Interesting that the OP is so deeply concerned with tech companies' lobbying against Keystone XL, but not concerned with the Koch brothers, whose organizations have spent a nine-digit amount of dollars on campaigns and advertisements (often misleading or just plain false) to influence campaigns, with an eye toward issues of interest to the Koch brothers themselves, like getting limits on campaign donations removed and, just to pick a random example, getting the Keystone XL pipeline approved.
It's ridiculous to blame the Black-Scholes model, the Black-Scholes equation, or the Black-Scholes formulas. There are two groups of individuals responsible for the crash, even if the corporate press refuses to acknowledge it: bank executives who knowingly did ridiculously risky things and the ratings agencies that gave them the cover to do it. It's also ridiculous to refer to the crash as the "subprime crisis," because the problem most definitely was not subprime mortgages. The sum total of all the subprime mortgages was on the order of a few hundred million dollars, but the damage done by the crash was in the tens of trillions of dollars. The bailout of 2008 amounted to over one-and-a-half trrillion dollars, which was enough to pay off all the subprime mortgages several times over, and yet it didn't solve the problem.
Let's start with the ratings agencies. With winks and nudges to their friends running the banks, the people at the ratings agencies gave ratings of AAA, which means "as close to risk-free as you can get," to packages of mortgages in which they knew many were "subprime" and many, many more had been given by unethical lenders (who later sold them off in packages) who did not check the ability of their customers to pay. In some cases, the AAA rating was even extended to complex derivatives based on the mortgage packages, despite the fact that the people at the ratings agencies didn't understand those derivatives well enough to give a rating at all. It's worth mentioning that among those customers were many middle-class and wealthy individuals counting on the obviously unsustainable growth of real estate prices in the US market so they could take out mortgages to buy properties, hold on to them for 6-18 months, and then "flip" them for a huge profit. Also among them were many companies. So don't go blaming the lower-middle-class and poor holders of "subprime" mortgages, who only represented a small fraction of the number of bad mortgages. Anyway, a rating like AAA should only be given to things that are as risk-free as a government bond. Since wealthy people and economists love to talk about there being "no such thing as a free lunch," it's worth pointing out that that idea is a basic principle used in things like pricing assets. In that context, it's called the "no-arbitrage principle." Arbitrage basically means "risk-free profit." The idea behind the no-arbitrage principle is that if there were an opportunity for risk-free profit, somebody would have already taken advantage of it and driven prices to the point where the opportunity no longer existed. In today's world of high-frequency trading, the no-arbitrage principle actually works pretty well. A classic example of arbitrage would be a stock that's sold in two different exchanges. If the price is lower in one and you can buy it quickly enough, then sell it quickly enough in the other exchange, where it's worth more, then you can make a profit with basically no risk. The thing is that if anyone notices and tries to do that, it drives up the price (buy increasing demand) in the exchange where the price was lower and brings the price down (by increasing supply) in the exchange where the price was higher. The prices are thus driven rapidly toward equilibrium. And in fact a crucial step in the derivation of the Black-Scholes equation is an application of the no-arbitrage principle, equating a risk-free return to the rate paid by government bonds.
Additionally, when heads had to roll at the banks for, y'know, breaking the world economy, you know the execs wanted to protect themselves and their own and put all the blame on their quantitative analysts, but they couldn't because the quants had done a good job of covering their own asses by sending e-mails to their superiors warning that there were all kinds of risks not being controlled or managed, and that there were even new risks introduced by modeling that could lead to problems. So the execs were fully aware that they were trading in assets tha
The important thing is not to get a project manager, but to give the project manager the power to actually do things like manage priorities. I worked at a software start-up in 1999. At the first company meeting after I got there, I tried to get an idea of what were the highest priorities among the tasks facing the company at that point, not necessarily in order, but just putting a priority from "1" to "3" (I had originally suggested 1 to 5) on each item. Out of 20-odd items, one got a "2" and the rest were "1." I tried to explain that I understood that everything was important and urgent, but that in order to get anywhere, we'd have to give some things higher priorities than others. I explained that "3" didn't mean "unimportant," just "less of a priority than a 1 or a 2." They all looked at me like I had 9 heads and outvoted me 3-1 to keep the utterly useless priority list as it was.
For free literature, most classics are already in the public domain. You can get many of the greatest works of literature in English free (and without violating even today's ridiculous copyright laws) at places like Project Gutenberg. Some things, like the later Barsoom novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, are in the public domain in Australia, but not in the USA. In any case, there are a few Project Gutenberg sites. I got the first few Barsoom novels from the Project Gutenberg site for the USA (linked above), and the rest of them from the one for Australia.
A woman I knew who worked at Microsoft in Brazil was told that her husband couldn't be covered on her health insurance, even though male employees' wives were all covered by their husbands' Microsoft-provided policies. When she started to say that was unfair, she was told to back off. I guess sexism at Microsoft is a worldwide thing.
It's not hard to develop apps for Android. And do you know what happens to apps that affect performance, crash or whatever? They get downvoted into oblivion and ignored.
The Skype app, which mangles performance, and the Facebook app, which voraciously wolfs down battery charge, haven't been downvoted into oblivion and ignored yet. How long should we expect to wait for this to happen?
I was looking forward to the Atari Flashback Portable that sadly never materialized. I really don't have a need or desire for a high-powered latest-generation portable console, but retro portable gaming I would pay for.
FWIW, I'm going to give Sony a chance to sell me a PSP2/NGP/whatever, but I'm already looking at alternatives. I don't really need all the gyros and accelerometers and multitouch surfaces and GPS and whatnot, and I think those things will jack up the price a lot. What I really want is a portable system on which I can watch videos (the PSP was good enough at that for me) and play sports games (especially soccer) and shooters. And I want two thumbsticks for the shooters so the controls can be consistent. I hate switching between PSP shooters, because each one has its own control scheme with its own ways of getting around the lack of a second thumbstick, and I get confused.
but every adult I have met who smoked pot back in the 60's and 70's are not what I call intelligent or well off anymore.
Like Willie Nelson, for instance?
Or Jack Herer?
Or Willie Nelson?
Could it be that the people you know simply weren't that bright or motivated to begin with?
How 'bout Richard Feynman? He talks about some of his experiences smoking pot in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, and he was pretty well off and considered quite intelligent right up until his death.
[If you can't tell the difference] between the Lincoln memorial and the FDR memorial you have no business going to Washington DC.
It sounds like the PP is saying that anyone who doesn't know enough about DC shouldn't go to DC and learn about it. That strikes me as weird.
However if you decide to go anyway, they do have still pre-printed maps checked for accuracy that sell at any gas station or book store.
Bingo. Yet another hissy-fit over nothing. Nobody is going to miss the Beck anti-Democrat rally. The two sites are less than half a mile apart. Glenn Beck fans and other people in DC speak the same language, so they could, y'know, ask for directions. Additionally, as the PP noted, it's not hard to find maps.
However, "teh Googlz iz in on teh conspiracy" is a convenient excuse if the turnout doesn't meet their expectations.
It doesn't help that Glenn Beck has his fans terrified, convinced that Obama and Democrats are enemies of the US and that Obama is just like Hitler. Conspiracy theories like "Google Maps doesn't want us to find the Lincoln Memorial and save America because Obama and Pelosi are controlling Google" are easier to believe when somebody on a channel called FOX News has been trying to convince them for years that Obama is destroying the USA and is about to put the white man down because he's an angry black radical, impose Sharia law because he's a Muslim, send people to Gulags and turn the USA into the Soviet Union because he's just like Stalin, or maybe he'll just turn into a genocidal expansionist dictator because he's just like Hitler.
On Tuesday, I checked maps.google.com.br to find the names of the streets that meet at the corner where I wanted a friend to meet me near the Berrini station of the São Paulo metropolitan train. Google Maps showed the station out in the middle of the Pinheiros River. I wonder if Obama and Pelosi were trying to drown me or poison me with the pollution in the Pinheiros...
Some friends and I (and lots of other 6th through 12th grade students) played that on terminals connected to our school's computer in 1980. I think the computer was a PDP-8/some letter, but I don't remember which letter. It was kept in the administrative building, while the student terminal room, which had a noisy teletype-style terminal, a newer and quieter terminal whose display was dot matrix printing, and three or four monocrome CRT terminals, was in a building with classrooms and the school library.
Trek was so popular at one point that I remember all the terminals surrounded by kids, and even the teletype-ish terminal pounding out the quadrant and sector maps. My friends and I figured out a few different ways of aiming photon torpedoes perfectly. One obvious one was a calculator with trig functions (and inverse trig functions), but at least we understood the trigonometry well enough to figure out how to use the calculator to help us kill Klingons. But I also remember three of us with protractors, rulers, and graph paper, getting the angle without using a calculator. The cool thing was when other kids saw us picking off the Klingons easily (and us celebrating each perfect shot), watched us for a while to understand how we did it, and then went off and did it themselves on other terminals. Some didn't care much about math like my friends and I did, but they cared enough about destroying Klingon ships represented by the letter K that they were willing to learn the math to do it.
Unpaid internships are also an easy wayo make sure that only "the right people" (i.e., people from wealthy families) have a chance to get into certain fields. In some fields, it's hard to get hired without experience, and the only way to get the initial experience is through an internship. But there are a lot of people who can't afford to work without any income, so if only unpaid internships are available, only those lucky enough to have been born into wealth can break into those fields.
I use Ubuntu and Firefox on the 'puter I use to access my company's Bank of Brazil account. And I usually just start by going to bb.com.br or jumping straight to the login page for a company account. A couple of months ago, I started having some difficulties logging in. I called Bank of Brazil's internet banking support, and they asked me to make sure I had the latest "version" of Java installed. I thought that couldn't be the problem, but I did check and it turned out I was an update behind (i.e., I was using version 6, update 17, and the latest was version 6, update 18). I didn't think that could cause the problem, but I figured that in order to continue with B of B's internet banking support, I'd have to be able to say that yes, I had the latest "version" of Java installed. Once I got Ubuntu to install the latest Java update, I tried logging in, and the problem was solved. Live and learn.
As for ATMs, I can tell you that at least some, and possibly all, of the ATMs at the Vila Leopoldina branch of the Bank of Brazil in São Paulo are Linux-based. I actually noticed that around Christmas of 2009. But that's not really relevant to my earlier post. I was talking about desktops.
By the way, I've had to deal with the following banks in Brazil: BBVA, Bradesco, Itaú, Santander, Unibanco (now part of Itaú, but it wasn't then), and Bank of Brazil. People like to speak ill of government employees, but the best service I've gotten, and not by a little, has been at B of B. Oddly enough, my experience with Bradesco was relatively positive too. Itaú is ridiculously expensive and has piss-poor service, but Unibanco must be the worst bank in the world. They make everything harder than every other bank does, but without adding any additional value. I could deal with, for example, additional security measures that made things a slightly bigger pain in the ass, but Unibanco just gives you the pain in the ass without any benefits. And even though I explicitly asked three times on the day I was opening the accounts at Unibanco and was told that the internet banking was compatible with non-Windows operating systems (important since my life has been completely Microsoft-free for a couple of years now), I didn't find out that Unibanco's internet banking only worked with "Ruimdows" until after I had wasted a lot of time and effort setting up the accounts and then trying to get the internet banking to work (which, by the way, even under ideal conditions and using Windows, would require at least three visits to the branch, which I find ridiculous). With all the passwords Unibanco gave me to memorize, the only way I could possibly keep everything straight was to have the passwords written down somewhere. I found creative ways to hide my passwords in my cell phone's address book, but all the stupid passwords not only didn't add security, they made it impossible to use the bank without writing down passwords somewhere, which is terrible.
Why is the Linux migration project in Munich so prominent, as mentioned in TFS? I know of much larger migrations, both in terms of the number of computers and the geographic area covered. The Brazilian government has been migrating to Free Software in mass. The Bank of Brazil, for example, has over 100,000 computers running Firefox and BrOffice. As of last June, the estimate was right at 100,000, with 65,000 of those machines running Linux and 35,000 running other operating systems. The Bank of Brazil has branches and offices all over Brazil, which is a very large country. The mass migration happened in 2006, before the migration really began in Munich. The number of machines involved (counting the Linux boxes only) is about 5 times as large as the number of machines to be involved in Munich, and instead of being located in a single city, they are spread out all over a country that's larger than the US would be if it didn't have Alaska, but smaller than the US with Alaska (i.e., larger in area than the "lower 48" plus DC plus Hawaii). In the year 2006 alone, the Bank of Brazil estimated that it saved R$20MM by using Free Software.
FWIW, I've also seen Linux desktops at the ITI (Brazil's IT Institute). Even totally non-nerdy ITI employees seemed perfectly at home on Linux desktops when I was there as long ago as early-to-mid 2005. The Bank of Brazil branch where my company has its account has all Linux desktops. The managers who take care of my account think it's funny when I crane my neck to look at their monitors and geek out on the software their 'puters are running. They are total non-nerds and not only appear to be happy with the Linux desktops, but told me they are. It took them a minute to figure out what I was asking - they didn't think of using Linux desktops as anything all that unusual.
A cop here in São Paulo told me a story about when his car was stolen. He got a call from the police (a different kind of police, but I don't want to go into the differences) saying his car had been recovered. He got to the place where the car was being kept pretty quickly and did the right thing: he took pictures of it. Because it was the end of the day and the processing to release his car could only be done by people who had already left, he could only get it the next day.
When he went back the next day, the car had been stripped. The stereo and a bunch of accessories and decorative items (nice hubcaps, for example) had been removed. He got access to the chief (delegado) and showed him the photographs from the previous day. The chief made an announcement that he wanted everything restored to that car within an hour or heads would roll. The next time the car's owner saw the car, it was as it had been the previous day.
Great. Maybe now the dumbasses at NBC will take their stuff off Hulu, so I can watch it from outside the US, I always thought the US networks should make their shows available vie internet and sell targeted advertising embedded in the same video stream as the shows. Obviously ads for car dealerships in the US wouldn't be interesting to people in other countries, nor would those dealerships be all that interested in getting access to my eyes in a foreign country, but through the magic of teh intarwebz, the US TV networks could sell advertising to advertisers who might ONLY have interest in access to eyes in specific foreign countries. I figured that just like I see ads in Portuguese on web sites I visit in the US (when I allow ads, of course) from IP addresses here in Brazil, ABC could embed video ads from advertisers with somethng to sell in the Brazilian market. There could also be standard web ads.
I should make some snide remark here about how there's no great loss from not seeing NBC shows since I quit Heroes during the second season (I was horribly disappointed with the final ep of the first season, which felt like it was thrown together at the last minute when they suddenly realized they only had one ep to wrap up the season after building things up really nicely for the first 21 eps), Saturday Night Live went from a normal bad phase to unwatchably unfunny while Tina Fey was head writer (I still haven't decided if she is funny or not, largely because SNL blew diseased goats when she was head writer), and the sometimes-funny Conan O'Brien has been exiled to bring the almost-always-unfunny bloated chin back to The Tonight Show, but there appear to have actually been a couple of funny moments on SNL just this last week. Too bad I wouldn't be able to find out without downloading a pirated copy of the ep. And I 'm STILL pissed off that I can't see the only legit copy of the Hedley & Wyche Toothpaste ad from an early '90s ep of SNL because NBC has removed all free video (e.g., YouTube) copies and only allows it to be watched via Hulu.
Since Lost's penultimate season is only now being broadcast on TV in Brazil (I don't subscribe to cable or satellite TV) and the last season is about to start in the US, only to appear a year or so from now on broadcast TV here, I would like to watch the new episodes as they become available online. I'm sure there are people in many other countries in situations similar to mine, and with similar interest in the show. That looks to me like a great opportunity for ABC to make some money selling video ads and regular web ads to advertisers who might be interested in people in other markets who want to watch the final season of Lost before it shows up on their local TV stations. I watched the penultimate episode of the first season of Heroes on the web at my sister's house in the US the day before watching the final episode on TV there. I didn't mind the ads that were in the video with the episode content, because it was actually less trouble to watch via web with ads than it would have been to set up a filesharing program and download the episode without ads. Most of the ads I saw or heard (while doing other things in the room during the ads) weren't all that relevant to me, but then again, I was watching from a computer at an IP address in South Carolina, not Brazil. Now it occurs to me that there's another massive marketing opportunity: I would gladly fill out a form with my name and home address in exchange for being able to watch the eps free via web and without having to resort to piracy. That would allow ABC, for example, to know something about avid viewers of its programs all over the world, which could help a lot with selling ads to a much wider range of advertisers. NBC is too stupid to see this opportunity (or to keep Conan over Jay after Jay's show at 22:00 tanked). Is ABC?
I don't understand why so many flight related programs are named Icarus. Let's remember what happened in the myth of Icarus: He flew too close to the sun and so he died.
Yeah. Imagine what I thought when I got on a Varig plane for an international flight back in the '90s and saw that Varig's in-flight magazine was called Í caro.
Except, most "nerds" wouldn't be caught dead playing this game.
I have a friend who is a well-known cryptographer. He is a tenured professor at the best university in his home country (it's also the best-known university in his home country; the two aren't always the same). Some of his work has become part of important international standards. I have used applications built on his work, and depending on how nerdy you are and what kind of work you do, you might have used some too. His work has won awards and has been recognized by his peers at major academic conferences on cryptography. Whether or not you have heard of him, you have almost certainly heard of some of his collaborators in other countries, even if you aren't a cryptography nerd. If that's not enough "nerd cred" for ya, he is also a fluent speaker of five languages, can get by really well in a sixth, can imitate different accents in at least one of his non-native languages, and has some knowledge of two other real languages plus Klingon.
And because I was sick to death of seeing his FarmVille updates and my sister's Mafia Wars updates, I finally learned how to block updates from those two applications just today.
. Its something about they way she is flicking her left finger. I wonder what it is for?
PP:
I'm more curious as to what those mammaries are for.
Those are the robot's eyes. Scientists have found that men will make better eye contact with the robot that way, which facilitates reading their facial expressions.
Color me shocked that a Microsoftie is doing something unoriginal.
Now, if Microsoft-style food makes your stomach unstable, that's just because you can't expect the creator of the food to test it in every possible stomach, and I'm sure they'll fix it in one of the service packs.
And the fact that Myhrvold doesn't yet know about things like pasteurization, filtering, and qualification of suppliers, used to deal with physical, chemical, and biological threats in the food does not mean that any food-borne pathogens, poisons, hormones, rocks or glass shards are his fault. He wants to dominate the market, and making lots of food for lots of people (he's working on deals with schools so kids won't be able to eat any kind of food but Myhrvold Food) means that there will be more of it in which pathogens, dangerous chemicals, and solid debris can hide. That's not Myhrvold's fault, and you fanbois who insist on eating food whose ingredients have been properly qualified, inspected, and treated to remove possible threats, well, the only reason your food is not being attacked is because Myhrvold's food presents a much more high-profile target for biological, chemical, and physical threats, so the threats don't even bother showing up in other food.
Plus, Myhrvold paid a company a bunch of money and they did a study showing that if you ignore hospital bills, funeral expenses, cleaning bills to remove spewed vomit, violently ejected diarrhea, and squirted blood from clothes, personal belongings, homes, places of work, car interiors, stores, schools, etc., and the permanent damage done to the digestive systems of those who have eaten Myhrvold Food and survived, then despite the fact that Myhrvold food is cheaper than what you get at those fancy restaurants that obey the safety and inspection laws, and even cheaper in total overall cost than the food you buy inexpensively at grocery stores and farmers' markets.
The MPAA is arguing that if they could directly turn those plugs on and off, they could offer more goods to consumers.
While I usually just laught at pirates stupid reasonings to pirate content (stupid record labels, support the artists directly, blabla), this is even more fun.
"Do what we demand, or suffer."
This reminds me of the insurance companies. They promised car insurance premiums would go down if a Federal speed limit of 55 miles per hour were established. They promised car insurance premiums would go down if seatbelt laws were passed. They promised car insurance premiums would go down if strict "drunk" driving laws were passed. They promised car insurance premiums would go down if car manufacturers were required to put three-point seatbelts in cars. They promised car insurance premiums would go down if car manufacturers would make airbags standard equipment.
Anyone want to guess whether the insurance companies made good on their promises?
I've been living in São Paulo for over 9 years. I was without electrical power for a few hours last night.
The timeline on this is pretty entertaining. On the 7th, there were a bunch of stories saying the 2007 blackouts in Brazil were caused by crackers (the articles say "hackers"). On the 9th, there were strong denials all around, accompanied by stories saying that no, the 2007 blackouts were caused by "sooty insulators." On the 10th, Brazil suffered a blackout much worse than the ones in 2007. That looks to me like crackers saying "sooty insulators? We'll show you sooty insulators!"
By the way, power failures are normally abrupt, but the one last night was not. I usually go from lights to no lights almost instantaneously, but last night, the lights were flickering for a while. After a few minutes, I thought it was going to stabilize, because my compact fluorescents stayed on while my UPS beeped a lot to tell me it wasn't getting enough juice. The larger fluorescents in the kitchen couldn't start, but the compact fluorescents gave me some light in the living room.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting that the OP is so deeply concerned with tech companies' lobbying against Keystone XL, but not concerned with the Koch brothers, whose organizations have spent a nine-digit amount of dollars on campaigns and advertisements (often misleading or just plain false) to influence campaigns, with an eye toward issues of interest to the Koch brothers themselves, like getting limits on campaign donations removed and, just to pick a random example, getting the Keystone XL pipeline approved.
It's ridiculous to blame the Black-Scholes model, the Black-Scholes equation, or the Black-Scholes formulas. There are two groups of individuals responsible for the crash, even if the corporate press refuses to acknowledge it: bank executives who knowingly did ridiculously risky things and the ratings agencies that gave them the cover to do it. It's also ridiculous to refer to the crash as the "subprime crisis," because the problem most definitely was not subprime mortgages. The sum total of all the subprime mortgages was on the order of a few hundred million dollars, but the damage done by the crash was in the tens of trillions of dollars. The bailout of 2008 amounted to over one-and-a-half trrillion dollars, which was enough to pay off all the subprime mortgages several times over, and yet it didn't solve the problem.
Let's start with the ratings agencies. With winks and nudges to their friends running the banks, the people at the ratings agencies gave ratings of AAA, which means "as close to risk-free as you can get," to packages of mortgages in which they knew many were "subprime" and many, many more had been given by unethical lenders (who later sold them off in packages) who did not check the ability of their customers to pay. In some cases, the AAA rating was even extended to complex derivatives based on the mortgage packages, despite the fact that the people at the ratings agencies didn't understand those derivatives well enough to give a rating at all. It's worth mentioning that among those customers were many middle-class and wealthy individuals counting on the obviously unsustainable growth of real estate prices in the US market so they could take out mortgages to buy properties, hold on to them for 6-18 months, and then "flip" them for a huge profit. Also among them were many companies. So don't go blaming the lower-middle-class and poor holders of "subprime" mortgages, who only represented a small fraction of the number of bad mortgages. Anyway, a rating like AAA should only be given to things that are as risk-free as a government bond. Since wealthy people and economists love to talk about there being "no such thing as a free lunch," it's worth pointing out that that idea is a basic principle used in things like pricing assets. In that context, it's called the "no-arbitrage principle." Arbitrage basically means "risk-free profit." The idea behind the no-arbitrage principle is that if there were an opportunity for risk-free profit, somebody would have already taken advantage of it and driven prices to the point where the opportunity no longer existed. In today's world of high-frequency trading, the no-arbitrage principle actually works pretty well. A classic example of arbitrage would be a stock that's sold in two different exchanges. If the price is lower in one and you can buy it quickly enough, then sell it quickly enough in the other exchange, where it's worth more, then you can make a profit with basically no risk. The thing is that if anyone notices and tries to do that, it drives up the price (buy increasing demand) in the exchange where the price was lower and brings the price down (by increasing supply) in the exchange where the price was higher. The prices are thus driven rapidly toward equilibrium. And in fact a crucial step in the derivation of the Black-Scholes equation is an application of the no-arbitrage principle, equating a risk-free return to the rate paid by government bonds.
Additionally, when heads had to roll at the banks for, y'know, breaking the world economy, you know the execs wanted to protect themselves and their own and put all the blame on their quantitative analysts, but they couldn't because the quants had done a good job of covering their own asses by sending e-mails to their superiors warning that there were all kinds of risks not being controlled or managed, and that there were even new risks introduced by modeling that could lead to problems. So the execs were fully aware that they were trading in assets tha
The important thing is not to get a project manager, but to give the project manager the power to actually do things like manage priorities. I worked at a software start-up in 1999. At the first company meeting after I got there, I tried to get an idea of what were the highest priorities among the tasks facing the company at that point, not necessarily in order, but just putting a priority from "1" to "3" (I had originally suggested 1 to 5) on each item. Out of 20-odd items, one got a "2" and the rest were "1." I tried to explain that I understood that everything was important and urgent, but that in order to get anywhere, we'd have to give some things higher priorities than others. I explained that "3" didn't mean "unimportant," just "less of a priority than a 1 or a 2." They all looked at me like I had 9 heads and outvoted me 3-1 to keep the utterly useless priority list as it was.
Look at my /. username, Mr. Reading Comprehension.
For free literature, most classics are already in the public domain. You can get many of the greatest works of literature in English free (and without violating even today's ridiculous copyright laws) at places like Project Gutenberg. Some things, like the later Barsoom novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, are in the public domain in Australia, but not in the USA. In any case, there are a few Project Gutenberg sites. I got the first few Barsoom novels from the Project Gutenberg site for the USA (linked above), and the rest of them from the one for Australia.
"Windows Vista was really bad, but Windows 7 is great!"
A woman I knew who worked at Microsoft in Brazil was told that her husband couldn't be covered on her health insurance, even though male employees' wives were all covered by their husbands' Microsoft-provided policies. When she started to say that was unfair, she was told to back off. I guess sexism at Microsoft is a worldwide thing.
It's not hard to develop apps for Android. And do you know what happens to apps that affect performance, crash or whatever? They get downvoted into oblivion and ignored.
The Skype app, which mangles performance, and the Facebook app, which voraciously wolfs down battery charge, haven't been downvoted into oblivion and ignored yet. How long should we expect to wait for this to happen?
I wonder, if they made one of Christopher Walken, could you tell the difference?
Yes.
I was looking forward to the Atari Flashback Portable that sadly never materialized. I really don't have a need or desire for a high-powered latest-generation portable console, but retro portable gaming I would pay for.
What about the Pandora?
What can you do with it?
Pandora's app site
Emulators
Loads more apps, including emulators and games
FWIW, I'm going to give Sony a chance to sell me a PSP2/NGP/whatever, but I'm already looking at alternatives. I don't really need all the gyros and accelerometers and multitouch surfaces and GPS and whatnot, and I think those things will jack up the price a lot. What I really want is a portable system on which I can watch videos (the PSP was good enough at that for me) and play sports games (especially soccer) and shooters. And I want two thumbsticks for the shooters so the controls can be consistent. I hate switching between PSP shooters, because each one has its own control scheme with its own ways of getting around the lack of a second thumbstick, and I get confused.
but every adult I have met who smoked pot back in the 60's and 70's are not what I call intelligent or well off anymore.
Like Willie Nelson, for instance?
Or Jack Herer?
Or Willie Nelson?
Could it be that the people you know simply weren't that bright or motivated to begin with?
How 'bout Richard Feynman? He talks about some of his experiences smoking pot in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, and he was pretty well off and considered quite intelligent right up until his death.
Click here to see one of my favorites
[If you can't tell the difference] between the Lincoln memorial and the FDR memorial you have no business going to Washington DC.
It sounds like the PP is saying that anyone who doesn't know enough about DC shouldn't go to DC and learn about it. That strikes me as weird.
However if you decide to go anyway, they do have still pre-printed maps checked for accuracy that sell at any gas station or book store.
Bingo. Yet another hissy-fit over nothing. Nobody is going to miss the Beck anti-Democrat rally. The two sites are less than half a mile apart. Glenn Beck fans and other people in DC speak the same language, so they could, y'know, ask for directions. Additionally, as the PP noted, it's not hard to find maps.
However, "teh Googlz iz in on teh conspiracy" is a convenient excuse if the turnout doesn't meet their expectations.
It doesn't help that Glenn Beck has his fans terrified, convinced that Obama and Democrats are enemies of the US and that Obama is just like Hitler. Conspiracy theories like "Google Maps doesn't want us to find the Lincoln Memorial and save America because Obama and Pelosi are controlling Google" are easier to believe when somebody on a channel called FOX News has been trying to convince them for years that Obama is destroying the USA and is about to put the white man down because he's an angry black radical, impose Sharia law because he's a Muslim, send people to Gulags and turn the USA into the Soviet Union because he's just like Stalin, or maybe he'll just turn into a genocidal expansionist dictator because he's just like Hitler.
On Tuesday, I checked maps.google.com.br to find the names of the streets that meet at the corner where I wanted a friend to meet me near the Berrini station of the São Paulo metropolitan train. Google Maps showed the station out in the middle of the Pinheiros River. I wonder if Obama and Pelosi were trying to drown me or poison me with the pollution in the Pinheiros...
Some friends and I (and lots of other 6th through 12th grade students) played that on terminals connected to our school's computer in 1980. I think the computer was a PDP-8/some letter, but I don't remember which letter. It was kept in the administrative building, while the student terminal room, which had a noisy teletype-style terminal, a newer and quieter terminal whose display was dot matrix printing, and three or four monocrome CRT terminals, was in a building with classrooms and the school library.
Trek was so popular at one point that I remember all the terminals surrounded by kids, and even the teletype-ish terminal pounding out the quadrant and sector maps. My friends and I figured out a few different ways of aiming photon torpedoes perfectly. One obvious one was a calculator with trig functions (and inverse trig functions), but at least we understood the trigonometry well enough to figure out how to use the calculator to help us kill Klingons. But I also remember three of us with protractors, rulers, and graph paper, getting the angle without using a calculator. The cool thing was when other kids saw us picking off the Klingons easily (and us celebrating each perfect shot), watched us for a while to understand how we did it, and then went off and did it themselves on other terminals. Some didn't care much about math like my friends and I did, but they cared enough about destroying Klingon ships represented by the letter K that they were willing to learn the math to do it.
Unpaid internships are also an easy wayo make sure that only "the right people" (i.e., people from wealthy families) have a chance to get into certain fields. In some fields, it's hard to get hired without experience, and the only way to get the initial experience is through an internship. But there are a lot of people who can't afford to work without any income, so if only unpaid internships are available, only those lucky enough to have been born into wealth can break into those fields.
I use Ubuntu and Firefox on the 'puter I use to access my company's Bank of Brazil account. And I usually just start by going to bb.com.br or jumping straight to the login page for a company account. A couple of months ago, I started having some difficulties logging in. I called Bank of Brazil's internet banking support, and they asked me to make sure I had the latest "version" of Java installed. I thought that couldn't be the problem, but I did check and it turned out I was an update behind (i.e., I was using version 6, update 17, and the latest was version 6, update 18). I didn't think that could cause the problem, but I figured that in order to continue with B of B's internet banking support, I'd have to be able to say that yes, I had the latest "version" of Java installed. Once I got Ubuntu to install the latest Java update, I tried logging in, and the problem was solved. Live and learn.
As for ATMs, I can tell you that at least some, and possibly all, of the ATMs at the Vila Leopoldina branch of the Bank of Brazil in São Paulo are Linux-based. I actually noticed that around Christmas of 2009. But that's not really relevant to my earlier post. I was talking about desktops.
By the way, I've had to deal with the following banks in Brazil: BBVA, Bradesco, Itaú, Santander, Unibanco (now part of Itaú, but it wasn't then), and Bank of Brazil. People like to speak ill of government employees, but the best service I've gotten, and not by a little, has been at B of B. Oddly enough, my experience with Bradesco was relatively positive too. Itaú is ridiculously expensive and has piss-poor service, but Unibanco must be the worst bank in the world. They make everything harder than every other bank does, but without adding any additional value. I could deal with, for example, additional security measures that made things a slightly bigger pain in the ass, but Unibanco just gives you the pain in the ass without any benefits. And even though I explicitly asked three times on the day I was opening the accounts at Unibanco and was told that the internet banking was compatible with non-Windows operating systems (important since my life has been completely Microsoft-free for a couple of years now), I didn't find out that Unibanco's internet banking only worked with "Ruimdows" until after I had wasted a lot of time and effort setting up the accounts and then trying to get the internet banking to work (which, by the way, even under ideal conditions and using Windows, would require at least three visits to the branch, which I find ridiculous). With all the passwords Unibanco gave me to memorize, the only way I could possibly keep everything straight was to have the passwords written down somewhere. I found creative ways to hide my passwords in my cell phone's address book, but all the stupid passwords not only didn't add security, they made it impossible to use the bank without writing down passwords somewhere, which is terrible.
Why is the Linux migration project in Munich so prominent, as mentioned in TFS? I know of much larger migrations, both in terms of the number of computers and the geographic area covered. The Brazilian government has been migrating to Free Software in mass. The Bank of Brazil, for example, has over 100,000 computers running Firefox and BrOffice. As of last June, the estimate was right at 100,000, with 65,000 of those machines running Linux and 35,000 running other operating systems. The Bank of Brazil has branches and offices all over Brazil, which is a very large country. The mass migration happened in 2006, before the migration really began in Munich. The number of machines involved (counting the Linux boxes only) is about 5 times as large as the number of machines to be involved in Munich, and instead of being located in a single city, they are spread out all over a country that's larger than the US would be if it didn't have Alaska, but smaller than the US with Alaska (i.e., larger in area than the "lower 48" plus DC plus Hawaii). In the year 2006 alone, the Bank of Brazil estimated that it saved R$20MM by using Free Software.
FWIW, I've also seen Linux desktops at the ITI (Brazil's IT Institute). Even totally non-nerdy ITI employees seemed perfectly at home on Linux desktops when I was there as long ago as early-to-mid 2005. The Bank of Brazil branch where my company has its account has all Linux desktops. The managers who take care of my account think it's funny when I crane my neck to look at their monitors and geek out on the software their 'puters are running. They are total non-nerds and not only appear to be happy with the Linux desktops, but told me they are. It took them a minute to figure out what I was asking - they didn't think of using Linux desktops as anything all that unusual.
A cop here in São Paulo told me a story about when his car was stolen. He got a call from the police (a different kind of police, but I don't want to go into the differences) saying his car had been recovered. He got to the place where the car was being kept pretty quickly and did the right thing: he took pictures of it. Because it was the end of the day and the processing to release his car could only be done by people who had already left, he could only get it the next day.
When he went back the next day, the car had been stripped. The stereo and a bunch of accessories and decorative items (nice hubcaps, for example) had been removed. He got access to the chief (delegado) and showed him the photographs from the previous day. The chief made an announcement that he wanted everything restored to that car within an hour or heads would roll. The next time the car's owner saw the car, it was as it had been the previous day.
Great. Maybe now the dumbasses at NBC will take their stuff off Hulu, so I can watch it from outside the US, I always thought the US networks should make their shows available vie internet and sell targeted advertising embedded in the same video stream as the shows. Obviously ads for car dealerships in the US wouldn't be interesting to people in other countries, nor would those dealerships be all that interested in getting access to my eyes in a foreign country, but through the magic of teh intarwebz, the US TV networks could sell advertising to advertisers who might ONLY have interest in access to eyes in specific foreign countries. I figured that just like I see ads in Portuguese on web sites I visit in the US (when I allow ads, of course) from IP addresses here in Brazil, ABC could embed video ads from advertisers with somethng to sell in the Brazilian market. There could also be standard web ads.
I should make some snide remark here about how there's no great loss from not seeing NBC shows since I quit Heroes during the second season (I was horribly disappointed with the final ep of the first season, which felt like it was thrown together at the last minute when they suddenly realized they only had one ep to wrap up the season after building things up really nicely for the first 21 eps), Saturday Night Live went from a normal bad phase to unwatchably unfunny while Tina Fey was head writer (I still haven't decided if she is funny or not, largely because SNL blew diseased goats when she was head writer), and the sometimes-funny Conan O'Brien has been exiled to bring the almost-always-unfunny bloated chin back to The Tonight Show, but there appear to have actually been a couple of funny moments on SNL just this last week. Too bad I wouldn't be able to find out without downloading a pirated copy of the ep. And I 'm STILL pissed off that I can't see the only legit copy of the Hedley & Wyche Toothpaste ad from an early '90s ep of SNL because NBC has removed all free video (e.g., YouTube) copies and only allows it to be watched via Hulu.
Since Lost's penultimate season is only now being broadcast on TV in Brazil (I don't subscribe to cable or satellite TV) and the last season is about to start in the US, only to appear a year or so from now on broadcast TV here, I would like to watch the new episodes as they become available online. I'm sure there are people in many other countries in situations similar to mine, and with similar interest in the show. That looks to me like a great opportunity for ABC to make some money selling video ads and regular web ads to advertisers who might be interested in people in other markets who want to watch the final season of Lost before it shows up on their local TV stations. I watched the penultimate episode of the first season of Heroes on the web at my sister's house in the US the day before watching the final episode on TV there. I didn't mind the ads that were in the video with the episode content, because it was actually less trouble to watch via web with ads than it would have been to set up a filesharing program and download the episode without ads. Most of the ads I saw or heard (while doing other things in the room during the ads) weren't all that relevant to me, but then again, I was watching from a computer at an IP address in South Carolina, not Brazil. Now it occurs to me that there's another massive marketing opportunity: I would gladly fill out a form with my name and home address in exchange for being able to watch the eps free via web and without having to resort to piracy. That would allow ABC, for example, to know something about avid viewers of its programs all over the world, which could help a lot with selling ads to a much wider range of advertisers. NBC is too stupid to see this opportunity (or to keep Conan over Jay after Jay's show at 22:00 tanked). Is ABC?
I don't understand why so many flight related programs are named Icarus. Let's remember what happened in the myth of Icarus: He flew too close to the sun and so he died.
Yeah. Imagine what I thought when I got on a Varig plane for an international flight back in the '90s and saw that Varig's in-flight magazine was called Í caro.
Except, most "nerds" wouldn't be caught dead playing this game.
I have a friend who is a well-known cryptographer. He is a tenured professor at the best university in his home country (it's also the best-known university in his home country; the two aren't always the same). Some of his work has become part of important international standards. I have used applications built on his work, and depending on how nerdy you are and what kind of work you do, you might have used some too. His work has won awards and has been recognized by his peers at major academic conferences on cryptography. Whether or not you have heard of him, you have almost certainly heard of some of his collaborators in other countries, even if you aren't a cryptography nerd. If that's not enough "nerd cred" for ya, he is also a fluent speaker of five languages, can get by really well in a sixth, can imitate different accents in at least one of his non-native languages, and has some knowledge of two other real languages plus Klingon.
And because I was sick to death of seeing his FarmVille updates and my sister's Mafia Wars updates, I finally learned how to block updates from those two applications just today.
GP:
. Its something about they way she is flicking her left finger. I wonder what it is for?
PP:
I'm more curious as to what those mammaries are for.
Those are the robot's eyes. Scientists have found that men will make better eye contact with the robot that way, which facilitates reading their facial expressions.
This is not a new idea. See wikipedia on molecular gastronomy. Mhyrvold will probably try to patent it though.
Color me shocked that a Microsoftie is doing something unoriginal.
Now, if Microsoft-style food makes your stomach unstable, that's just because you can't expect the creator of the food to test it in every possible stomach, and I'm sure they'll fix it in one of the service packs.
And the fact that Myhrvold doesn't yet know about things like pasteurization, filtering, and qualification of suppliers, used to deal with physical, chemical, and biological threats in the food does not mean that any food-borne pathogens, poisons, hormones, rocks or glass shards are his fault. He wants to dominate the market, and making lots of food for lots of people (he's working on deals with schools so kids won't be able to eat any kind of food but Myhrvold Food) means that there will be more of it in which pathogens, dangerous chemicals, and solid debris can hide. That's not Myhrvold's fault, and you fanbois who insist on eating food whose ingredients have been properly qualified, inspected, and treated to remove possible threats, well, the only reason your food is not being attacked is because Myhrvold's food presents a much more high-profile target for biological, chemical, and physical threats, so the threats don't even bother showing up in other food.
Plus, Myhrvold paid a company a bunch of money and they did a study showing that if you ignore hospital bills, funeral expenses, cleaning bills to remove spewed vomit, violently ejected diarrhea, and squirted blood from clothes, personal belongings, homes, places of work, car interiors, stores, schools, etc., and the permanent damage done to the digestive systems of those who have eaten Myhrvold Food and survived, then despite the fact that Myhrvold food is cheaper than what you get at those fancy restaurants that obey the safety and inspection laws, and even cheaper in total overall cost than the food you buy inexpensively at grocery stores and farmers' markets.
The MPAA is arguing that if they could directly turn those plugs on and off, they could offer more goods to consumers.
While I usually just laught at pirates stupid reasonings to pirate content (stupid record labels, support the artists directly, blabla), this is even more fun.
"Do what we demand, or suffer."
This reminds me of the insurance companies. They promised car insurance premiums would go down if a Federal speed limit of 55 miles per hour were established. They promised car insurance premiums would go down if seatbelt laws were passed. They promised car insurance premiums would go down if strict "drunk" driving laws were passed. They promised car insurance premiums would go down if car manufacturers were required to put three-point seatbelts in cars. They promised car insurance premiums would go down if car manufacturers would make airbags standard equipment.
Anyone want to guess whether the insurance companies made good on their promises?
I've been living in São Paulo for over 9 years. I was without electrical power for a few hours last night.
The timeline on this is pretty entertaining. On the 7th, there were a bunch of stories saying the 2007 blackouts in Brazil were caused by crackers (the articles say "hackers"). On the 9th, there were strong denials all around, accompanied by stories saying that no, the 2007 blackouts were caused by "sooty insulators." On the 10th, Brazil suffered a blackout much worse than the ones in 2007. That looks to me like crackers saying "sooty insulators? We'll show you sooty insulators!"
By the way, power failures are normally abrupt, but the one last night was not. I usually go from lights to no lights almost instantaneously, but last night, the lights were flickering for a while. After a few minutes, I thought it was going to stabilize, because my compact fluorescents stayed on while my UPS beeped a lot to tell me it wasn't getting enough juice. The larger fluorescents in the kitchen couldn't start, but the compact fluorescents gave me some light in the living room.