Well, wouldn't a large sample size (say, tens of thousands) help cancel out most of the individual preferences? At least then, your data would only be skewed by social/cultural preferences of your overall sample group, which may be good enough to get an idea of any underlying (instinctive?) standard of beauty.
Thanks for the quarterbuck link. I had no idea people were reporting on this stuff.
Therefore, be it resolved, that shareholders request that management institute policies to help protect freedom of access to the Internet which would include the following minimum standards:
1) Data that can identify individual users should not be hosted in Internet restricting countries, where political speech can be treated as a crime by the legal system.
2) The company will not engage in pro-active censorship.
3) The company will use all legal means to resist demands for censorship. The company will only comply with such demands if required to do so through legally binding procedures.
4) Users will be clearly informed when the company has acceded to legally binding government requests to filter or otherwise censor content that the user is trying to access.
5) Users should be informed about the company's data retention practices, and the ways in which their data is shared with third parties.
6) The company will document all cases where legally-binding censorship requests have been complied with, and that information will be publicly available.
Required Vote
Approval of the stockholder proposal requires the affirmative "FOR" vote of a majority of the votes cast on the proposal. Unless marked to the contrary, proxies received will be voted "AGAINST" the stockholder proposal.
Recommendation Our board of directors recommends a vote AGAINST the stockholder proposal.
Unless it's a typeo, or Google is simply trying to avoid having to move a mountain of red tape every time it does something, that does look a little fishy.
As far as I can tell, there's no reason to label this as "clandestine". It looks to me like GOOG is just doing what publicly held businesses do: make money and court the biggest customers they can.
The upshot to this is that this is one place where the Federal government at large actually provides something for the public good, even if it is a few steps removed from joe sixpack. Since the NSA has some of the most stringent security requirements outside of most casinos, they're likely to push Google to improve their products in ways the rest of us can't. Take Net BSD for example. Anyway, that's likely to trickle down to the rest of us in the form of a more robust line of Google appliances and more. Another possibility is that Google may also have to learn how to become more nimble as a company in order to meet tougher requirements for Government-contract volume, reliability and ease-of-handling-red-tape. Again, that can work out for everyone.
The downside is that throwing Google style power at large, parallelizable computing tasks, might send us rocketing down a rather slippery slope if it were used for less-than-legal *coughATTcough* purposes. Yea, we're all tempted to file that one under "-1 No Duh", but I think it bears mentioning all the same.
Interesting point. I've always felt that if more vendors made sure that the card conformed to some kind of standardized I/O interface, that the OS guys could write a generic driver in a pinch. I recall the good 'ol days of VESA and S3 cards, and always found that as long as a whitebox card had the right chips, it would work fine w/o disks.
I agree with your sentiment regarding their use of patents - maybe that's the problem. However, I disagree that it would cost them money since the truely patentable and valuable part of their product is in the hardware side. Furthermore, patents by their very nature are *disclosed* and documented innvoations, yet protected by law, somewhat akin to the GPL. So if the competition wants to make a competing design, they can, while tip-toeing around the patented bits; that's of no practical difference than if the source were out in the clear.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not one of those fascist 'everything should be FOSS' types; maybe you can help me understand your point a bit better. But I honestly feel that opening the drivers up shouldn't cost them anything but pride.
If women want men to read the signals properly, we need to know the rules and they need to be consistent.
(The following is entirely IMO, and backed purely upon several years of marriage and observation)
The problem is that in order for this to happen, society and women in general need to audit each other's behavior to the point where abberant, malign, or ambiguous behavior simply is't tolerated. Given what I do understand about how women work amongst each other, they're more likely to simply let one another screw up than help or intercede thanks to a very agresssive competitive instinct.
From what I've seen, it's actually worth a girl's time to let her peers fail at dating, then spend any effort ensuring that everyone has a fair shot. This is due to the fact that while it's easy for a woman to get a guy, it's considerably harder to find and *keep* one that's actually worth keeping. So there's a percieved scarcity that undercuts most efforts at cooperation, when it comes to dating and mating.
I feel like I'm playing by a constantly-changing set of rules (Calvinball, anyone?).
The biggest problem, as I see it, is that there are several rulebooks with conflicting rules at work: social, religious, sub-cultural and instinctive biases all come into play at varying degrees from person to person. The "feminism vs traditional social mores" is just the tip of the iceberg here - try dating a rebelling goth who was raised Catholic, or a born-again christian from a single-parent family. So you never know what someone's particular bias twoard sex, sexuality, dating, romance and commitment is going to be (kind of like DnD character sheets I guess) until you get to know them.
Well, consider the fact that without reliable drivers, it doesn't matter how good their chips are. Shipping a video card with bad drivers that are difficult to fix/upgrade/replace is as bad, if not worse, than shipping sub-standard hardware with good drivers.
I prefer to look at it this way: The good folks at NVIDIA obviously aren't doing a perfect job, so why can't they enlist some (free) help? With the proper specifications in hand*, anything is possible. So I dare to say "yes", a thousand geeks with free time to burn can certainly do better.
As for the OP's crack about opening the drivers themselves, NVIDIA needs a massive reality check: they're in the *hardware* business - the drivers just make their cards more marketable. And given that those drivers are known to be a major PITA on some environments (Linux and now Vista), it certainly isn't helping their position.
(* Yea, they probably want to guard this with an iron-clad NDA and know all your PII before you sign it. I've always found this to be sparse logic at best since we're just talking about stuff that can be reverse engineered for one, and two, all a developer needs is what bits to set and when; it's not like that crap is necessarily a company's bread-and-butter. )
My guess is that the labels are run/managed by people who are beholden to outside interests. This could be in the form of outright bribery and corruption to something a subtle as simply supporting long-time friends and partners in the business. Also, are any of the big five vertically integrated?
IMO, its probably nothing so conspiratorial. I belive that there's resistance to change just for fear of capsizing the whole mess; and perhaps it's not unwarranted. For example, it could be that labels hesitate alienating distributors or publishers, for fear of reprisal in the form of a strike. All any big label would have to do is say "iTunes works well, so we're cutting our total shipping by %50 next month" and then presto: they're stuck with 5 million copies of "Soulja Boy", molding away in a werehouse for months on end, because nobody will drive them anywhere. And then the shareholders come around and start asking questions...
I am not a particle physicist, nor do I possess anything other than an ameteur's grasp of how this stuff works.
One potential use for quantum entanglement is to use a whole slew of entangled photons that can be used to transmit binary information at an arbitrary bit-width. While transmitting via the quantum channel, you also transmit via a classical channel some minimal information to discern the clock and parity for decoding the quantum information at the other end.
The reciever continually records the information streaming out of the quantum entangled photons, and then buffers it for later, at such a time it can be decoded after the classical component has been recieved.
The result is practically interference free, EM bandwidth friendly (your classical channel is likely optical or radio), and reasonably secure thanks to the actual data moving via a quantum channel. This also plays well with the lightspeed barrier, relativity and the quantum nature of the medium in general.
For example, take a satellite taking *very* high resolution images of Mars while in Martian orbit. It would send these gigabyte-sized raw images via the quantum channel and transmit the parity/decode/clock info via radio. Back on earth, the quantum bit-buffer is just happily logging 1's and 0's round the clock, blithely unaware that it now has real data. Some time later, Mission Control finally "catches" the complete radio transmission, deduces when it was sent, and decodes portion of the quantum buffer for that timeframe. Presto. Seriously high-bandwith, high-latency, inter-planetary data transmission.
Just a guess: It was probably some kind of porous pummice stone or other kind of volcanic rock. Something like that would have a pore size small enough to handle the microbes that cause "intestinal discomfort" (aka Montezuma's revenge) and the like.
IIRC, you'd still need something like charcoal to take care of molecular/atomic contiminants like lead, chlorine, heavy metals, etc. That's why they're so popular here in the states since microbes are already purged thanks to chlorination of the water, so that's pretty much all that's left.
I'd be willing to bet that charcoal filters do a good job with all the stuff mentioned in TFA, but I'm not a scientist.
I think that's more of an exception than a solid example of what the GP was referring to.
Both sides were rolling out firmware based modems near the end of the "high speed" modem wars. In the end, a standard protocol was agreed upon (V.90 or just "V.Everything") and firware updates for the new standard was provided to everyone; so nobody but the very earliest adopters (no flash) had to replace their hardware. It was also resolved *very* fast - it took about a year after Flex was introduced, if I remember correctly.
Also 100% of that equipment could simply connect to your ISP of choice at 28.8kbps which, while not all that fast, is a rather nice failure mode for an "incompatible" piece of hardware. This is in sharp contrast to most hardware/format/protocol wars where any competing technologies are mutually incompatible with the competition's implementation, with option to run at reduced capacity.
IMO, a real consumer tech "war" is marked by the conflict ending with everone on the loosing side having to "upgrade" by buying a replacement for their purchased-too-soon piece of tech.
Brain abscesses have been found to occur in some cases of sinusitis. Therefore I'd like to a) take a sample and culture b) perform a CT and MRI c) do a lumbar puncture d) rule out influenza, parainfluenza and respiratory syncytial virus e) rule out mucormycosis f) rule out lymphomas and other nasal cavity tumors.
. It's not every day you get to do a live-fire exercise of your satellite-attacking technologies... Not to mention it's not every day you get a real live test of just how good your satellite's anti-missile technologies are! Either way somebody in the military wins:P
I was just thinking of that the other day. My guess is that your mileage-per-recharge will just plain suck in the winter months.
It's either that, or they start making EV's with a kerosene/gasoline/propane heater option.
Another thing I would like to know is how well these batteries function in freezing and sub-zero conditions, since chemical batteries have a reputation for performing poorly when cold. In such a case, you might need something like a battery pre-heater to get any decent performance out of it, which only makes the situation worse.
[BSD Nerd w/Retainer] Pshaw. That'sss only in the 1scht printing whisch wass horribly missprinted due to poor Schee-YMK alignment.
For the schubsequent printings, they re-did schome of the dialogue andch added an Apple logo to the back of Willow'sch laptop. SSchee was clearly meant to be an OS-Echsch fan, whisch by proschtky putsch her ssquarely in the B-sch-D camp. Not Linuschtksss. [/BSD Nerd w/Retainer]
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps it has to do with the large amount of fiber in their diet?
LOL. Someone mod parent "+1 Aye Carumba!"
Well, wouldn't a large sample size (say, tens of thousands) help cancel out most of the individual preferences? At least then, your data would only be skewed by social/cultural preferences of your overall sample group, which may be good enough to get an idea of any underlying (instinctive?) standard of beauty.
Unless it's a typeo, or Google is simply trying to avoid having to move a mountain of red tape every time it does something, that does look a little fishy.
I just looked at the calendar and let out a deep sigh. The entire internet is going to be unusable all week, isn't it?
As far as I can tell, there's no reason to label this as "clandestine". It looks to me like GOOG is just doing what publicly held businesses do: make money and court the biggest customers they can.
The upshot to this is that this is one place where the Federal government at large actually provides something for the public good, even if it is a few steps removed from joe sixpack. Since the NSA has some of the most stringent security requirements outside of most casinos, they're likely to push Google to improve their products in ways the rest of us can't. Take Net BSD for example. Anyway, that's likely to trickle down to the rest of us in the form of a more robust line of Google appliances and more. Another possibility is that Google may also have to learn how to become more nimble as a company in order to meet tougher requirements for Government-contract volume, reliability and ease-of-handling-red-tape. Again, that can work out for everyone.
The downside is that throwing Google style power at large, parallelizable computing tasks, might send us rocketing down a rather slippery slope if it were used for less-than-legal *coughATTcough* purposes. Yea, we're all tempted to file that one under "-1 No Duh", but I think it bears mentioning all the same.
Interesting point. I've always felt that if more vendors made sure that the card conformed to some kind of standardized I/O interface, that the OS guys could write a generic driver in a pinch. I recall the good 'ol days of VESA and S3 cards, and always found that as long as a whitebox card had the right chips, it would work fine w/o disks.
I agree with your sentiment regarding their use of patents - maybe that's the problem. However, I disagree that it would cost them money since the truely patentable and valuable part of their product is in the hardware side. Furthermore, patents by their very nature are *disclosed* and documented innvoations, yet protected by law, somewhat akin to the GPL. So if the competition wants to make a competing design, they can, while tip-toeing around the patented bits; that's of no practical difference than if the source were out in the clear.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not one of those fascist 'everything should be FOSS' types; maybe you can help me understand your point a bit better. But I honestly feel that opening the drivers up shouldn't cost them anything but pride.
(The following is entirely IMO, and backed purely upon several years of marriage and observation)
The problem is that in order for this to happen, society and women in general need to audit each other's behavior to the point where abberant, malign, or ambiguous behavior simply is't tolerated. Given what I do understand about how women work amongst each other, they're more likely to simply let one another screw up than help or intercede thanks to a very agresssive competitive instinct.
From what I've seen, it's actually worth a girl's time to let her peers fail at dating, then spend any effort ensuring that everyone has a fair shot. This is due to the fact that while it's easy for a woman to get a guy, it's considerably harder to find and *keep* one that's actually worth keeping. So there's a percieved scarcity that undercuts most efforts at cooperation, when it comes to dating and mating.
The biggest problem, as I see it, is that there are several rulebooks with conflicting rules at work: social, religious, sub-cultural and instinctive biases all come into play at varying degrees from person to person. The "feminism vs traditional social mores" is just the tip of the iceberg here - try dating a rebelling goth who was raised Catholic, or a born-again christian from a single-parent family. So you never know what someone's particular bias twoard sex, sexuality, dating, romance and commitment is going to be (kind of like DnD character sheets I guess) until you get to know them.
Well, consider the fact that without reliable drivers, it doesn't matter how good their chips are. Shipping a video card with bad drivers that are difficult to fix/upgrade/replace is as bad, if not worse, than shipping sub-standard hardware with good drivers.
I prefer to look at it this way: The good folks at NVIDIA obviously aren't doing a perfect job, so why can't they enlist some (free) help? With the proper specifications in hand*, anything is possible. So I dare to say "yes", a thousand geeks with free time to burn can certainly do better.
As for the OP's crack about opening the drivers themselves, NVIDIA needs a massive reality check: they're in the *hardware* business - the drivers just make their cards more marketable. And given that those drivers are known to be a major PITA on some environments (Linux and now Vista), it certainly isn't helping their position.
(* Yea, they probably want to guard this with an iron-clad NDA and know all your PII before you sign it. I've always found this to be sparse logic at best since we're just talking about stuff that can be reverse engineered for one, and two, all a developer needs is what bits to set and when; it's not like that crap is necessarily a company's bread-and-butter. )
</rant>
My guess is that the labels are run/managed by people who are beholden to outside interests. This could be in the form of outright bribery and corruption to something a subtle as simply supporting long-time friends and partners in the business. Also, are any of the big five vertically integrated?
IMO, its probably nothing so conspiratorial. I belive that there's resistance to change just for fear of capsizing the whole mess; and perhaps it's not unwarranted. For example, it could be that labels hesitate alienating distributors or publishers, for fear of reprisal in the form of a strike. All any big label would have to do is say "iTunes works well, so we're cutting our total shipping by %50 next month" and then presto: they're stuck with 5 million copies of "Soulja Boy", molding away in a werehouse for months on end, because nobody will drive them anywhere. And then the shareholders come around and start asking questions...
I am not a particle physicist, nor do I possess anything other than an ameteur's grasp of how this stuff works.
One potential use for quantum entanglement is to use a whole slew of entangled photons that can be used to transmit binary information at an arbitrary bit-width. While transmitting via the quantum channel, you also transmit via a classical channel some minimal information to discern the clock and parity for decoding the quantum information at the other end.
The reciever continually records the information streaming out of the quantum entangled photons, and then buffers it for later, at such a time it can be decoded after the classical component has been recieved.
The result is practically interference free, EM bandwidth friendly (your classical channel is likely optical or radio), and reasonably secure thanks to the actual data moving via a quantum channel. This also plays well with the lightspeed barrier, relativity and the quantum nature of the medium in general.
For example, take a satellite taking *very* high resolution images of Mars while in Martian orbit. It would send these gigabyte-sized raw images via the quantum channel and transmit the parity/decode/clock info via radio. Back on earth, the quantum bit-buffer is just happily logging 1's and 0's round the clock, blithely unaware that it now has real data. Some time later, Mission Control finally "catches" the complete radio transmission, deduces when it was sent, and decodes portion of the quantum buffer for that timeframe. Presto. Seriously high-bandwith, high-latency, inter-planetary data transmission.
Just a guess: It was probably some kind of porous pummice stone or other kind of volcanic rock. Something like that would have a pore size small enough to handle the microbes that cause "intestinal discomfort" (aka Montezuma's revenge) and the like.
IIRC, you'd still need something like charcoal to take care of molecular/atomic contiminants like lead, chlorine, heavy metals, etc. That's why they're so popular here in the states since microbes are already purged thanks to chlorination of the water, so that's pretty much all that's left.
I'd be willing to bet that charcoal filters do a good job with all the stuff mentioned in TFA, but I'm not a scientist.
Both sides were rolling out firmware based modems near the end of the "high speed" modem wars. In the end, a standard protocol was agreed upon (V.90 or just "V.Everything") and firware updates for the new standard was provided to everyone; so nobody but the very earliest adopters (no flash) had to replace their hardware. It was also resolved *very* fast - it took about a year after Flex was introduced, if I remember correctly.
Also 100% of that equipment could simply connect to your ISP of choice at 28.8kbps which, while not all that fast, is a rather nice failure mode for an "incompatible" piece of hardware. This is in sharp contrast to most hardware/format/protocol wars where any competing technologies are mutually incompatible with the competition's implementation, with option to run at reduced capacity.
IMO, a real consumer tech "war" is marked by the conflict ending with everone on the loosing side having to "upgrade" by buying a replacement for their purchased-too-soon piece of tech.
Makes sense to me. I was thinking the same thing.
I came here for the Alien/Aliens references. So far, I'm not disappointed.
I've always wanted to know the pollution concerns myself. Add to that:
- The cost of manufacture and disposal of SSL fixtures vs incandescent bulbs, at the scale of production for incandescent bulbs.
If we wind up with something that is more efficient in the socket, but three times as energy expensive cradle to grave, then watt's* the point?
(* so sorry)
"Make me a sandwich."
"What? Make it yourself."
"sudo Make me a sandwich."
"Okay."
http://xkcd.com/149/
FTFY.
Regretably, some students treat it like a large lavatory, especially after the beer part is factored in.
There's a time to think, and a time to act. And this, gentlemen, is no time to think.
Il ya un temps pour penser et un temps pour agir. Et ceci, Messieurs, n'est pas le temps de penser.
I was just thinking of that the other day. My guess is that your mileage-per-recharge will just plain suck in the winter months.
It's either that, or they start making EV's with a kerosene/gasoline/propane heater option.
Another thing I would like to know is how well these batteries function in freezing and sub-zero conditions, since chemical batteries have a reputation for performing poorly when cold. In such a case, you might need something like a battery pre-heater to get any decent performance out of it, which only makes the situation worse.
Granted, that's from the opinion of a commuter and occasional traveler - I'm not with Fire and Rescue or anything like that.
::raises hand::
::looks around::
::lowers hand slowly::
[BSD Nerd w/Retainer]
Pshaw. That'sss only in the 1scht printing whisch wass horribly missprinted due to poor Schee-YMK alignment.
For the schubsequent printings, they re-did schome of the dialogue andch added an Apple logo to the back of Willow'sch laptop. SSchee was clearly meant to be an OS-Echsch fan, whisch by proschtky putsch her ssquarely in the B-sch-D camp. Not Linuschtksss.
[/BSD Nerd w/Retainer]