Actually, Obama's lawyers told the Court that, firstly, it was not a tax but a valid use of the government's Commerce-Clause powers. Then they outlined two alternative arguments:
Alternative A: Even if the Court finds it was not within the scope of the Commerce Clause, the ACA is nonetheless Constitutional under the Necessary and Proper clause, because the insurance mandate is both necessary and proper to enacting Congress's reform scheme.
Alternative B: Even if the Court finds it is neither within the scope of the CC or the N&P clause, the ACA should nonetheless be upheld because it is functionally equivalent to a tax, and if treated as a tax, is within Congress's powers under the Tax Clause.
The Court rejected Obama's lawyers' primary and Alternative A arguments, but accepted Alternative B. This is fairly common in legal cases. You first say what you think is true, but then you go through several alternatives that argue that, even if the Court disagrees with you in some way, you should nonetheless win for several backup reasons.
It's actually been A/B tested, and continues to be used mainly because it converts the best. There were some experiments this year in rotating in more faces of other Wikipedians, to emphasize the breadth of contributors, but Wales's face still statistically converted best, so it was kept in heavy rotation.
Fwiw, Wales isn't "the head of Wikipedia" anymore either. He remains one of the 10 members of the Board of Trustees in a special member-for-life seat, but he no longer runs the organization day-to-day (the staff do that), and has no specific authority to make decisions, except via his vote on the Board.
A large number of Swiss immigrants are from the "local" Swiss ethnic groups, though, which limits their foreignness. The two largest Swiss immigrant groups are: 1) Italians who move to the Italian part of Switzerland, and 2) Germans/Austrians who move to the German part of Switzerland. Even the anti-immigrant Swiss parties tend not to care about them, because they already share a cultural/linguistic background.
I think some of it is getting the big picture / motivation as well. A lot of students don't have the background many Slashdotters have in documentaries, natural-science museums, even sci-fi, which can lay the big-picture groundwork, with which you can then dive right into equations and methods in the courses. When it comes to physics, for example, a large number of students probably first need to be brought up to "read some Carl Sagan" levels of understanding, which would put them in a lot better position to learn more quantitative aspects.
My guess: There wasn't enough meat to the blurb otherwise, so the editor posting it had to come up with something to flesh it out, and it's tough work to come up with something clever on the spot.:)
While restarting any nuclear reactors is currently quite unpopular in Japan nationally, the decision to restart this particular plant's two reactors was actually made with local input and approval. Local councils aren't normally required to approve such matters, but due to the current controversy, Japan's government de-facto made restart contingent on approval from the local government. After several months of safety studies and deliberation, the municipal council voted 11-1 in favor of restarting the reactors in mid-May, which gave the national government some cover to go ahead with it.
That's basically the recommendation in the report.
They propose basically two things:
1. Increasing the percentage of NIH money that funds permanent positions, versus PhD and postdoc stipends; and
2. Shift the funding of PhD students and postdocs away from PI-controlled project money. Instead, have more of the money allocated towards competitive fellowships that PhD students and postdocs can apply for, where they'll be paid directly from the NIH and not tied to a funded project.
I think the answer on #1 is actually more complex than this summary makes it sound. The notion of pure ethnic groups is a fiction, but you can trace some kinds of population lineages using genetic markers. That's in fact some of how we've recreated early human population movements; by estimating when in time certain markers diverged between Asian and European populations, for example, we can estimate when those populations migrated out of the Middle East / Africa area where their ancestors likely originated. The HapMap project maps some more recent geographical correlations.
Judging by the program for the meatspace event next week, it looks like no. Not even the abstract for the "Turing the Man" panel, which is probably the only one it'd really fit in, mentions his persecution by the British government. The description of what precisely the panel will discuss about his life is vague enough that it might be mentioned at the actual event, though.
One thing could potentially be quantified: what proportion of online spending is made from a mobile device? Of course, that doesn't account for brand advertising, where the goal is just to make your logo more familiar to people, as opposed to actually convert a sale. But it would be somewhere to start, by telling us whether, at least in conversion-focused advertising, mobile advertising is under- or over-performing relative to the amount of commerce that takes place on the platform.
I'm reading through the snippet patent's claims, and while it's not as broad as the server patent, it doesn't seem like an invention to me either. It's automatic summarization plus some ranking/distribution statistics. Automatic summarization is a really old research field, dating back to the early days of information theory. Why is applying it here novel and non-obvious to someone skilled in the art?
It started in the late 1990s as part of a project to make an Amiga-compatible and possibly Amiga-flavored operating system available on newer hardware, with some companies expressing an interest in putting out some kind of dedicated MorphOS-based box. Some overlap in ideas with the BeBox, which also hoped to target an audience that wanted something other than a PC or Mac, around the same time.
This retargeting towards people who want to repurpose their old PPC hardware seems like a bit of a last gasp.
Also, I should add, Gabe Newell is apparently on board as an enthusiastic backer. Gabe Newell has a net worth of over one billion dollars. If he thinks it's such a great idea, why not just fund the damn thing? $500k is pocket change to him.
I assume it's some kind of hype move, but it'd sit better with me if they built it first and then hyped, instead of hyping vaporware while trying to get people a lot poorer than themselves to fund their experiment.
There's been a bit of a transition in the use of Kickstarter. Initially the idea was to provide seed funding, to cover expenses for a project that someone wouldn't be able to do otherwise unless they got conventional funding (e.g. grants or angel investors). So, for example, $5k for supplies and a few months' rent to support an art project. Then there were perks just as thank-yous to supporters.
It seems to be slowly transitioning to a pre-order system where the perks are the point, though. Neal Stephenson is a multi-millionaire; he does not actually need this seed funding to pay his rent and expenses. If he wanted, he could self-fund the entire project. So why would he use Kickstarter? My guess is to get early buy-in from potential customers, to validate the idea's appeal, to build buzz, etc. Essentially a business-strategy use of the platform rather than a seed-funding use.
I agree with that view. While we're proposing fantasy budgets, instead of doubling NASA's budget from its current $18 billion to $36 billion, I think the promotion of science would be much better served (at a lower cost, even!) by doubling the National Science Foundation's budget from its current $7 billion to $14 billion.
Yeah, I agree with that. Google and Netflix are basically moving a commodity service in-house, which often makes sense once you're using enough of it. But others can continue to use the commodity service, as long as it continues to exist, which it looks like it will.
If anything, the basic way bandwidth is billed and peering agreements are arranged is a bigger problem for small players than the edge caches this story is trying to get us worried about. The first problem someone is going to have if they try to compete with YouTube is not CDN access, but the fact that they would have to pay for bandwidth, whereas in many cases Google doesn't. For example, I work at a university, and our university network has a peering agreement with Google: that means that all YouTube watching by students is free to Google. A YouTube-competitor startup would have to pay for transit.
As the article notes, from an internet-topology standpoint this isn't that new, dating back to Akamai-type CDNs starting in the 1990s. The idea is that you mirror your content inside several of the major edge networks, so e.g. Comcast users get served from the Comcast-local mirror. You then update the mirror whenever there's new content, but every single user doesn't have to re-fetch that video over the public internet to Comcast's network.
The main difference is that some of the large content providers are building out their own private CDNs, so Google is setting up its own edge-network mirrors instead of contracting out to Akamai. That's not a major technical change, but could have some important implications for competition.
One more crippling cybershell hit the already beleaguered cyberdefense community when CyberIDC confirmed that cyberwarfare rates have risen yet again, now up to more than 100 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Cybercraft survey which plainly states that cyberdefense has lost more cyberbattles, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Cyberdefense is collapsing in complete cyberchaos.
Hence why I think that the subset of BSD proponents who argue that the GPL is unnecessary, because many companies will give back just to be "good citizens" without legal requirements, are a bit too optimistic, in most cases.
While the lockpicking hobby might've scared the FBI just in itself, more problematic to them was that he had used it in a "stole the atom bomb secrets" prank. He really did break into the safe that had the atom bomb secrets! But he didn't leak them. But: not everyone was sure of that.
Here's the story from an interview (from p. 51 in this book):
Interviewer: Is it true that you broke the Los Alamos security code and opened a safe containing top-secret documents? Then left behind a note that said "Guess Who?"
Feynman: When I was at Los Alamos one of my hobbies was to try to open safes and locks, a sort of locksmith-type hobby. Practicing opening locks, I at one point opened the lock of the safe that contained all the secrets of the atom bomb, and the whole business behind them. There were nine filing cabinets containing all the documents at Los Alamos. I opened three of them to check if they all had the same combination. I left notes in them to tell the guy that he shouldn't have locks with all the combinations the same, and stuff like that. And that I'd taken the documents out. And there were certain jokes in my notes. I was standing in the office there playing with the safes in the full light of day. The guy who was running the office was a friend of mine. And he was very upset when he found the safes had been opened. They probably changed the combinations after that.
Fortunately, FBI agents apparently were more reasonable even during the Cold War than they are in the War on Terrorism, because he'd probably be in jail for that prank today.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Obama's lawyers told the Court that, firstly, it was not a tax but a valid use of the government's Commerce-Clause powers. Then they outlined two alternative arguments:
Alternative A: Even if the Court finds it was not within the scope of the Commerce Clause, the ACA is nonetheless Constitutional under the Necessary and Proper clause, because the insurance mandate is both necessary and proper to enacting Congress's reform scheme.
Alternative B: Even if the Court finds it is neither within the scope of the CC or the N&P clause, the ACA should nonetheless be upheld because it is functionally equivalent to a tax, and if treated as a tax, is within Congress's powers under the Tax Clause.
The Court rejected Obama's lawyers' primary and Alternative A arguments, but accepted Alternative B. This is fairly common in legal cases. You first say what you think is true, but then you go through several alternatives that argue that, even if the Court disagrees with you in some way, you should nonetheless win for several backup reasons.
It's actually been A/B tested, and continues to be used mainly because it converts the best. There were some experiments this year in rotating in more faces of other Wikipedians, to emphasize the breadth of contributors, but Wales's face still statistically converted best, so it was kept in heavy rotation.
Fwiw, Wales isn't "the head of Wikipedia" anymore either. He remains one of the 10 members of the Board of Trustees in a special member-for-life seat, but he no longer runs the organization day-to-day (the staff do that), and has no specific authority to make decisions, except via his vote on the Board.
I took a shop class in a U.S. public school in the 1990s, and we used saws and hammers. Have things really changed that much since the '90s?
A large number of Swiss immigrants are from the "local" Swiss ethnic groups, though, which limits their foreignness. The two largest Swiss immigrant groups are: 1) Italians who move to the Italian part of Switzerland, and 2) Germans/Austrians who move to the German part of Switzerland. Even the anti-immigrant Swiss parties tend not to care about them, because they already share a cultural/linguistic background.
I think some of it is getting the big picture / motivation as well. A lot of students don't have the background many Slashdotters have in documentaries, natural-science museums, even sci-fi, which can lay the big-picture groundwork, with which you can then dive right into equations and methods in the courses. When it comes to physics, for example, a large number of students probably first need to be brought up to "read some Carl Sagan" levels of understanding, which would put them in a lot better position to learn more quantitative aspects.
It precisely is building a schematic map of power grids...
My guess: There wasn't enough meat to the blurb otherwise, so the editor posting it had to come up with something to flesh it out, and it's tough work to come up with something clever on the spot. :)
Privacy advocates beware, as the problem is almost certainly worse than ever anticipated.
Wouldn't that require people to actually use Google Plus, in order for it to be a problem?
At 2 mW currently, with hopes of raising that to 30 mW, you won't be traveling very fast...
While restarting any nuclear reactors is currently quite unpopular in Japan nationally, the decision to restart this particular plant's two reactors was actually made with local input and approval. Local councils aren't normally required to approve such matters, but due to the current controversy, Japan's government de-facto made restart contingent on approval from the local government. After several months of safety studies and deliberation, the municipal council voted 11-1 in favor of restarting the reactors in mid-May, which gave the national government some cover to go ahead with it.
That's basically the recommendation in the report.
They propose basically two things:
1. Increasing the percentage of NIH money that funds permanent positions, versus PhD and postdoc stipends; and
2. Shift the funding of PhD students and postdocs away from PI-controlled project money. Instead, have more of the money allocated towards competitive fellowships that PhD students and postdocs can apply for, where they'll be paid directly from the NIH and not tied to a funded project.
1. How accurate are these tests?
and 2. How ethical is doing something like that?
I think the answer on #1 is actually more complex than this summary makes it sound. The notion of pure ethnic groups is a fiction, but you can trace some kinds of population lineages using genetic markers. That's in fact some of how we've recreated early human population movements; by estimating when in time certain markers diverged between Asian and European populations, for example, we can estimate when those populations migrated out of the Middle East / Africa area where their ancestors likely originated. The HapMap project maps some more recent geographical correlations.
Judging by the program for the meatspace event next week, it looks like no. Not even the abstract for the "Turing the Man" panel, which is probably the only one it'd really fit in, mentions his persecution by the British government. The description of what precisely the panel will discuss about his life is vague enough that it might be mentioned at the actual event, though.
One thing could potentially be quantified: what proportion of online spending is made from a mobile device? Of course, that doesn't account for brand advertising, where the goal is just to make your logo more familiar to people, as opposed to actually convert a sale. But it would be somewhere to start, by telling us whether, at least in conversion-focused advertising, mobile advertising is under- or over-performing relative to the amount of commerce that takes place on the platform.
I'm reading through the snippet patent's claims, and while it's not as broad as the server patent, it doesn't seem like an invention to me either. It's automatic summarization plus some ranking/distribution statistics. Automatic summarization is a really old research field, dating back to the early days of information theory. Why is applying it here novel and non-obvious to someone skilled in the art?
It started in the late 1990s as part of a project to make an Amiga-compatible and possibly Amiga-flavored operating system available on newer hardware, with some companies expressing an interest in putting out some kind of dedicated MorphOS-based box. Some overlap in ideas with the BeBox, which also hoped to target an audience that wanted something other than a PC or Mac, around the same time.
This retargeting towards people who want to repurpose their old PPC hardware seems like a bit of a last gasp.
Also, I should add, Gabe Newell is apparently on board as an enthusiastic backer. Gabe Newell has a net worth of over one billion dollars. If he thinks it's such a great idea, why not just fund the damn thing? $500k is pocket change to him.
I assume it's some kind of hype move, but it'd sit better with me if they built it first and then hyped, instead of hyping vaporware while trying to get people a lot poorer than themselves to fund their experiment.
There's been a bit of a transition in the use of Kickstarter. Initially the idea was to provide seed funding, to cover expenses for a project that someone wouldn't be able to do otherwise unless they got conventional funding (e.g. grants or angel investors). So, for example, $5k for supplies and a few months' rent to support an art project. Then there were perks just as thank-yous to supporters.
It seems to be slowly transitioning to a pre-order system where the perks are the point, though. Neal Stephenson is a multi-millionaire; he does not actually need this seed funding to pay his rent and expenses. If he wanted, he could self-fund the entire project. So why would he use Kickstarter? My guess is to get early buy-in from potential customers, to validate the idea's appeal, to build buzz, etc. Essentially a business-strategy use of the platform rather than a seed-funding use.
I agree with that view. While we're proposing fantasy budgets, instead of doubling NASA's budget from its current $18 billion to $36 billion, I think the promotion of science would be much better served (at a lower cost, even!) by doubling the National Science Foundation's budget from its current $7 billion to $14 billion.
Yeah, I agree with that. Google and Netflix are basically moving a commodity service in-house, which often makes sense once you're using enough of it. But others can continue to use the commodity service, as long as it continues to exist, which it looks like it will.
If anything, the basic way bandwidth is billed and peering agreements are arranged is a bigger problem for small players than the edge caches this story is trying to get us worried about. The first problem someone is going to have if they try to compete with YouTube is not CDN access, but the fact that they would have to pay for bandwidth, whereas in many cases Google doesn't. For example, I work at a university, and our university network has a peering agreement with Google: that means that all YouTube watching by students is free to Google. A YouTube-competitor startup would have to pay for transit.
As the article notes, from an internet-topology standpoint this isn't that new, dating back to Akamai-type CDNs starting in the 1990s. The idea is that you mirror your content inside several of the major edge networks, so e.g. Comcast users get served from the Comcast-local mirror. You then update the mirror whenever there's new content, but every single user doesn't have to re-fetch that video over the public internet to Comcast's network.
The main difference is that some of the large content providers are building out their own private CDNs, so Google is setting up its own edge-network mirrors instead of contracting out to Akamai. That's not a major technical change, but could have some important implications for competition.
One more crippling cybershell hit the already beleaguered cyberdefense community when CyberIDC confirmed that cyberwarfare rates have risen yet again, now up to more than 100 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Cybercraft survey which plainly states that cyberdefense has lost more cyberbattles, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Cyberdefense is collapsing in complete cyberchaos.
Hence why I think that the subset of BSD proponents who argue that the GPL is unnecessary, because many companies will give back just to be "good citizens" without legal requirements, are a bit too optimistic, in most cases.
While the lockpicking hobby might've scared the FBI just in itself, more problematic to them was that he had used it in a "stole the atom bomb secrets" prank. He really did break into the safe that had the atom bomb secrets! But he didn't leak them. But: not everyone was sure of that.
Here's the story from an interview (from p. 51 in this book):
Fortunately, FBI agents apparently were more reasonable even during the Cold War than they are in the War on Terrorism, because he'd probably be in jail for that prank today.