Whose website was it, anyway? That's the info I want to know...because the idiot who signed up for it is going to be seriously unhappy when the feds come a knocking.
I can't imagine that the DC tax code is that much less complicated than the Federal tax code. Besides, the point I was trying to make was that tax returns where one uses the standard deduction should be simple enough to code for. I'm not talking about itemized deductions, which I'll agree are complicated.
Am I the only person who feels that this entire argument should be moot? The IRS is perfectly capable of allowing consumers to file online tax returns. Several states, including DC (my home is in the district) allow online tax forms to be filled out. All are quite advanced, allowing deductions and the proper calculations to take mere seconds. Most are relatively error-free.
The IRS though, caving to groups like Intuit and full-service prepares like H&R Block, has taken the novel approach of allowing people to submit taxes online, but only if approved through a private company. Yes, there are a few folks who can use telefile, but for anyone making any decent wages, there's no free equivalent to telefile for federal forms. I'm don't itemize my deductions, yet even taking the standard deduction makes it "impossible" to use telefile.
This is one area that the government could step in and provide a useful service for free, just as the states have done so. There's no reason for them not to, except for frantic lobbying by certain interests.
I agree that it's not a blog. I just want to know how google "knows" it's not a blog. Would it simply search for pages that change at least once a day and contain links to other websites rather than original content? Would it look for field marked "comment" on each entry? Obviously, I'm interested in NOT being labelled a blog.
If it's purely comment based, then what about sites like TPM? It's clearly a blog. Or would the answer be somewhat voluntary, in which case it wouldn't actually work?
I work at a company that has a blog-like recap of political news of interest for our clients and friends. If google tries to separate all sites with blog-like content, won't this naturally reduce my rank without actually increasing the source of information? Or am I missing something? How is google going to search for blog-like sites?
I'm a little unclear as to who the target audience for this is. I can't remember any time I've sat down and thought "Damn, if only I had 300 more megabytes of space I could cram all my pr0n into ten cds instead of fifteen". Add in the firmware bit and you're targeting a non-existent audience.
Analysts say it's too early to know how the new chips will rate against each other, with testing not yet complete.
Yes, I know it's too early to know how the new chips will rate. Everyone should know this. It used to be that a PR blitz was timed for the launch of a product. Now it comes out well in advance. This, in turn, means that delays that could affect the delivery date have to be factored in. Next thing you know, we'll have helpful stories over a month in advance of launch with more helpful statements about how the chips haven't been tested yet.
Yes, if the chips have already been produced and are filtering into distributors, this point is moot. I just wish more was made when the products emerged and less when it was all pie-in-the-sky hyperbole.
What about all those games that came out a year or so ago with commercials exhorting kids to run around grocery stores ripping things off of shelves in an attempt to "power up" their videogame creatures? Those were cool...er...stupid.
Wasn't this what nano-technology promised us years ago? We would all have tons of nanites roaming through our bodies, cleaning up the arteries and destroying cancerous cells. So far though, little concrete has been developed.
I'll believe it when the applications actually arrive. And unlike nanites, these cells depend upon chemical reactions...I'm not sure I'd trust someone to inject tons of living cells into me the same way I'd trust them to inject tons of non-living machines into me.
DNA, maybe. DNA is fairly good at reproducing without errors. RNA, on the other hand, isn't that good with errors, but is much quicker. (Ask any virus.)
My thought is this: as soon as the process becomes complex, errors introduced into each cell could produce vastly different results. And the debug process would be tortuous. There'd be no guarantee that a single mutation couldn't bring down the whole system.
I wasn't saying the interface would solve the problem. I was saying that if I designed a cell to respond to an external stimulus with a certain protein production, I'd have a handy interface. Instead of building a cell to light up in the presence of a complex chemical compound, I could then simply have a cell send a protein to a circuit which could then send a signal to a led. Or, vice-versa, I could program a complex series of actions into a processor which would then interface with said S-2-C cell which would produce the proper proteins to achieve the desired effect.
The article certainly goes beyond the idea of having one cell act a certain way. They implied that multiple cells could be chained together like some sort of rube-goldberg contraption. It's the chaining together that seems inefficient to me, when you could use silicon for the complex stuff and an interface cell to make the conversion. Kind of like a digital-to-analog switch, only between silicon and carbon. You still need to hack the cells, but you don't need to create complex machines. That was all I was wondering.
Re:DNA computing and Cryptography
on
Digital DNA Circuits
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Even your body doesn't rely upon chemical reactions to accurately predict certain outcomes. Studies have shown that nerve fibers in your arm will often send a "the ball is coming" signal to your brain well in advance of the actual signal reaching your fingers. This sort of predicative function makes complex tasks like walking and talking much easier, but when it catches up to you (like when you fall on the bottom step of a flight of stairs because you forgot how many steps there were) you crash and burn.
The point is, that chemical reactions are very slow. If they were faster, your brain (and your neurons in your arm) wouldn't have to guess. Because they're so slow they'd be very poor at brute force attacks, regardless of the sheer number of cells.
Okay, this may seem short-sighted, but if silicon circuits are so much faster, why not simply design silicon-to-carbon interfaces rather than try to redesign the wheel? Unless there's some level of functionality that's not applicable on the silicon side, I don't see why the results of a process couldn't be approximated. In the article, for instance:
It's far easier to describe the schematics of these circuits than to build them for operation inside a cell. For instance, to hook up one gate to the next, the amount of protein produced by the first gate must be the right amount to activate the next gate. And at every step, the output protein must be either very high or very low, to avoid false positives or negatives. It's also necessary to tweak many parameters, such as the strength with which the various proteins and the messenger RNA bind to different parts of the DNA sequence.
If the end result is accomplished simply by having the right protein the right place at the right time, why not build the circuit in silicon and simply train the cell to produce the appropriate protein based on the result of a calculation? Perhaps my ignorance is becoming too glaring...
To play devil's advocate: when I'm doing my IT stuff in my office, I'm busy all the time. I take only a short lunch break, and often work late. I don't take smoking breaks, water cooler breaks, or stand around and gossip about the show on tv the night before. Why? Because there's too much to be done. It would be nice if, for just one day, I managed to finish all the things that needed to be done. IT is somewhat sisyphean in its nature, because things can always run smoother, be more fully automated.
That said, I can't stand all the people who spend their days talking about their families, taking two hour long lunch breaks, taking a smoking break for a half hour and who appear to only put in one hour of genuine work a day. I feel guilty for spending five minutes every few hours checking out/. you know? So I think there's a healthy medium between IT workaholism and HR slackerdom.
"We go to liberate not to conquer. We will not fly our flags in their country," he said.
Interestingly enough, the Iraqis heard this statement before from the British when they took over Iraq from the Ottomans. Some Iraqis were amused at the similarity. I agree with the sentiment...I just hope we follow through.
2 points:
1) Here'a a good link to info on the Al-Samoud missile system. (Which Iraq has never concealed.)
2) I heard that Iraq is planning to use small engine planes to deploy chemical weapons because they have no missile systems capable of deployment. Is this a rumor or true? Any ideas?
ABC News just launched a live 24 hour newsfeed service in conjunction with Real, so if you pay a few bucks and have a fat connection to the internet, you can watch the war as it unfolds on your computer. Now if only CNN would follow suit...I'd sign up for it.
Actually, I see this as the beginning of the end for gamers, like me, who used to be fairly swift at both running around in FPS games while launching verbal taunts with the keyboard simultaneously. Nothing felt sweeter than to blow someone to pieces, send them a notice saying you did it, and keep strafing simultaneously.
With voice communications, there's no additional bonus for multi-tasking. Any idiot can curse when they die...only the swift can pun with the best using a keyboard and a mouse. And as an added bonus, swearing up a blue storm on the keyboard happens much more rarely.
What I'd really like to see would be a voice-transcription add-on so that you could give your teams commands and see them appear, as text, on the screen, rather than hear them live. That'd would be sweet.
But isn't ISDN, like DSL, simply run over a few copper wiring pairs? You just need to have the right equipment at both ends to make and break down the connection. I could be wrong about this...I'm not an expert on the phone system, SS7, etc.
I used to work at the USDA and they always had tons of videophone connections to places all over the country, most of them small offices. I'd assume the military has similar capabilities on their carriers. And if there aren't hard lines to Northern Iraq and satellite connections to ships, how are these reporters connecting at all? Tightband microwaves? Bluetooth? (JK!)
My question is this: why are all the reporters who are reporting "via videophone" burdened with such bad reception? A decent ISDN connection should be able to have fairly smooth video and audio, yet the CNN reporter on the USS Lincoln and the CNN reporter in Northern Iraq both had super-grainy video and sketchy audio. Don't these reporters have access to a satellite uplink? And if not, why can't they get enough bandwidth over a decent ISDN connection?
Already, there are some glitches. Satellite traffic jams have been a frequent frustration. The other day it took Sanders almost two hours to get a high-speed connection to send his report. "Every crew from every network is often trying to get on the same bird at the same time," he said.
This is the modern equivalent of the old 1940s movies where twenty reporters would see a man shot, then all rush out to the same three telephone booths and all try to pile into the same one, closing the door on each other in the process while they were screaming "Operator, get me the Times!"
Slashdot Mirror
Then again, /. just did a piece about minitel's 20-year anniversary. And it pales in comparison to the internet.
Whose website was it, anyway? That's the info I want to know...because the idiot who signed up for it is going to be seriously unhappy when the feds come a knocking.
I can't imagine that the DC tax code is that much less complicated than the Federal tax code. Besides, the point I was trying to make was that tax returns where one uses the standard deduction should be simple enough to code for. I'm not talking about itemized deductions, which I'll agree are complicated.
Am I the only person who feels that this entire argument should be moot? The IRS is perfectly capable of allowing consumers to file online tax returns. Several states, including DC (my home is in the district) allow online tax forms to be filled out. All are quite advanced, allowing deductions and the proper calculations to take mere seconds. Most are relatively error-free.
The IRS though, caving to groups like Intuit and full-service prepares like H&R Block, has taken the novel approach of allowing people to submit taxes online, but only if approved through a private company. Yes, there are a few folks who can use telefile, but for anyone making any decent wages, there's no free equivalent to telefile for federal forms. I'm don't itemize my deductions, yet even taking the standard deduction makes it "impossible" to use telefile.
This is one area that the government could step in and provide a useful service for free, just as the states have done so. There's no reason for them not to, except for frantic lobbying by certain interests.
So all custom blogs wouldn't be affected then...hmm...nice. That would work for me.
I agree that it's not a blog. I just want to know how google "knows" it's not a blog. Would it simply search for pages that change at least once a day and contain links to other websites rather than original content? Would it look for field marked "comment" on each entry? Obviously, I'm interested in NOT being labelled a blog.
If it's purely comment based, then what about sites like TPM? It's clearly a blog. Or would the answer be somewhat voluntary, in which case it wouldn't actually work?
I work at a company that has a blog-like recap of political news of interest for our clients and friends. If google tries to separate all sites with blog-like content, won't this naturally reduce my rank without actually increasing the source of information? Or am I missing something? How is google going to search for blog-like sites?
Right. So the target audience is people who are backing up/copying their dvd collection. This can't be a huge group...right?
I'm a little unclear as to who the target audience for this is. I can't remember any time I've sat down and thought "Damn, if only I had 300 more megabytes of space I could cram all my pr0n into ten cds instead of fifteen". Add in the firmware bit and you're targeting a non-existent audience.
Analysts say it's too early to know how the new chips will rate against each other, with testing not yet complete.
Yes, I know it's too early to know how the new chips will rate. Everyone should know this. It used to be that a PR blitz was timed for the launch of a product. Now it comes out well in advance. This, in turn, means that delays that could affect the delivery date have to be factored in. Next thing you know, we'll have helpful stories over a month in advance of launch with more helpful statements about how the chips haven't been tested yet.
Yes, if the chips have already been produced and are filtering into distributors, this point is moot. I just wish more was made when the products emerged and less when it was all pie-in-the-sky hyperbole.
Actually, the number is right here.
What about all those games that came out a year or so ago with commercials exhorting kids to run around grocery stores ripping things off of shelves in an attempt to "power up" their videogame creatures? Those were cool...er...stupid.
Wasn't this what nano-technology promised us years ago? We would all have tons of nanites roaming through our bodies, cleaning up the arteries and destroying cancerous cells. So far though, little concrete has been developed.
I'll believe it when the applications actually arrive. And unlike nanites, these cells depend upon chemical reactions...I'm not sure I'd trust someone to inject tons of living cells into me the same way I'd trust them to inject tons of non-living machines into me.
DNA, maybe. DNA is fairly good at reproducing without errors. RNA, on the other hand, isn't that good with errors, but is much quicker. (Ask any virus.)
My thought is this: as soon as the process becomes complex, errors introduced into each cell could produce vastly different results. And the debug process would be tortuous. There'd be no guarantee that a single mutation couldn't bring down the whole system.
I wasn't saying the interface would solve the problem. I was saying that if I designed a cell to respond to an external stimulus with a certain protein production, I'd have a handy interface. Instead of building a cell to light up in the presence of a complex chemical compound, I could then simply have a cell send a protein to a circuit which could then send a signal to a led. Or, vice-versa, I could program a complex series of actions into a processor which would then interface with said S-2-C cell which would produce the proper proteins to achieve the desired effect.
The article certainly goes beyond the idea of having one cell act a certain way. They implied that multiple cells could be chained together like some sort of rube-goldberg contraption. It's the chaining together that seems inefficient to me, when you could use silicon for the complex stuff and an interface cell to make the conversion. Kind of like a digital-to-analog switch, only between silicon and carbon. You still need to hack the cells, but you don't need to create complex machines. That was all I was wondering.
Even your body doesn't rely upon chemical reactions to accurately predict certain outcomes. Studies have shown that nerve fibers in your arm will often send a "the ball is coming" signal to your brain well in advance of the actual signal reaching your fingers. This sort of predicative function makes complex tasks like walking and talking much easier, but when it catches up to you (like when you fall on the bottom step of a flight of stairs because you forgot how many steps there were) you crash and burn.
The point is, that chemical reactions are very slow. If they were faster, your brain (and your neurons in your arm) wouldn't have to guess. Because they're so slow they'd be very poor at brute force attacks, regardless of the sheer number of cells.
So, yes, you're dreaming.
Okay, this may seem short-sighted, but if silicon circuits are so much faster, why not simply design silicon-to-carbon interfaces rather than try to redesign the wheel? Unless there's some level of functionality that's not applicable on the silicon side, I don't see why the results of a process couldn't be approximated. In the article, for instance:
It's far easier to describe the schematics of these circuits than to build them for operation inside a cell. For instance, to hook up one gate to the next, the amount of protein produced by the first gate must be the right amount to activate the next gate. And at every step, the output protein must be either very high or very low, to avoid false positives or negatives. It's also necessary to tweak many parameters, such as the strength with which the various proteins and the messenger RNA bind to different parts of the DNA sequence.
If the end result is accomplished simply by having the right protein the right place at the right time, why not build the circuit in silicon and simply train the cell to produce the appropriate protein based on the result of a calculation? Perhaps my ignorance is becoming too glaring...
To play devil's advocate: when I'm doing my IT stuff in my office, I'm busy all the time. I take only a short lunch break, and often work late. I don't take smoking breaks, water cooler breaks, or stand around and gossip about the show on tv the night before. Why? Because there's too much to be done. It would be nice if, for just one day, I managed to finish all the things that needed to be done. IT is somewhat sisyphean in its nature, because things can always run smoother, be more fully automated.
That said, I can't stand all the people who spend their days talking about their families, taking two hour long lunch breaks, taking a smoking break for a half hour and who appear to only put in one hour of genuine work a day. I feel guilty for spending five minutes every few hours checking out /. you know? So I think there's a healthy medium between IT workaholism and HR slackerdom.
Interestingly enough, the Iraqis heard this statement before from the British when they took over Iraq from the Ottomans. Some Iraqis were amused at the similarity. I agree with the sentiment...I just hope we follow through.
2 points: 1) Here'a a good link to info on the Al-Samoud missile system. (Which Iraq has never concealed.) 2) I heard that Iraq is planning to use small engine planes to deploy chemical weapons because they have no missile systems capable of deployment. Is this a rumor or true? Any ideas?
ABC News just launched a live 24 hour newsfeed service in conjunction with Real, so if you pay a few bucks and have a fat connection to the internet, you can watch the war as it unfolds on your computer. Now if only CNN would follow suit...I'd sign up for it.
Actually, I see this as the beginning of the end for gamers, like me, who used to be fairly swift at both running around in FPS games while launching verbal taunts with the keyboard simultaneously. Nothing felt sweeter than to blow someone to pieces, send them a notice saying you did it, and keep strafing simultaneously.
With voice communications, there's no additional bonus for multi-tasking. Any idiot can curse when they die...only the swift can pun with the best using a keyboard and a mouse. And as an added bonus, swearing up a blue storm on the keyboard happens much more rarely.
What I'd really like to see would be a voice-transcription add-on so that you could give your teams commands and see them appear, as text, on the screen, rather than hear them live. That'd would be sweet.
But isn't ISDN, like DSL, simply run over a few copper wiring pairs? You just need to have the right equipment at both ends to make and break down the connection. I could be wrong about this...I'm not an expert on the phone system, SS7, etc.
I used to work at the USDA and they always had tons of videophone connections to places all over the country, most of them small offices. I'd assume the military has similar capabilities on their carriers. And if there aren't hard lines to Northern Iraq and satellite connections to ships, how are these reporters connecting at all? Tightband microwaves? Bluetooth? (JK!)
My question is this: why are all the reporters who are reporting "via videophone" burdened with such bad reception? A decent ISDN connection should be able to have fairly smooth video and audio, yet the CNN reporter on the USS Lincoln and the CNN reporter in Northern Iraq both had super-grainy video and sketchy audio. Don't these reporters have access to a satellite uplink? And if not, why can't they get enough bandwidth over a decent ISDN connection?
This is the modern equivalent of the old 1940s movies where twenty reporters would see a man shot, then all rush out to the same three telephone booths and all try to pile into the same one, closing the door on each other in the process while they were screaming "Operator, get me the Times!"