"Could it be that the Google Books team has had enough of destroying the library in order to save it?"
The Google Books team is not Google. It's a a group of people, some of whom built this non-destructive reader. It's quite likely these people, who probably love books, started by wondering if there was a way they could scan their content without damaging them physically, and decided to use their 20% time to figure it out.
As for scanning books, that is most definitely a Google-the-company supported project, which they've put a lot of company resources into, including going to bat in the courts to defend the project.
It's Adnix. And by the look of it, we might soon need Preachnix. It's all for a good cause though, giving your money to Hadden so he can build the second machine.
"as for my mobile devices I could simply blacklist IP addresses and domains at my own router and do everything this box claims to do already"
Now pull yourself out of the Slashdot groupthink and pretend you don't know the difference between a router and a modem (and don't care). This is a box you plug in and it gets rid of a lot of ads. No need to install stuff on every computer, no need to fiddle with black-thingies and I-pee addresses (these Internet people think of such such stupid names).
That gets complicated. If you're not serving the ads from your server you have to trust the people who run the website. All the fancy click counting will go away, which the advertisers will hate. And if the advertisers hate it, I'm for it.
Third party candidates are a fantasy in the US because everyone thinks they are. Every other major UK-inspired democracy in the world has viable third parties when they're required, and lots of times when they're not.
Third parties in the US poll at around 1%, get about 1% of the vote, and get LESS than 1% of the donations and members.
Science in reality isn't quite that simple. SUSY theories can be falsified (a big swath of them will be falsified when they increase the confidence on this observation). SUSY as an idea is much more difficult to falsify, just like the idea of a geocentric solar system is quite difficult to falsify. However, just like with geocentrism, when observations force you to resort to extremely complicated theories incorporating your idea, and other, very simple theories without your idea are available that also fit the data, your idea usually gets discarded.
SUSY is an extension to the standard model, not a replacement. Most new physics is an extension. Even string theory can be seen as sort of an extension, albeit one that (attempts) to add a lot of explanatory power as well.
The standard model needs to be extended - we know it's incomplete. SUSY would resolve some problems with the model and also introduce some good candidate particles for dark matter.
Don't doubt Einstein did a lot of pounding pegs. His theories didn't spring fully formed out of his head at breakfast one day. They were also inspired by experimental results that contradicted theory, or to fill holes in existing theories that were okay, but not quite complete. Just like modern particle physicists are trying to do.
Either you don't know what thoughtcrime is or you don't know what patents are.
You can do all the tinkering in your own home you want. If you want to build yourself a smartphone that looks identical to an iPhone in every way, go for it. You can even go use it out on the street, and tell everyone about it. What you can't do is make them for other people. Making things (and distributing them) is definitely not thoughtcrime.
It's suspicious that nobody has ever created ANY hardware open source project with anything like the success of Linux or any of the top tier open source projects (or the middle tier). And nobody has ever created a hardware open source project at all that covers something as ambitious as a smartphone.
If we had a bunch of successful open source hardware projects for all kinds of things and smartphones were a notable omission the patent theory might have some merit, but it looks much more like there are other barriers to open source hardware.
It involves electrons. Instruments traditionally don't. If you're going to get excited about the horrors of digital signal processing, go all the way and get excited about the horrors of electronic signal processing.
Ha, I go past there every day on my way to work. I always wondered why they don't tear it down. Now I know it's at least being put to better use than most of the other eyesores.
I've always thought it's ironic that electric instrument players get all excited about a crude way to add artificial distortion to the artificial sounds produced by their artificial instruments. If you really want "the analog experience" go get yourself a wooden acoustical instrument and get the reverb you want by playing in the appropriate room.
"If you exclude the present day and any other examples I feel are inconvenient to my argument, I am right." Your latest post added "idiot" to the end.
You sir are truly a magnificent example of the debater's art, as well as a master logician. Are you employed in a think-tank perhaps? Or maybe a southern US state's board of education?
The $1.4 trillion sounds like the figure for actually fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. The "war on terror" involves more than that. A lot is spent inside the US and there were some other little wars, police actions, raids, covert operations, etc.
It's called "voting with your wallet." There's only one power carrying wire going into your house, and it's owned and operated by one company. But that company can still offer you the choice of supporting renewable or more environmentally friendly sources. If they aren't balancing their energy purchases accordingly it's fraud and should be punished.
The situation is the same as buying a domestically made product. There's probably nothing really different other than the price, but you might do it to support the domestic economy or to not support child labour. If the shop keeper sold you those Nikes as "made in America" when they were actually made by eight year olds in Cambodia, he's committed fraud.
I "claimed" that the UK, Canada and India all have competitive third parties. They do. A third party doesn't necessarily ever make it into power, but they exert influence. Particularly with a coalition or minority government, the third party becomes disproportionately powerful. Also extremely important is the ability for third parties to form, or existing ones to gain power, in times of need: "the current clusterfuck", wars, times of geographical disagreement or when there are more than two prominent viewpoints on important issues.
Candidates will always play to areas where they can gain support. If a state/district/city/neighborhood is firmly on your side, you're not going to concentrate your campaigning there. Swing states are a media creation.
"has a tendency to produce an equilibrium of two parties with mediocre support."
People say this, but it isn't true. Of all the major representative legislatures in the world, only the US has devolved to a hardcore two-party system (and it wasn't even always that way in the US). Canada, the UK and India all have multiple competitive parties in their legislatures, including sub-national ones.
You're not correct. An X% (Bayesian) credibility interval means that the true value lies within that interval with X% probability. If you make a prediction based on the interval and give it a Y% probability of being true, it should end up being true Y% of the time. Frequentist confidence intervals have a slightly different pedantic interpretation but, when you're doing normally distributed stats they end up being the same thing as the credibility interval anyway (so it really is pedantic in that case).
If Silver makes a prediction and gives it an 80% probability, he should be wrong about 20% of the time, unless he's being overly conservative.
Realistically, 50 states is probably too few to actually reliably test his confidence intervals, particularly since most of them are very narrow and fairly far from the tie.
Slashdot Mirror
"Could it be that the Google Books team has had enough of destroying the library in order to save it?"
The Google Books team is not Google. It's a a group of people, some of whom built this non-destructive reader. It's quite likely these people, who probably love books, started by wondering if there was a way they could scan their content without damaging them physically, and decided to use their 20% time to figure it out.
As for scanning books, that is most definitely a Google-the-company supported project, which they've put a lot of company resources into, including going to bat in the courts to defend the project.
It's Adnix. And by the look of it, we might soon need Preachnix. It's all for a good cause though, giving your money to Hadden so he can build the second machine.
"as for my mobile devices I could simply blacklist IP addresses and domains at my own router and do everything this box claims to do already"
Now pull yourself out of the Slashdot groupthink and pretend you don't know the difference between a router and a modem (and don't care). This is a box you plug in and it gets rid of a lot of ads. No need to install stuff on every computer, no need to fiddle with black-thingies and I-pee addresses (these Internet people think of such such stupid names).
That gets complicated. If you're not serving the ads from your server you have to trust the people who run the website. All the fancy click counting will go away, which the advertisers will hate. And if the advertisers hate it, I'm for it.
The states that would be middle or even great powers on their own are all strangely the ones that are mostly not interested in separating.
Don't quite Duverger's Law. Even Duverger doesn't believe it.
Third party candidates are a fantasy in the US because everyone thinks they are. Every other major UK-inspired democracy in the world has viable third parties when they're required, and lots of times when they're not.
Third parties in the US poll at around 1%, get about 1% of the vote, and get LESS than 1% of the donations and members.
Yeah, you'd just have to worry about a hostile theocracy sharing major borders with you. Oh, and you'd probably depend on them for food.
Science in reality isn't quite that simple. SUSY theories can be falsified (a big swath of them will be falsified when they increase the confidence on this observation). SUSY as an idea is much more difficult to falsify, just like the idea of a geocentric solar system is quite difficult to falsify. However, just like with geocentrism, when observations force you to resort to extremely complicated theories incorporating your idea, and other, very simple theories without your idea are available that also fit the data, your idea usually gets discarded.
SUSY is an extension to the standard model, not a replacement. Most new physics is an extension. Even string theory can be seen as sort of an extension, albeit one that (attempts) to add a lot of explanatory power as well.
The standard model needs to be extended - we know it's incomplete. SUSY would resolve some problems with the model and also introduce some good candidate particles for dark matter.
Don't doubt Einstein did a lot of pounding pegs. His theories didn't spring fully formed out of his head at breakfast one day. They were also inspired by experimental results that contradicted theory, or to fill holes in existing theories that were okay, but not quite complete. Just like modern particle physicists are trying to do.
Almost certainly cleaner than the factory fresh ones too, unless they autoclave the things before packing them.
Either you don't know what thoughtcrime is or you don't know what patents are.
You can do all the tinkering in your own home you want. If you want to build yourself a smartphone that looks identical to an iPhone in every way, go for it. You can even go use it out on the street, and tell everyone about it. What you can't do is make them for other people. Making things (and distributing them) is definitely not thoughtcrime.
It's suspicious that nobody has ever created ANY hardware open source project with anything like the success of Linux or any of the top tier open source projects (or the middle tier). And nobody has ever created a hardware open source project at all that covers something as ambitious as a smartphone.
If we had a bunch of successful open source hardware projects for all kinds of things and smartphones were a notable omission the patent theory might have some merit, but it looks much more like there are other barriers to open source hardware.
It involves electrons. Instruments traditionally don't. If you're going to get excited about the horrors of digital signal processing, go all the way and get excited about the horrors of electronic signal processing.
Ha, I go past there every day on my way to work. I always wondered why they don't tear it down. Now I know it's at least being put to better use than most of the other eyesores.
I've always thought it's ironic that electric instrument players get all excited about a crude way to add artificial distortion to the artificial sounds produced by their artificial instruments. If you really want "the analog experience" go get yourself a wooden acoustical instrument and get the reverb you want by playing in the appropriate room.
Fine, let me summarize your argument:
"If you exclude the present day and any other examples I feel are inconvenient to my argument, I am right." Your latest post added "idiot" to the end.
You sir are truly a magnificent example of the debater's art, as well as a master logician. Are you employed in a think-tank perhaps? Or maybe a southern US state's board of education?
Unless everybody without AC dies, life is possible.
The $1.4 trillion sounds like the figure for actually fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. The "war on terror" involves more than that. A lot is spent inside the US and there were some other little wars, police actions, raids, covert operations, etc.
Yes, because nobody lived there before air conditioning was invented, or common.
Life there would be uncomfortable without air conditioning, but it would certainly be possible.
It's called "voting with your wallet." There's only one power carrying wire going into your house, and it's owned and operated by one company. But that company can still offer you the choice of supporting renewable or more environmentally friendly sources. If they aren't balancing their energy purchases accordingly it's fraud and should be punished.
The situation is the same as buying a domestically made product. There's probably nothing really different other than the price, but you might do it to support the domestic economy or to not support child labour. If the shop keeper sold you those Nikes as "made in America" when they were actually made by eight year olds in Cambodia, he's committed fraud.
The UK currently has a coalition government, doesn't it? Here's the Wikipedia diagram:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament_of_the_United_Kingdom
For comparison, here's Canada:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament_of_Canada.
The India page doesn't have a nice diagram, but there are a bajillion parties.
Now the US:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Congress.
I "claimed" that the UK, Canada and India all have competitive third parties. They do. A third party doesn't necessarily ever make it into power, but they exert influence. Particularly with a coalition or minority government, the third party becomes disproportionately powerful. Also extremely important is the ability for third parties to form, or existing ones to gain power, in times of need: "the current clusterfuck", wars, times of geographical disagreement or when there are more than two prominent viewpoints on important issues.
Candidates will always play to areas where they can gain support. If a state/district/city/neighborhood is firmly on your side, you're not going to concentrate your campaigning there. Swing states are a media creation.
"has a tendency to produce an equilibrium of two parties with mediocre support."
People say this, but it isn't true. Of all the major representative legislatures in the world, only the US has devolved to a hardcore two-party system (and it wasn't even always that way in the US). Canada, the UK and India all have multiple competitive parties in their legislatures, including sub-national ones.
You're not correct. An X% (Bayesian) credibility interval means that the true value lies within that interval with X% probability. If you make a prediction based on the interval and give it a Y% probability of being true, it should end up being true Y% of the time. Frequentist confidence intervals have a slightly different pedantic interpretation but, when you're doing normally distributed stats they end up being the same thing as the credibility interval anyway (so it really is pedantic in that case).
If Silver makes a prediction and gives it an 80% probability, he should be wrong about 20% of the time, unless he's being overly conservative.
Realistically, 50 states is probably too few to actually reliably test his confidence intervals, particularly since most of them are very narrow and fairly far from the tie.