Thanks! My own policy is that I don't post draft or submitted versions, but once something is finalized (camera-ready final copy as it's going to appear in the proceedings), I'll post the PDF online.
One plus side for those who care about such things is that it'll get into Google Scholar faster—GS is surprisingly good at picking these PDFs up in its crawls and figuring out how to index them.
Note: I am a co-author of the coming paper to appear in PADS 2013.
I clicked hoping to read the paper, but the actual paper doesn't seem to be posted, only the abstract. The ACM copyright policy explicitly allows authors to "Post the Accepted Version of the Work on... the Author's home page", so there is no legal barrier to the authors putting a PDF online. Doing so would of course increase readership of the paper, so ought to benefit everyone.
It's odd that Putin was quoted talking about 'European colleagues' when the Americans were responsible for cutting T-Platforms off.
I read him as chiding the Europeans for giving in to U.S. pressure rather than being willing to act independently, i.e. letting the U.S. Commerce Department's decision dissuade them from buying from T-Platforms, rather than making their own decision.
I'm a huge fan of MDPV. Not the white hydrochloride - it's inconceivable that anyone on the planet would willingly put that into their bodies -- I'm talking the freebase form. I think many of you that don't bother to freebase it yourself have at least tasted the freebase version when it was widely available as "tan mdpv". I think it's the finest drug evere conceived, not just for the indescribable hypersexuality, but also for the smooth euphoria and mild comedown.
Do you still stick to this opinion? Are you sure it's the finest drug ever conceived? If you're unwavering in that view, what would you rank as the second or third drugs in the chemical hall of fame?
From their whois record, ru4.com claims to be X Plus One, an "enterprise" data-analytics company with a lot of finance-sector clients. So it seems reasonably plausible to me that Chase is contracting with them.
I don't get why large companies don't bring these things at least under their own subdomains, though. Even if you're having something hosted by a third party, it's not hard to set up its DNS at foo.chase.com.
American craft beers are also quite influential in Scandinavia, among both beer drinkers and as an influence on the local brewing scene. Brooklyn Brewery is popular enough that they're opening a brewery in Stockholm to fill local demand without having to ship the beer.
So can I sell you some chicken with an EULA which covers me from liability in the event that the chicken actually contains high levels of Salmonella? No, I can't.
Even accounting for that, though, software providers get away with providing stuff that really is catastrophically buggy, without incurring liability, on the basis of some shrinkwrap EULAs that wouldn't fly in any other field.
I'm not sure what black-magic software companies and webservice providers incanted to manage to exempt themselves from traditional product-liability law. If you sell a widget and your design was shit in a way that causes monetary damages, traditionally you are liable. If you sell a widget and your design sucks so bad that it doesn't even work (even without causing real damages), then people are at least entitled to a refund. But software somehow avoids this: your design can be buggy as hell and somehow you are not liable for shipping a shit product that didn't fulfill its advertised purpose and may have actually actively harmed people.
This bill seems to just take one small step towards restoring some minimal degree of responsibility for your product.
The idea is in fact so old that it was used in pre-computer arcade games, from back in the days when there were electro-mechanical arcade cabinets with parts that get moved around by motors.
On the plus side, at least the patent is expired. Here is a patent from 1946, describing a rather bizarre rabbit hunting game. If you shoot the rabbit successfully, a colored light turns on to illuminate the rabbit's face in red, which the patent describes as the rabbit blushing (I guess rabbits are embarrassed at being shot). But if you miss the rabbit with your shot, then the rabbit turns around and shoots you, which the cabinet implements by delivering a mild electric shock.
From what I can find, the only providers that include unlimited SMS in their lowest-tier plans are those that have actually eliminated their traditional, sub-$50 basic plans entirely, leaving only the premium, everything-included plans.
Here's what a quick perusal of websites turns up, using a Texas zip code when it asks for one:
T-Mobile: The basic plan is $50/mo and includes unlimited messaging.
AT&T: The basic plan is $40/mo, but charges per-message. Unlimited messaging can be added on for $20/mo, so you get it for: $60/mo.
Sprint: The basic plan is $40/mo, but charges per-message. The cheapest plan that includes unlimited messaging is $70/mo.
Verizon: The cheapest plan they even offer is $80/mo! Yeah, it includes unlimited texts, but for more than any of the other three.
I don't think the stores actually want the business of the kinds of people who would raise a stink over not being able to pay for a $2 purchase with a credit card. If those kinds of customers are scared off, so much the better.
Is there any way for it to be otherwise? Afaict, the word "hipster" is applied pretty much tautologically to anyone who likes "retro" things. So it is in fact impossible to like pinball and not be seen as a hipster, unless perhaps you're old.
A certain set of Republican politicians are very opposed to the National Science Foundation, as far as I can tell for two reasons:
1. For some politicians (and grassroots conservatives), they oppose some of the actual research being done. For example, they do not want to fund global-warming research, do not want to fund studies of gun violence, and do not particularly want there to be social-science research into issues such as racism or economic inequality.
2. For other politicians, it's just a convenient source of material for people who want to pose as cutting government spending without having to propose serious cuts any of the programs that take up more significant parts of the budget, because those are either too popular and/or politically too well-connected. Instead they just try to make political hay out of finding a few programs in the single-digit millions which they can attack as "frivolous". So, for example, Tom Coburn compiles an annual list of NSF-funded research projects he considers frivolous. You know, frivolous stuff like robotics research.
Bertrand Russell used almost exactly that same thought experiment in a 1932 article, fwiw:
Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?
And when those who provide, create and actually work refuse to give those who are lazy and do nothing the fruits of their efforts what then?
You're suggesting that as we're able to produce an increasing proportion of humans' needs through mechanical rather than human labor, we'll run a risk that the robots will go on strike and refuse to keep providing us with the fruits of their labor?
The article is a survey of a number of different approaches to reconfigurable materials as applied to mobile devices, and proposes some criteria for how to quantify the "resolution" of the reconfigurability along a number of axes, like morphology and curvature and area and whatnot. I have not read it in enough depth to determine how useful it is as an analytical tool, but it's essentially proposing an analytical tool to use to understand this area and guide further developments.
can't access the site because it got slashdotted (and cloudflare dropped the ball)
Side note, but CloudFlare rarely helps much with Slashdotting. Most of the time what kills a site is generating dynamic HTML out of a database without sufficient caching, and CloudFlare by default doesn't do anything about that, because it has no idea when it's safe to cache dynamically generated pages. By default it just proxies media files, so it can help things if bandwidth was the bottleneck for a server being hammered, but bandwidth usually isn't the bottleneck.
If you generate static HTML pages (or pages that are static for a period of time), you can mark them cacheable in CloudFlare. But if you're doing that you probably won't go down anyway, because serving up static HTML is not server-intensive.
Yes, it's counting all levels of government added together (international comparisons typically do, because the internal structuring differs so much between countries).
If you add up all governments in the U.S. (federal, state, county, municipal), the numbers are: taxes equal 27% of GDP, and spending equals 39% of GDP. If you add up all the levels of government in Denmark, the numbers are: taxes equal 49% of GDP, and spending equals 52% of GDP. Source: The Heritage Foundation (a conservative U.S. think-tank)
Doing a bit of digging for the U.S. federal budget, it looks like it's a little over half the total in both categories. Total 2012 federal tax receipts were $2.5 trillion, and total federal expenditures were $3.5 trillion. Since GDP was $15 trillion, that equates to 17% of GDP in federal taxation, and 23% of GDP in federal spending.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks! My own policy is that I don't post draft or submitted versions, but once something is finalized (camera-ready final copy as it's going to appear in the proceedings), I'll post the PDF online.
One plus side for those who care about such things is that it'll get into Google Scholar faster—GS is surprisingly good at picking these PDFs up in its crawls and figuring out how to index them.
I clicked hoping to read the paper, but the actual paper doesn't seem to be posted, only the abstract. The ACM copyright policy explicitly allows authors to "Post the Accepted Version of the Work on ... the Author's home page", so there is no legal barrier to the authors putting a PDF online. Doing so would of course increase readership of the paper, so ought to benefit everyone.
The summary says:
I read him as chiding the Europeans for giving in to U.S. pressure rather than being willing to act independently, i.e. letting the U.S. Commerce Department's decision dissuade them from buying from T-Platforms, rather than making their own decision.
You've been quoted as partial to freebase MDPV:
Do you still stick to this opinion? Are you sure it's the finest drug ever conceived? If you're unwavering in that view, what would you rank as the second or third drugs in the chemical hall of fame?
From their whois record, ru4.com claims to be X Plus One, an "enterprise" data-analytics company with a lot of finance-sector clients. So it seems reasonably plausible to me that Chase is contracting with them.
I don't get why large companies don't bring these things at least under their own subdomains, though. Even if you're having something hosted by a third party, it's not hard to set up its DNS at foo.chase.com.
American craft beers are also quite influential in Scandinavia, among both beer drinkers and as an influence on the local brewing scene. Brooklyn Brewery is popular enough that they're opening a brewery in Stockholm to fill local demand without having to ship the beer.
So can I sell you some chicken with an EULA which covers me from liability in the event that the chicken actually contains high levels of Salmonella? No, I can't.
Even accounting for that, though, software providers get away with providing stuff that really is catastrophically buggy, without incurring liability, on the basis of some shrinkwrap EULAs that wouldn't fly in any other field.
"Why not leave it to the market to decide?" is one of those Poe's Law sort of questions.
I'm not sure what black-magic software companies and webservice providers incanted to manage to exempt themselves from traditional product-liability law. If you sell a widget and your design was shit in a way that causes monetary damages, traditionally you are liable. If you sell a widget and your design sucks so bad that it doesn't even work (even without causing real damages), then people are at least entitled to a refund. But software somehow avoids this: your design can be buggy as hell and somehow you are not liable for shipping a shit product that didn't fulfill its advertised purpose and may have actually actively harmed people.
This bill seems to just take one small step towards restoring some minimal degree of responsibility for your product.
The idea is in fact so old that it was used in pre-computer arcade games, from back in the days when there were electro-mechanical arcade cabinets with parts that get moved around by motors.
On the plus side, at least the patent is expired. Here is a patent from 1946, describing a rather bizarre rabbit hunting game. If you shoot the rabbit successfully, a colored light turns on to illuminate the rabbit's face in red, which the patent describes as the rabbit blushing (I guess rabbits are embarrassed at being shot). But if you miss the rabbit with your shot, then the rabbit turns around and shoots you, which the cabinet implements by delivering a mild electric shock.
From what I can find, the only providers that include unlimited SMS in their lowest-tier plans are those that have actually eliminated their traditional, sub-$50 basic plans entirely, leaving only the premium, everything-included plans.
Here's what a quick perusal of websites turns up, using a Texas zip code when it asks for one:
Released on May Day, eh? I see what you're up to, OpenBSD. That's a pretty red logo, too.
Canadians are one thing, but these are Albertans we're talking about.
I don't think the stores actually want the business of the kinds of people who would raise a stink over not being able to pay for a $2 purchase with a credit card. If those kinds of customers are scared off, so much the better.
I guess the 1960s really are back.
Is there any way for it to be otherwise? Afaict, the word "hipster" is applied pretty much tautologically to anyone who likes "retro" things. So it is in fact impossible to like pinball and not be seen as a hipster, unless perhaps you're old.
Kirby's Pinball Land, perhaps?
A certain set of Republican politicians are very opposed to the National Science Foundation, as far as I can tell for two reasons:
1. For some politicians (and grassroots conservatives), they oppose some of the actual research being done. For example, they do not want to fund global-warming research, do not want to fund studies of gun violence, and do not particularly want there to be social-science research into issues such as racism or economic inequality.
2. For other politicians, it's just a convenient source of material for people who want to pose as cutting government spending without having to propose serious cuts any of the programs that take up more significant parts of the budget, because those are either too popular and/or politically too well-connected. Instead they just try to make political hay out of finding a few programs in the single-digit millions which they can attack as "frivolous". So, for example, Tom Coburn compiles an annual list of NSF-funded research projects he considers frivolous. You know, frivolous stuff like robotics research.
Tampa was not aware of technology prior to 2013?
Bertrand Russell used almost exactly that same thought experiment in a 1932 article, fwiw:
You're suggesting that as we're able to produce an increasing proportion of humans' needs through mechanical rather than human labor, we'll run a risk that the robots will go on strike and refuse to keep providing us with the fruits of their labor?
The article is a survey of a number of different approaches to reconfigurable materials as applied to mobile devices, and proposes some criteria for how to quantify the "resolution" of the reconfigurability along a number of axes, like morphology and curvature and area and whatnot. I have not read it in enough depth to determine how useful it is as an analytical tool, but it's essentially proposing an analytical tool to use to understand this area and guide further developments.
Incidentally, if you're interested in such materials, you may also be interested in self-reconfiguring modular robots.
Side note, but CloudFlare rarely helps much with Slashdotting. Most of the time what kills a site is generating dynamic HTML out of a database without sufficient caching, and CloudFlare by default doesn't do anything about that, because it has no idea when it's safe to cache dynamically generated pages. By default it just proxies media files, so it can help things if bandwidth was the bottleneck for a server being hammered, but bandwidth usually isn't the bottleneck.
If you generate static HTML pages (or pages that are static for a period of time), you can mark them cacheable in CloudFlare. But if you're doing that you probably won't go down anyway, because serving up static HTML is not server-intensive.
Yes, it's counting all levels of government added together (international comparisons typically do, because the internal structuring differs so much between countries).
If you add up all governments in the U.S. (federal, state, county, municipal), the numbers are: taxes equal 27% of GDP, and spending equals 39% of GDP. If you add up all the levels of government in Denmark, the numbers are: taxes equal 49% of GDP, and spending equals 52% of GDP. Source: The Heritage Foundation (a conservative U.S. think-tank)
Doing a bit of digging for the U.S. federal budget, it looks like it's a little over half the total in both categories. Total 2012 federal tax receipts were $2.5 trillion, and total federal expenditures were $3.5 trillion. Since GDP was $15 trillion, that equates to 17% of GDP in federal taxation, and 23% of GDP in federal spending.