quality of each contributing member needs to be evaluated.
This list is carefully crafted to stay roughly within the scope of what the NSF currently funds. e.g., it omits almost everything having to do with medicine (the domain of the NIH).
They also tread carefully around current events, cover the asses of various government and corporate interests, and ensure future funding (at least for the next year or so) by including "security" topics that everyone knows are bogus ways of diverting funds (except for the rotton apples at the top of the barrel).
If we have learned anything it is that the future of engineering is interdisciplinary (e.g. bio-engineering, regenerative therapy/stem cells, genetic engineering, etc). This just shows how horribly shriveled and unimaginative the NSF research vision really is.
Eh, whatever. It is pointless to argue about which branch is the most corrupt because none of it qualifies as surprising. This government is a sham all the way from the top to the bottom, left to right. It only marginally qualifies as a democracy at all -- we don't have proportional representation, and huge portions of the government are run by appointments with little oversight.
Hard to say exactly, but here is my general advice:
1-- According to what I've read, there is only about a 10% chance that a woman will respond to an inquiry from someone who is theoretically a match. I guess that is what the author of TFA is griping about, but I just lower my expectations -- if I want to get a date, I write to at least 10 people -- it just takes a bit of extra work. Obviously I try to select reasonable matches as well. Usually my selection criteria are; 1) *reasonable* match score, 2) nearby (I won't do long distance) 3) recent "online" activity (indicates that they might be interested). Photos are necessary to start with, but I've found that they are fairly misleading, so I try to keep an open mind.
2-- The basic rule of flirting is to ask questions (Google "SIRC Guide to Flirting" for more). Showing interest and keeping your subject engaged in conversation is far more important than what you say. Usually I scan the profile for missing information, and pose a question around that. Sometimes the question is totally absurd -- it doesn't have to be serious content. Sometimes I might throw in an additional comment, but not too much in the first message (or it becomes overwhelming). I try to avoid the trap of "proving" that I'm a good candidate because I satisfy some list of stipulated requirements... that just looks like desperation.
3-- In keeping with #2, I keep parts of *my* profile deliberately vague, to make it easier for them to ask questions. *Especially* the more interesting bits. Back to the SIRC guide--the process of building trust and intimacy is all about revealing personal information. Putting it all out at once leaves nothing to work with.
Once I do get a response, I may keep a dialog going for a while (only insofar as questions continue to exchange), or move directly to asking for a date. Obviously, neutral location and circumstances are necessary... some of the more quiet bars (where talking is easy) are usually good places.
OKC works quite well for me and several of my peers. In my experience Match.com is useless (also, it is not cheap).
The profiling/questionaire system only works insofar as it assures you will not meet someone offensive (e.g. basic political or religious incompatibility). Beyond that I'm fairly skeptical.
Also, all the pictures, words and numbers cannot prepare you for what someone is like in *real life*. I've had successful relationships with people who "on paper" didn't have a high matching coefficient, and met plenty who did but were instantly incompatible.
The "internet generation" is radically changing the acceptable norms for social privacy.
The uproar over practices at facebook was centered around the use of user-contributed information in advertising -- it is ethics that matter. Privacy is, for the most part, a secondary concern.
Actually studies have shown that green vehicles are more visible than red. Peak wavelength luminous efficacy of the human retina is around yellow-green. In addition, red appears as black for protanomalous observers (about.5% of the population).
So they may have actually been correcting a technical mistake in the traditional color of the fire engine.
IR tracking has zero drift, unlike accel+gyro IMUs, although, after calibration for the local magnetic field, the magnetometer (compass) can provide the necessary correction. One will have to tell it where the TV is, unlike the wiimote which already knows, but it will still work when not pointed at the IR source so there is more possibility for independent 3D motion tracking.
The problem is, those extra sensors are not cheap (currently) -- esp. compared to the stuff in the wiimote. The $99 price projection is likely a pipe-dream or on such narrow margins that Nintendo would never take such a thing seriously.
Note that TFA says this thing tracks absolute position which is an error -- it tracks absolute orientation. It's position sensing will be short-time relative at best.
That is true for a nominal change in altitude but not in general. Speed of sound is a joint function of temperature and density. The thermosphere is thin but actually quite hot (2700K). The interplanetary medium is even less dense but with a temperature of 100000K has a speed of sound of about 100km per sec.
MapReduce falls under the category of embarrassingly parallel algorithms. It isn't a step backwards, it just has a limited scope.
Google's contribution (and yes it does predate them by a long time) is to point out that MapReduce is a bit more than an algorithm -- it is a design pattern. Design patterns help us write clean code by establishing a consistent vocabulary (e.g. actors, containers, operators, etc), and furthermore are important insofar as they making algorithms accessible to programmers. Right now we badly need more well-defined design patterns in the area of parallel computing as this is essentially the future of programming.
They have 'em for people with normal legs, too... they are called power stilts or powerskips. Lots of fun videos on YouTube showing super-human jumping and running abilities. Looks fun!:)
I wouldn't say more advanced -- just different. The manner of communication makes a big impact on personal comfort level -- autistics, foreigners, the speech-impaired, contortionists (body language counts, too), strangers, etc. But having advanced skills in some area does not cause social discomfort. Concert pianists, jugglers, mathematicians -- no one feels uncomfortable around these people.
Also, studies have shown that *a priori* speech recognition through lip reading isn't possible. At a minimum you need the onset-offset information to determine the voiced-unvoiced segmentation (this is how early cochlear implants were able to function). Lip reading is only possible by combining the visual information with (often abundant) context clues. People with normal hearing also use the visual information (when available) to aid in reconstruction (see McGurk effect).
Wattage isn't everything. This prothesis is effectively a spring -- so it conserves energy (except for a small loss through heat). It is also lighter than a normal leg, so less energy is required to move it, and it has lower wind resistance. If it is longer than his "normal" leg, then it is also a mechanical advantage.
In order to be "fair", all of those advantageous factors have to be balanced out perfectly to account for the loss of power in the lower leg. The experiments proposed won't tell us this.
The prothesis is remarkably similar to power stilts (try a YouTube search for more) -- wearing these people can run much faster than normal and easily jump > 5 feet in the air.
It's not just a matter of confusion -- by means of sufficient similarity "Scrabulous" is leveraging the brand-recognition of the Scrabble trademark for the purpose of advertisement. At the same time it dilutes the identity of the mark as what one thinks of as Scrabble now becomes Scrab* or some such variant. So, it is both a type of IP theft and causes damage to the trademark by dilution.
Second the issue of confusion applies to people who are not necessarily familiar with the game -- granted most people are, but that isn't a valid counter argument from a legal POV. For this hypothetical person who has never actually played Scrabble and doesn't know exactly how to spell it, the two names are sufficiently similar to cause confusion.
I'm not defending Hasbro per say, just pointing out that this is expected behavior for a trademark holder. In fact, it is required, since if the mark is not defended with due diligence, that fact can be used as evidence in proceedings to have the trademark nullified. (This has been pointed out several times already in this comment stream by others)
Unfortunately, many examples of what people call "Web 2.0" consists of half-assed implementations (more like "Web 1.5") created by programmers who never bothered to understand RDF. Tagging is a great example of this. Tagging is RDF with a missing relation operator, in other words--meaningless junk.
RDF databases really shine when you start pulling XML from multiple data sources. All the feeds can then be dumped into a single generic three-column table, slap a SPARQL implementation on top of that, and you can instantly have all the expressive query power that is normally found in SQL without having to create a static schema.
Amazon, Google, and other large-scale data providers are already serving up useful data by the gob-full -- tools like SPARQL will do wonders for making that data accessible.
Current estimates put the total number of asteroids between 1-2 million (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid), only about 300k of which are cataloged. About 5000 more are discovered each month, nearly all of which are found by entirely automated systems.
So, if you can find *any* asteroid at all with a telescope, chances are better than 70% that it is a new discovery. And, finding one probably isn't all that hard with a modern telescope... just point it at the Kupier Belt and take a few pictures.
So, I wouldn't say they were "lucky", since the probability of success was pretty high going into it. And their discovery, while it was probably fun and educational, is hardly news-worthy as it is dwarfed by the ~150 other asteroids that are discovered *every day*.
Due diligence for brand/trademark defense -- if you don't go after the copy cats you lose the rights to the brand. If they permit clones of classic games, what is to stop clones of new games as well?
That reminds me of Mysql, which silently converts invalid or unspecified dates to "0000-00-00 00:00:00". When I first saw this happen I did a double-take... I cannot imagine why someone thought this was a good idea. This odd behavior was finally fixed in version 5.0.2, which generates an error when strict mode is enabled and a warning otherwise.
Your assertion about the Laffer Curve assumes that the current level of taxation is already above the optimum point.
I'm not a big fan of the Clinton but she does *look* presidential, and we all know that is just about the only thing that matters (second to religion, of course).
Basic contract law stipulates that a contract goes into force as soon as money is involved, regardless of signature or the form of agreement (verbal, written, etc).
The terms of use for WHOIS are clearly stated, and they are profiting by it, so it is a contract violation.
Whois terms of use are for information lookups only to find the owner of a domain. Sniffing queries and buying up the non-taken names that someone has expressed interest in is, at the very least, a commercial application of the data, which is forbidden. The crime is contract breach.
I predict disaster. This will only encourage the pirates to go robotic as well, ultimately escalating to a global war fought out with robots remotely controlled by ninjas.
Slashdot Mirror
#1) Adjusted for inflation the NASA budget is not significantly different from the moon-visit era. Getting to Mars, the Moon, etc is more a problem of social engineering than it is technical. BTW, our current hot-air-bag-in-chief has claimed this as a priority but actually done jack squat in terms of actual leadership.
#2) Nobody has to die, and it isn't even particularly risky. Also, the first trip to Mars can, at the same time, be the first colonization of Mars. Once again automation comes to the rescue.
Step 1: Send an unmanned craft to Mars, with a return vehicle as it's payload. Land it on the surface, and verify that the return vehicle is launch-capable. At the same time the launch vehicle is also a habitation unit. Risk to human life: 0.
Step 2: Send the *same* unmanned craft + return vehicle to Mars, this time with people on board. Land it on the surface. If *this* return vehicle didn't break, that is great, leave it there. If it did, there is still a way home because the other one works. If they both work, even better -- leave one behind as a backup for the *next* crew.
Meanwhile, the launchers start accumulating on the surface and form the a growing permanent base of operations on Mars.
FYI, I forget who's idea this was, but it isn't mine.
The ruling by the judge has nothing to do with the naivity of the subject or automaticity of the software, but specifically with the lack of concrete evidence. Copyright (civil) laws are quite a bit different acts of *criminal* negligence such as drug trafficking or even driving violations.
... "without actual distribution of copies . . . there is no violation [of] the distribution right." ... ... requires "[f]actual allegations [which are] enough to raise a right to relief above the speculative level."
"""
A plaintiff alleging copyright infringement must establish two elements: "(1) ownership of a valid copyright, and (2)
copying of constituent elements of the work that are original."
a plaintiff's obligation to provide the 'grounds' of his 'entitle[ment] to relief'
"""
Normal, intelligent people don't care much about national politics because they know that as individuals they have zero impact on the operations of the broken and corrupt system. That is the *rational* response. The *irrational* response when presented with a non-responsive system is to engage in some sort of behavior that at least devotes more resources to the cause than the situation merits (obsessive stalking of women comes to mind as an example).
... talkative ... about their favorite candidate also tend to be at least slightly insane. A good friend of mine who is a libertarian (a lobbyist, actually) and RP supporter (who is only slightly insane, but in a good way for the most part) told me that a significant portion of the people at the local RP meetup were seriously proposing to "take to the streets" (i.e. guns and rioting) if RP wasn't elected president.
In my estimation, people who are very
Here are some more that can be derived automatically:
- Code cleanliness (e.g. consistent camelCase, whitespace, comment styles)
- Statistics of commits over the same section of code (may imply that it is buggy)
- Rate of API breakage -- how long does a function last before it's name/args/return value changes. This metric could be "weighted" by evaluating the prevalence of the function. A high rate implies an unstable design.
Some of the ones I don't like that Ohloh uses:
- "Mature" meaning that the project has a long history. That tells me nothing. Some of those projects had such pathetic early versions that it would be insane to use them today. On the other hand, there are probably millions of active Apache 1.3 installs. I would call a project mature when its currently maintained major version(s) have a long history.
- "Very Large Development Team". e.g., Drupal (contributions) with 575 developers. But does it really make it better? In my experience 95% of that project is junk. The quality of each contributing member needs to be evaluated.
This list is carefully crafted to stay roughly within the scope of what the NSF currently funds. e.g., it omits almost everything having to do with medicine (the domain of the NIH).
They also tread carefully around current events, cover the asses of various government and corporate interests, and ensure future funding (at least for the next year or so) by including "security" topics that everyone knows are bogus ways of diverting funds (except for the rotton apples at the top of the barrel).
If we have learned anything it is that the future of engineering is interdisciplinary (e.g. bio-engineering, regenerative therapy/stem cells, genetic engineering, etc). This just shows how horribly shriveled and unimaginative the NSF research vision really is.
Eh, whatever. It is pointless to argue about which branch is the most corrupt because none of it qualifies as surprising. This government is a sham all the way from the top to the bottom, left to right. It only marginally qualifies as a democracy at all -- we don't have proportional representation, and huge portions of the government are run by appointments with little oversight.
Hard to say exactly, but here is my general advice:
1-- According to what I've read, there is only about a 10% chance that a woman will respond to an inquiry from someone who is theoretically a match. I guess that is what the author of TFA is griping about, but I just lower my expectations -- if I want to get a date, I write to at least 10 people -- it just takes a bit of extra work. Obviously I try to select reasonable matches as well. Usually my selection criteria are; 1) *reasonable* match score, 2) nearby (I won't do long distance) 3) recent "online" activity (indicates that they might be interested). Photos are necessary to start with, but I've found that they are fairly misleading, so I try to keep an open mind.
2-- The basic rule of flirting is to ask questions (Google "SIRC Guide to Flirting" for more). Showing interest and keeping your subject engaged in conversation is far more important than what you say. Usually I scan the profile for missing information, and pose a question around that. Sometimes the question is totally absurd -- it doesn't have to be serious content. Sometimes I might throw in an additional comment, but not too much in the first message (or it becomes overwhelming). I try to avoid the trap of "proving" that I'm a good candidate because I satisfy some list of stipulated requirements... that just looks like desperation.
3-- In keeping with #2, I keep parts of *my* profile deliberately vague, to make it easier for them to ask questions. *Especially* the more interesting bits. Back to the SIRC guide--the process of building trust and intimacy is all about revealing personal information. Putting it all out at once leaves nothing to work with.
Once I do get a response, I may keep a dialog going for a while (only insofar as questions continue to exchange), or move directly to asking for a date. Obviously, neutral location and circumstances are necessary... some of the more quiet bars (where talking is easy) are usually good places.
OKC works quite well for me and several of my peers. In my experience Match.com is useless (also, it is not cheap).
The profiling/questionaire system only works insofar as it assures you will not meet someone offensive (e.g. basic political or religious incompatibility). Beyond that I'm fairly skeptical.
Also, all the pictures, words and numbers cannot prepare you for what someone is like in *real life*. I've had successful relationships with people who "on paper" didn't have a high matching coefficient, and met plenty who did but were instantly incompatible.
The "internet generation" is radically changing the acceptable norms for social privacy.
The uproar over practices at facebook was centered around the use of user-contributed information in advertising -- it is ethics that matter. Privacy is, for the most part, a secondary concern.
Actually studies have shown that green vehicles are more visible than red. Peak wavelength luminous efficacy of the human retina is around yellow-green. In addition, red appears as black for protanomalous observers (about .5% of the population).
So they may have actually been correcting a technical mistake in the traditional color of the fire engine.
IR tracking has zero drift, unlike accel+gyro IMUs, although, after calibration for the local magnetic field, the magnetometer (compass) can provide the necessary correction. One will have to tell it where the TV is, unlike the wiimote which already knows, but it will still work when not pointed at the IR source so there is more possibility for independent 3D motion tracking.
The problem is, those extra sensors are not cheap (currently) -- esp. compared to the stuff in the wiimote. The $99 price projection is likely a pipe-dream or on such narrow margins that Nintendo would never take such a thing seriously.
Note that TFA says this thing tracks absolute position which is an error -- it tracks absolute orientation. It's position sensing will be short-time relative at best.
That is true for a nominal change in altitude but not in general. Speed of sound is a joint function of temperature and density. The thermosphere is thin but actually quite hot (2700K). The interplanetary medium is even less dense but with a temperature of 100000K has a speed of sound of about 100km per sec.
MapReduce falls under the category of embarrassingly parallel algorithms. It isn't a step backwards, it just has a limited scope.
Google's contribution (and yes it does predate them by a long time) is to point out that MapReduce is a bit more than an algorithm -- it is a design pattern. Design patterns help us write clean code by establishing a consistent vocabulary (e.g. actors, containers, operators, etc), and furthermore are important insofar as they making algorithms accessible to programmers. Right now we badly need more well-defined design patterns in the area of parallel computing as this is essentially the future of programming.
They have 'em for people with normal legs, too... they are called power stilts or powerskips. Lots of fun videos on YouTube showing super-human jumping and running abilities. Looks fun! :)
I wouldn't say more advanced -- just different. The manner of communication makes a big impact on personal comfort level -- autistics, foreigners, the speech-impaired, contortionists (body language counts, too), strangers, etc. But having advanced skills in some area does not cause social discomfort. Concert pianists, jugglers, mathematicians -- no one feels uncomfortable around these people.
Also, studies have shown that *a priori* speech recognition through lip reading isn't possible. At a minimum you need the onset-offset information to determine the voiced-unvoiced segmentation (this is how early cochlear implants were able to function). Lip reading is only possible by combining the visual information with (often abundant) context clues. People with normal hearing also use the visual information (when available) to aid in reconstruction (see McGurk effect).
Wattage isn't everything. This prothesis is effectively a spring -- so it conserves energy (except for a small loss through heat). It is also lighter than a normal leg, so less energy is required to move it, and it has lower wind resistance. If it is longer than his "normal" leg, then it is also a mechanical advantage.
In order to be "fair", all of those advantageous factors have to be balanced out perfectly to account for the loss of power in the lower leg. The experiments proposed won't tell us this.
The prothesis is remarkably similar to power stilts (try a YouTube search for more) -- wearing these people can run much faster than normal and easily jump > 5 feet in the air.
It's not just a matter of confusion -- by means of sufficient similarity "Scrabulous" is leveraging the brand-recognition of the Scrabble trademark for the purpose of advertisement. At the same time it dilutes the identity of the mark as what one thinks of as Scrabble now becomes Scrab* or some such variant. So, it is both a type of IP theft and causes damage to the trademark by dilution.
Second the issue of confusion applies to people who are not necessarily familiar with the game -- granted most people are, but that isn't a valid counter argument from a legal POV. For this hypothetical person who has never actually played Scrabble and doesn't know exactly how to spell it, the two names are sufficiently similar to cause confusion.
I'm not defending Hasbro per say, just pointing out that this is expected behavior for a trademark holder. In fact, it is required, since if the mark is not defended with due diligence, that fact can be used as evidence in proceedings to have the trademark nullified. (This has been pointed out several times already in this comment stream by others)
Unfortunately, many examples of what people call "Web 2.0" consists of half-assed implementations (more like "Web 1.5") created by programmers who never bothered to understand RDF. Tagging is a great example of this. Tagging is RDF with a missing relation operator, in other words--meaningless junk.
RDF databases really shine when you start pulling XML from multiple data sources. All the feeds can then be dumped into a single generic three-column table, slap a SPARQL implementation on top of that, and you can instantly have all the expressive query power that is normally found in SQL without having to create a static schema.
Amazon, Google, and other large-scale data providers are already serving up useful data by the gob-full -- tools like SPARQL will do wonders for making that data accessible.
Current estimates put the total number of asteroids between 1-2 million (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid), only about 300k of which are cataloged. About 5000 more are discovered each month, nearly all of which are found by entirely automated systems.
So, if you can find *any* asteroid at all with a telescope, chances are better than 70% that it is a new discovery. And, finding one probably isn't all that hard with a modern telescope... just point it at the Kupier Belt and take a few pictures.
So, I wouldn't say they were "lucky", since the probability of success was pretty high going into it. And their discovery, while it was probably fun and educational, is hardly news-worthy as it is dwarfed by the ~150 other asteroids that are discovered *every day*.
Due diligence for brand/trademark defense -- if you don't go after the copy cats you lose the rights to the brand. If they permit clones of classic games, what is to stop clones of new games as well?
That reminds me of Mysql, which silently converts invalid or unspecified dates to "0000-00-00 00:00:00". When I first saw this happen I did a double-take... I cannot imagine why someone thought this was a good idea. This odd behavior was finally fixed in version 5.0.2, which generates an error when strict mode is enabled and a warning otherwise.
Your assertion about the Laffer Curve assumes that the current level of taxation is already above the optimum point.
I'm not a big fan of the Clinton but she does *look* presidential, and we all know that is just about the only thing that matters (second to religion, of course).
Basic contract law stipulates that a contract goes into force as soon as money is involved, regardless of signature or the form of agreement (verbal, written, etc).
The terms of use for WHOIS are clearly stated, and they are profiting by it, so it is a contract violation.
Whois terms of use are for information lookups only to find the owner of a domain. Sniffing queries and buying up the non-taken names that someone has expressed interest in is, at the very least, a commercial application of the data, which is forbidden. The crime is contract breach.
I predict disaster. This will only encourage the pirates to go robotic as well, ultimately escalating to a global war fought out with robots remotely controlled by ninjas.