Of course, but patching the hole and going after people who create malware that takes advantage of it is not an either/or choice: both are necessary, generally speaking. Google, in taking advantage of a browser exploit, is essentially stooping to the tactics used by malware authors, even though unlike them it has signed agreements and generated official privacy policies saying it'd do no such thing.
Although perhaps not for daily use, the technology could prove valuable in science experiments where chronological accuracy is paramount, Prof Flambaum said."
This isn't intended for "most people," but for very precise scientific experiments.
"American" is the standard English-language word for people from the USA. There's no danger of confusion there, as the USA is the only nation in the world with "America" in its name. Using "America" to refer to the USA is more specific than using "United States," even: Mexico's official name translates to English as "The United States of Mexico." This sort of assault on the English language is simply political correctness run amok.
Besides, even if you were able to artificially redefine "American" to refer to everyone from North and South America, that would be about as useful a term as "Afro-Eurasian" to refer to people from those continents. It would get used by some pedant once or twice a year, but be absolutely useless in real-world speech. There's simply no need for such a term. We already have "North American," "South American," and even "Central American" to refer to the various regions in question.
Agreed. My daily driver is a 2001 Mustang with 248,xxx miles, and I figure it's probably got half its useful life left. But reliability over the long-haul is more a matter of how well you maintain a vehicle than anything: short-term problems are more a matter of a poorly built vehicle to begin with. That's not to say that inherent design issues won't also effect long-term reliability, just that the signal-to-noise ratio is so high that it's hard to pick them out in a survey.
*Shrug* My daily driver is a 2001 Ford Mustang with 248,xxx miles on it... runs great and doesn't even consume oil at a noticeable rate (i.e. not enough in my 5-7,000 mile oil change intervals to be outside the normal range on the dipstick by the time I change it). If you maintain a modern car properly, it will last. If you don't, you'll get what you should expect. Other than a very few lemons on the market, most of the industry has remarkably similar quality metrics - even working from inside information of actual dealer repairs, etc.
However, if you are only basing reliability on one year or whatever you define as a new car period then you sir (and the author) are fools.
J.D. Power conducts multiple surveys: an Initial Quality survey, measuring problems people have with new cars (i.e. initial defects that manifest within the first few months), and a Dependability survey, which looks at problems with 3-year-old cars. There might be a longer-term reliability survey too, I can't recall. There's really no way to measure the long-term reliability of cars until they've actually been around for a while, though. They haven't yet developed a time machine to use for the Future Reliability survey to get answers today from people in 2015. Maybe the fellows making faster-than-light neutrinos at CERN can help them with that.
Lax attitude towards patents? SOFTWARE SHOULD NOT BE PATENTED.
There's a difference between what you or I may believe the law should be and what the law actually is, in practice. As it currently stands, the USPTO and the courts are interpreting the law in such a way as to allow and enforce patents on software. Even if this isn't a good, well-thought-out system and needs to be revised, it is still the law as it exists today. Google doesn't like the system and in some ways responds by just trying to pretend like it doesn't exist. Other companies, even if we don't like it, have the law on their side. So yes, I would say that Google has a lax attitude towards patents, and it's hurting Android OEMs. Whether that's a good thing or not is another issue, but it is the case.
Even setting aside Apple having been last-to-market with voice search, don't Apple and Microsoft already have patent cross-licensing agreements in place? I'm pretty sure there are a number of Microsoft patents they'd rely on every bit as much as Microsoft might rely on theirs. Android OEMs are an easy target due to Google's lack of indemnification and apparently lax attitude towards patent issues, but I suspect Microsoft would already be in the clear with licensing even if there were valid patent issues there.
Of course, but it will never be 100% effective. You can reduce the click-rate from 10% to 1% through training, but there's still that 1% that will be fooled and click it to see what it is.
Problem is, these attacks don't primarily rely on bad security for their point of entry, but on fooling users. You can have the most secure network in the world, but if a user clicks a malicious link that uses the latest zero-day exploit on some Adobe product, it doesn't matter. These aren't people finding holes in firewalls or ill-conceived or executed security plans; they're targeting pretty well-constructed, legit-looking attacks at specific individuals. You or I might be able to discern a malicious e-mail, even if it's really well put together, and something like 90% of other educated users can too, but if they get one or two people to click out of a few hundred, that's all it takes sometimes.
Yes, and check out his more detailed explanations from other interviews:
GATES: Well, the most exciting thing I learned when I was just getting into philanthropy was that, if you reduce childhood deaths, if you improve health in a society, that, surprisingly, population growth goes down. And that's because a parent needs to have some children survive into adulthood to take care of them when they're old.
And so, if they think having six children is what they need to do to have at least two survive, that's what they'll do. And amazingly, across the entire world, as health improves, then the population growth actually is reduced.
And there's a miracle intervention, which is vaccines. In 1960, over 20 million children died. In 2005, less than 10 million died. And that's despite much larger global population.
That is huge progress. And a lot of that is because these vaccinations are being given broadly, over half of that improvement. Another part is from economic development.
And so, even in the poorest countries, we should go in and give them a malaria vaccine, and give them vaccines for diarrheal diseases. And if a mother wants to limit her family size, give her the tools that let her have that possibility.
So, I think we owe it even to the poorest billion to give them a chance.
That's not to say I agree with his population growth bit, or even that his apparently somewhat paradoxical reasoning works out if you run the numbers, but it seems that his motivation to improve people's lives is good, whether or not a larger anti-population-growth rationale makes any sense.
He didn't say that vaccines reduce population. He said that the sociological effects of a more healthy and wealthy population include reduced population growth. Due to a variety of factors this is true. I don't necessarily agree that population growth is in itself a negative thing we should be working towards reducing, but the context in which he mentioned it was as a downstream consequence of a healthy population that has escaped widespread poverty, not as a direct effect of the vaccinations.
Not as fast as LTE, but certainly faster than 3G. Even AT&T's 3G data speeds are about twice what Sprint's are, and their HSPA+ "4G" speeds are about twice as fast as their own 3G speeds, though not as fast as their LTE speeds (which should be more like 10x their own 3G), so AT&T's HSPA+ "4G" network should have roughly 4x the throughput of Sprint's 3G network. Sprint's WiMAX "4G" speeds are roughly on par with AT&T's HSPA+ "4G" speeds, but again nowhere near LTE. I'm not discounting your anecdotal "feels the same" experience - sheer data speeds aren't always the only important factor in practice, and AT&T's network can suffer from high latency at times - but speed tests do show a real difference between the two. As far as just on AT&T, my girlfriend's Focus S (HSPA+ "4G") is noticeably quicker in side-by-side downloads than my first-gen Focus (3G), but I can still usually get to what I want faster, just by virtue of typing faster, using better search queries, etc.- so the difference doesn't amount to all that much in practice. It's not that it's not measurable, just that it's not all that important, since their 3G speeds are "fast enough" to keep up with a lot of people's actual usage.
Many of AT&T's current "4G" phone offerings are HSPA+, not LTE - that is, they're faster than its 3G network, which is itself already faster than Verizon's 3G network, but they're not capable of nearly the transfer speeds of LTE. On the up side, since it's a multiplexed "3G+" technology, with enhanced backhaul on their end, they've been able to roll it out quickly over most of their coverage area while they're still working on building out an LTE network. On the down side, it's not true LTE "4G" yet.
I had a Ford truck that would run on E85, but it said right in the owner's manual that the gas mileage was 15-20% poorer.
Ethanol is a net loss of energy. It takes more energy to produce a gallon than you get by burning it. Combine that with the fact that we could cover the entire country in corn and still not be independent of fossil fuels - it's a complete boondoggle.
Not quite. In order to get 1 unit of energy of ethanol fuel content, we have to supply about 80% of that in fossil fuels producing it. It's not a net loss, just a very small net gain. Not enough to make it economical on its own, but not negative either.
Octane rating is not a measure of octane content. It's a comparison of the autoignition (e.g. knock) resistance of a given fuel blend to a scale defined by the properties of pure iso-octane (100) and heptane (0). A gasoline with an octane rating of 97 has the same autoignition properties as a mix of 97% octane and 3% heptane. Ethanol's octane rating is at or over 100, and E85 typically has a R+M/2 octane rating of around 95, which is a little higher than retail premium gasolines, and much higher than standard 87-octane gasoline.
The high knock resistance of E85 actually enables engine designs that have higher compression ratios, more boost, etc. to improve efficiency (and power output) which can actually make up some of the reduced range in a vehicle if the engine is designed primarily with E85 in mind rather than standard gasoline. Still, with the fuel only having about 2/3 the energy content of gasoline per unit volume, it's a big gap to close.
Ethanol isn't primarily added because of its octane-boosting properties, however (though those are taken advantage of in formulating the base stock to blend with). It's added because the EPA mandates oxygenated fuels to reduce emissions of CO and other pollutants. Fuels can be oxygenated through the addition of either ethers or alcohols, MTBE being an example of the former, and ethanol an example of the latter. Most states have mandated that oxygenates be specifically made up of ethanol, due to the harmful health effects of MTBE, methanol, and other potential chemicals if they leach into ground water, as well as support from the powerful corn-farming lobby.
(I don't mean to imply that retail salespeople are all mindless fanboys, but that their enthusiasm for a particular product will naturally come through in their sales pitches)
I agree that the general public is not geeky, but if their purchasing were primarily based on having a slick graphical presentation and intuitive UI, the new Windows Phone should be winning hands-down. Most of the general public, I'd posit, is heavily influenced by Apple's slick marketing, and a large number buy whatever the salesman at the retail store pushes (which is largely based on sales incentives or his own fanboyism), or what their friends and family recommend.
Such a thing already exists: many journals (at least in my field) accept submissions for "technical notes" that aren't full-fledged papers, but merely describe a brief, interesting bit of data, etc. It's more a question of whether the researcher has any incentive to put the time into writing them up and submitting them than a problem of a lack of venues for us to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, but patching the hole and going after people who create malware that takes advantage of it is not an either/or choice: both are necessary, generally speaking. Google, in taking advantage of a browser exploit, is essentially stooping to the tactics used by malware authors, even though unlike them it has signed agreements and generated official privacy policies saying it'd do no such thing.
From TFS:
Although perhaps not for daily use, the technology could prove valuable in science experiments where chronological accuracy is paramount, Prof Flambaum said."
This isn't intended for "most people," but for very precise scientific experiments.
Guillotines effectively cure headaches.
"American" is the standard English-language word for people from the USA. There's no danger of confusion there, as the USA is the only nation in the world with "America" in its name. Using "America" to refer to the USA is more specific than using "United States," even: Mexico's official name translates to English as "The United States of Mexico." This sort of assault on the English language is simply political correctness run amok.
Besides, even if you were able to artificially redefine "American" to refer to everyone from North and South America, that would be about as useful a term as "Afro-Eurasian" to refer to people from those continents. It would get used by some pedant once or twice a year, but be absolutely useless in real-world speech. There's simply no need for such a term. We already have "North American," "South American," and even "Central American" to refer to the various regions in question.
Agreed. My daily driver is a 2001 Mustang with 248,xxx miles, and I figure it's probably got half its useful life left. But reliability over the long-haul is more a matter of how well you maintain a vehicle than anything: short-term problems are more a matter of a poorly built vehicle to begin with. That's not to say that inherent design issues won't also effect long-term reliability, just that the signal-to-noise ratio is so high that it's hard to pick them out in a survey.
*Shrug* My daily driver is a 2001 Ford Mustang with 248,xxx miles on it... runs great and doesn't even consume oil at a noticeable rate (i.e. not enough in my 5-7,000 mile oil change intervals to be outside the normal range on the dipstick by the time I change it). If you maintain a modern car properly, it will last. If you don't, you'll get what you should expect. Other than a very few lemons on the market, most of the industry has remarkably similar quality metrics - even working from inside information of actual dealer repairs, etc.
However, if you are only basing reliability on one year or whatever you define as a new car period then you sir (and the author) are fools.
J.D. Power conducts multiple surveys: an Initial Quality survey, measuring problems people have with new cars (i.e. initial defects that manifest within the first few months), and a Dependability survey, which looks at problems with 3-year-old cars. There might be a longer-term reliability survey too, I can't recall. There's really no way to measure the long-term reliability of cars until they've actually been around for a while, though. They haven't yet developed a time machine to use for the Future Reliability survey to get answers today from people in 2015. Maybe the fellows making faster-than-light neutrinos at CERN can help them with that.
Lax attitude towards patents? SOFTWARE SHOULD NOT BE PATENTED.
There's a difference between what you or I may believe the law should be and what the law actually is, in practice. As it currently stands, the USPTO and the courts are interpreting the law in such a way as to allow and enforce patents on software. Even if this isn't a good, well-thought-out system and needs to be revised, it is still the law as it exists today. Google doesn't like the system and in some ways responds by just trying to pretend like it doesn't exist. Other companies, even if we don't like it, have the law on their side. So yes, I would say that Google has a lax attitude towards patents, and it's hurting Android OEMs. Whether that's a good thing or not is another issue, but it is the case.
Even setting aside Apple having been last-to-market with voice search, don't Apple and Microsoft already have patent cross-licensing agreements in place? I'm pretty sure there are a number of Microsoft patents they'd rely on every bit as much as Microsoft might rely on theirs. Android OEMs are an easy target due to Google's lack of indemnification and apparently lax attitude towards patent issues, but I suspect Microsoft would already be in the clear with licensing even if there were valid patent issues there.
And without doing any of that spamming, I have 25 GB for free on SkyDrive...
Of course, but it will never be 100% effective. You can reduce the click-rate from 10% to 1% through training, but there's still that 1% that will be fooled and click it to see what it is.
Problem is, these attacks don't primarily rely on bad security for their point of entry, but on fooling users. You can have the most secure network in the world, but if a user clicks a malicious link that uses the latest zero-day exploit on some Adobe product, it doesn't matter. These aren't people finding holes in firewalls or ill-conceived or executed security plans; they're targeting pretty well-constructed, legit-looking attacks at specific individuals. You or I might be able to discern a malicious e-mail, even if it's really well put together, and something like 90% of other educated users can too, but if they get one or two people to click out of a few hundred, that's all it takes sometimes.
If the universe eventually collapses back into a singularity, there won't be a point to our civilization, either.
On the contrary: if the universe eventually collapses back into a singularity, our civilization will be reduced quite neatly to a single point.
Yes, and check out his more detailed explanations from other interviews:
GATES: Well, the most exciting thing I learned when I was just getting into philanthropy was that, if you reduce childhood deaths, if you improve health in a society, that, surprisingly, population growth goes down. And that's because a parent needs to have some children survive into adulthood to take care of them when they're old.
And so, if they think having six children is what they need to do to have at least two survive, that's what they'll do. And amazingly, across the entire world, as health improves, then the population growth actually is reduced.
And there's a miracle intervention, which is vaccines. In 1960, over 20 million children died. In 2005, less than 10 million died. And that's despite much larger global population.
That is huge progress. And a lot of that is because these vaccinations are being given broadly, over half of that improvement. Another part is from economic development.
And so, even in the poorest countries, we should go in and give them a malaria vaccine, and give them vaccines for diarrheal diseases. And if a mother wants to limit her family size, give her the tools that let her have that possibility.
So, I think we owe it even to the poorest billion to give them a chance.
Source
That's not to say I agree with his population growth bit, or even that his apparently somewhat paradoxical reasoning works out if you run the numbers, but it seems that his motivation to improve people's lives is good, whether or not a larger anti-population-growth rationale makes any sense.
He didn't say that vaccines reduce population. He said that the sociological effects of a more healthy and wealthy population include reduced population growth. Due to a variety of factors this is true. I don't necessarily agree that population growth is in itself a negative thing we should be working towards reducing, but the context in which he mentioned it was as a downstream consequence of a healthy population that has escaped widespread poverty, not as a direct effect of the vaccinations.
Not as fast as LTE, but certainly faster than 3G. Even AT&T's 3G data speeds are about twice what Sprint's are, and their HSPA+ "4G" speeds are about twice as fast as their own 3G speeds, though not as fast as their LTE speeds (which should be more like 10x their own 3G), so AT&T's HSPA+ "4G" network should have roughly 4x the throughput of Sprint's 3G network. Sprint's WiMAX "4G" speeds are roughly on par with AT&T's HSPA+ "4G" speeds, but again nowhere near LTE. I'm not discounting your anecdotal "feels the same" experience - sheer data speeds aren't always the only important factor in practice, and AT&T's network can suffer from high latency at times - but speed tests do show a real difference between the two. As far as just on AT&T, my girlfriend's Focus S (HSPA+ "4G") is noticeably quicker in side-by-side downloads than my first-gen Focus (3G), but I can still usually get to what I want faster, just by virtue of typing faster, using better search queries, etc.- so the difference doesn't amount to all that much in practice. It's not that it's not measurable, just that it's not all that important, since their 3G speeds are "fast enough" to keep up with a lot of people's actual usage.
3G Comparison
"4G" Comparison
Many of AT&T's current "4G" phone offerings are HSPA+, not LTE - that is, they're faster than its 3G network, which is itself already faster than Verizon's 3G network, but they're not capable of nearly the transfer speeds of LTE. On the up side, since it's a multiplexed "3G+" technology, with enhanced backhaul on their end, they've been able to roll it out quickly over most of their coverage area while they're still working on building out an LTE network. On the down side, it's not true LTE "4G" yet.
I had a Ford truck that would run on E85, but it said right in the owner's manual that the gas mileage was 15-20% poorer.
Ethanol is a net loss of energy. It takes more energy to produce a gallon than you get by burning it. Combine that with the fact that we could cover the entire country in corn and still not be independent of fossil fuels - it's a complete boondoggle.
Not quite. In order to get 1 unit of energy of ethanol fuel content, we have to supply about 80% of that in fossil fuels producing it. It's not a net loss, just a very small net gain. Not enough to make it economical on its own, but not negative either.
Octane rating is not a measure of octane content. It's a comparison of the autoignition (e.g. knock) resistance of a given fuel blend to a scale defined by the properties of pure iso-octane (100) and heptane (0). A gasoline with an octane rating of 97 has the same autoignition properties as a mix of 97% octane and 3% heptane. Ethanol's octane rating is at or over 100, and E85 typically has a R+M/2 octane rating of around 95, which is a little higher than retail premium gasolines, and much higher than standard 87-octane gasoline.
The high knock resistance of E85 actually enables engine designs that have higher compression ratios, more boost, etc. to improve efficiency (and power output) which can actually make up some of the reduced range in a vehicle if the engine is designed primarily with E85 in mind rather than standard gasoline. Still, with the fuel only having about 2/3 the energy content of gasoline per unit volume, it's a big gap to close.
Ethanol isn't primarily added because of its octane-boosting properties, however (though those are taken advantage of in formulating the base stock to blend with). It's added because the EPA mandates oxygenated fuels to reduce emissions of CO and other pollutants. Fuels can be oxygenated through the addition of either ethers or alcohols, MTBE being an example of the former, and ethanol an example of the latter. Most states have mandated that oxygenates be specifically made up of ethanol, due to the harmful health effects of MTBE, methanol, and other potential chemicals if they leach into ground water, as well as support from the powerful corn-farming lobby.
(I don't mean to imply that retail salespeople are all mindless fanboys, but that their enthusiasm for a particular product will naturally come through in their sales pitches)
I agree that the general public is not geeky, but if their purchasing were primarily based on having a slick graphical presentation and intuitive UI, the new Windows Phone should be winning hands-down. Most of the general public, I'd posit, is heavily influenced by Apple's slick marketing, and a large number buy whatever the salesman at the retail store pushes (which is largely based on sales incentives or his own fanboyism), or what their friends and family recommend.
Yes, of course, but he said:
In fact, all browsers that have a significant market share are paid by google.
IE certainly has significant market share, and isn't being financed by Google.
IE is paid for by Google? I mean I know Android vendors are paying Microsoft for patent licensing rights, but that's a stretch ...
Such a thing already exists: many journals (at least in my field) accept submissions for "technical notes" that aren't full-fledged papers, but merely describe a brief, interesting bit of data, etc. It's more a question of whether the researcher has any incentive to put the time into writing them up and submitting them than a problem of a lack of venues for us to do so.
It's only an Apple Tax (same as a Microsoft Tax) if you go that way.
Every time you buy into some proprietary technology you sell a little piece of your soul.
OK ... good luck building your own non-proprietary car, TV, computer hardware, etc.