I have still to work out what the iPhone's target market is.
People who like shiny gadgets. It's not going after the "Look at me, I work 100 hours a week and I'm so busy I need to screw with my blackberry while I drive!" crowd. It's targeted more at the hipster crowd, who wear their devices as emblems of cool rather than power.
I don't really need a blackberry or iPhone, because I don't have a ton of downtime where I need entertainment. I'm usually either home (where I have my laptop), work (where I have my desktop), or out doing something (where I don't need to play on the internet). Additionally, I'm murder on phones and would probably kill the iphone in 5 days. My current phone weighs half a pound and is waterproof, shockproof, and dustproof. That's all I need.
The only appeal I could see for the iPhone is if I took the train to work or something.
A good majority of websites also do that, and who knows what they are doing with the data?
Really? Web sites track my behavior and correlate it with my name, address, date of birth, and (last I checked in some states) my social security number?
I encourage you to think about the issue again a little more objectively, and do a little more research before dismissing such a straightforward analysis as a conspiracy theory.
I encourage you to actually FIND SOME DAMNED PROOF before firing off with the conspiracy theories.
Before we start playing the 'jump to conclusions' game, it's important to determine whether there are any demographic patterns that overlap. I wouldn't be surprised if the roll-out of the Diebold machines went first to wealthier districts, or possibly bigger cities, or whatever.
I have to say, this is really annoying. Thanks to the 2000 election, we're basically going to have to deal with allegations of election fraud from the loser of every close race. I initially thought it was just an anti-Republican thing, but clearly the Democrats are turning on each other now.
Yeah, asking questions may actually work, provided you adequately train and pay the security personel executing such interviews. The Israelis are very good at that and nothing happened in Tel Aviv for, literally, decades.
Don't get me wrong, if you put me in charge, the hiring standards for "Thousands Standing Around" will go up from simply a pulse to a functioning brain.
My last encounters with US airline or security personel (which admitedly was in 2002) was that some dumb bimbo, or some illetarate, minimum wage drone is going through some script with the verve and gusto of an average call center agent.
You're lucky. I always seem to get the guy with an agression problem and an inferiority complex who got rejected from the police academy and is using his TSA job as an ego trip. I wish that guy *would* stay on script!
As long as it has to be cheapcheapcheap the best security you can hope for are the new, snazzy combat uniforms of said highschool dropouts.
Couldn't agree more. Although I think if we're allowed to target real threats rather than searching randomly, and if we are allowed to pay for good personnel, I think we could decimate the number of staff needed and ultimately save money.
I'll take those odds. If over 90% of the terrorists attempting to attack the US are of Middle Eastern descent, but only 1% of the travelers are, then that means they're far, far overrepresented in the dirtbag category. You don't have to be a statistician to figure out that 75 year old American women deserve less attention than 25 year old men from Saudi Arabia.
Olive complexion? Beard? Going to hassle anyone who isn't blonde-haired and blue-eyed and might be stressed about flying?
Olive complexion? No. Middle East passport? Yes. Stressed about flying? No. If his stress level increases dramatically when I ask him questions about what's in his baggage? Yes.
Focus on that group and I expect they would just recruit a nice All-American type.
Except there's a whole lot fewer All-American type kids willing to strap on a bomb and ride it to Allah. Let alone grandmothers.
Combine profiling with voice stress tests as developed by the Israelis - which are reputedly very effective - and you'd do a lot better than with physical screening, which any traveler knows is a joke.
FAST has been losing money like crazy, and Microsoft completely bailed them out by over-paying for the buy out. The acquisition does not make any sense. A company that is incapable of profiting from its products normally indicates that the product is lacking.
That thinking is, like, soooooooo pre-1998. Next thing you'll be telling me is that a company with nothing but a sock puppet and a Super Bowl ad won't make money. Get with the 90s.
Assuming it costs them SOMETHING (even pennies) to register a domain with the central registry then I think this is an absolutely awesome idea. I'll run such a script if someone writes it. In fact maybe I'll write one myself, because screwing over NSI sounds like a much better way to spend my afternoon then doing anything productive;)
If you can't write that in under three lines in the scripting language of your choice, you officially lose your nerd card.;)
The Nitrogen family on the periodic table like to form 3 bonds with symmetry. Phosphorus is also in the same column, but it can form up to 5 bonds, and I think would be troublesome to use to form the crystal.
But from a symmetry perspective, they also have a lone electron pair which acts somewhat like a bonded atom when forming molecules. Thus, N and P tend to have bond angles that are close to tetrahedral if one imagined that the lone pair were part of the tetrahedron. A perfect tetrahedron has bond angles of 109.5; ammonia (NH3) has angles of 107, which is pretty close.
Boron or aluminum, on the other hand, can form three bonds more easily. Aluminum has a simple cubic crystal structure, while boron has an interesting icosohedral structure.
Sounds like you just described the PageRank TM algorithm in general. Remember, the "Page" in PageRank TM is for the founders name, not web pages. It is not the complexity of the math, but of the ability to solve equations on a large scale quickly over the distributed systems that makes the Google methods so powerful in solving these "simple" math problems.
He described a Markov model, of which PageRank is a variant.
One additional possible application is a driver that only updates changed pixels, for applications in which most of the screen doesn't change between paints.
No longer true, I believe because they got sick of answering the questions you pose in your post.;)
From http://www.microsoft.com/msft/FAQ/dividend.mspx: "Microsoft pays a quarterly dividend of $0.11 per share. Beginning in Fiscal Year 2005, Microsoft shifted from paying an annual dividend to a quarterly dividend."
So I think MS is probably a "stock for fools". If you buy a stock with the expectation of its price rising, you're gambling, not investing. That's not to say that gambling that Mars won't explode in the next two weeks isn't a good bet; some gambles are worthwhile.
As an aside, I think TMF has moved away from that sort of stance. Look at it this way - if I'm a long term invester (and it's better to be), then I don't need the dividend now. What would I do? Probably re-invest it. If I believe in the company enough to own their stock, I'd rather they didn't pay me the dividend, which I'd just re-invest, because (I think) if my investment isn't tax-protected that's actually better from a tax perspective. I don't want to be taxed on the dividends now while I'm working and presumably in a higher bracket, I'd rather be taxed on them later at the long-term cap gains rate.
A better idea would be to purchase new, cheap hardware that has been manufactured in this century. It still doesn't make sense for me that the taxpayer will pay $40 to help someone trick hardware that's not worth $10 into working.
That said, I have to agree that the thrill is largely gone. Even slashdot, the stories all seem to be something I've read before, and so do the comments. The late 90's, they were fantastic. But like the hippies after Woodstock, this is not the low point of a cycle -- it's over. Whatever "it" was, it will only return in a different form, and it will revolve around people other than us.
That's a fantastic analogy, Abe Simpson. Let's try not to be so annoyingly self-indulgent as the Baby Boomers. The internet revolution, which the older of us experienced as teenagers, college students, or even adults, was one of the biggest transformations in the exchange of information that we'll ever see. The kiddies talk about how different "2.0" will be, but these little bastards have never used a card catalog system to know how different the internet is that what we had before. Things are good now. We're spoiled.
So expecting the changes of 1995-2000 to keep going would be stupid. But that doesn't mean what we're getting now is actually bad. Device creators are focusing more on UIs now, so that the stuff we have is actually, you know, not a pain in the ass to use. That's good. Online services continue to get better, if not in a "blow your mind" kind of way. That's good.
Many times I've been thinking - why is it so important to break the latest console to work with your "insert-homebrew-here"? Is it because it's some hardware that most have been importing in to your homes? is it because of the "scene" or is it because you "can"?.
I don't know. Did Edmund Hillary climb Everest because he thought there was prime real estate up there?
The judge, when he asked them whether they were unauthorized, was asking them whether they were "illegal". Their "yes" response is chilling.
I missed that little nugget actually. And, upon doing some Googling, I apparently missed it when they said the same in the Jammie Thomas case too, which is bizarre.
I'm actually glad they're doing this. I hope they make a number of similar asinine statements and I hope the defendant gets lawyered up by the EFF or similar. I'm not in favor of piracy but, as you say, this is fair use.
There's also the publishing effect - namely, articles reporting the effect of cell phone radiation upon some biological system X is so popular now that many, many researchers are examining it. If 20 people perform a study, and 1 finds a result that's statistically significant at the 95% confidence interval, the 1 study gets published...even though 1 such study out of 20 would find that result from a random system.
In the end, as a scientist I'm extremely leery of statistical correlation with no mechanism. What is the specific mechanism by which the specified radiation has the claimed effect? This is especially so with the cell phone/cancer studies, which have the very difficult job of claiming that non-ionizing radiation causes cancer. Because I've seen such bad science, I'm very skeptical of the cell phone studies in general.
I agree with you about the difference between 'authorized' and 'legal'. I still think the point of the lawsuit - and the part that's dropped in all the many stories on this topic - is the 'making available' portion, not the 'unauthorized copying'.
Is this the same retread story that's been making the rounds for the last two weeks?
Short summary: Guy ripped CD and placed MP3 in P2P shared directory. RIAA sues him for "making available" an "unauthorized copy". Media ignores first part and reports that RIAA is suing the guy for simply ripping a CD (how would they know if that's all he did?). Frenzied and completely incorrect stories are reported and posted to slashdot, with hundreds of comments posted by people who can't (or choose not to) read and correctly comprehend the actual events.
Will somebody please put a bullet in this undead zombie beast of a story? It seems to be submitted every day and the summary is damn near always wrong.
the RIAA is going to list the item "he made UNAUTHORIZED copies of CDs into MP3s on his computer and unauthorized copies copyright infringement".
...*snip*...
Yes, copying a CD into MP3 format is indeed "unauthorized". However that does not make it copyright infringement.
I'll play grammar pedant for a moment only because it's actually germane. In the first statement, they claim he made an "unauthorized copy". Unless that's just a redundancy, it implies there are "authorized copies" (say, for personal fair use) and "unauthorized copies" (say, for sharing via P2P). If that's the case, via interpretation of their exact language, I don't have a problem with that. Of course, a jury will decide whether "making available" is an actual violation, but I think it's a leap to take the specific statement cited and interpret it to mean that the RIAA is claiming that any copy anywhere is illegal.
Of course, they've still said a lot of other dumb stuff, but examining the current case very narrowly, I think it's being misinterpreted. Note that most of the media coverage of the case glosses over the P2P part conveniently, at which point this case becomes Same Old Story.
Slashdot Mirror
I have still to work out what the iPhone's target market is.
People who like shiny gadgets. It's not going after the "Look at me, I work 100 hours a week and I'm so busy I need to screw with my blackberry while I drive!" crowd. It's targeted more at the hipster crowd, who wear their devices as emblems of cool rather than power.
I don't really need a blackberry or iPhone, because I don't have a ton of downtime where I need entertainment. I'm usually either home (where I have my laptop), work (where I have my desktop), or out doing something (where I don't need to play on the internet). Additionally, I'm murder on phones and would probably kill the iphone in 5 days. My current phone weighs half a pound and is waterproof, shockproof, and dustproof. That's all I need.
The only appeal I could see for the iPhone is if I took the train to work or something.
A good majority of websites also do that, and who knows what they are doing with the data?
Really? Web sites track my behavior and correlate it with my name, address, date of birth, and (last I checked in some states) my social security number?
Doesn't sound too kosher to me.
I encourage you to think about the issue again a little more objectively, and do a little more research before dismissing such a straightforward analysis as a conspiracy theory.
I encourage you to actually FIND SOME DAMNED PROOF before firing off with the conspiracy theories.
Before we start playing the 'jump to conclusions' game, it's important to determine whether there are any demographic patterns that overlap. I wouldn't be surprised if the roll-out of the Diebold machines went first to wealthier districts, or possibly bigger cities, or whatever.
I have to say, this is really annoying. Thanks to the 2000 election, we're basically going to have to deal with allegations of election fraud from the loser of every close race. I initially thought it was just an anti-Republican thing, but clearly the Democrats are turning on each other now.
Apart from the fact that I believe that a certain measure of randomness is still necessary, I totally agree.
No doubt, just like the IRS you have to throw the random audits in to throw the fear of God into everyone, and to obfuscate your threat rulesets.
It's really, really unlikely that this nice, 85 year old granny in a wheelchair, sucking on an oxygen bottle is an evil terrorist.
I see you've never met my mother in law. ;)
Yeah, asking questions may actually work, provided you adequately train and pay the security personel executing such interviews. The Israelis are very good at that and nothing happened in Tel Aviv for, literally, decades.
Don't get me wrong, if you put me in charge, the hiring standards for "Thousands Standing Around" will go up from simply a pulse to a functioning brain.
My last encounters with US airline or security personel (which admitedly was in 2002) was that some dumb bimbo, or some illetarate, minimum wage drone is going through some script with the verve and gusto of an average call center agent.
You're lucky. I always seem to get the guy with an agression problem and an inferiority complex who got rejected from the police academy and is using his TSA job as an ego trip. I wish that guy *would* stay on script!
As long as it has to be cheapcheapcheap the best security you can hope for are the new, snazzy combat uniforms of said highschool dropouts.
Couldn't agree more. Although I think if we're allowed to target real threats rather than searching randomly, and if we are allowed to pay for good personnel, I think we could decimate the number of staff needed and ultimately save money.
Only takes one.
I'll take those odds. If over 90% of the terrorists attempting to attack the US are of Middle Eastern descent, but only 1% of the travelers are, then that means they're far, far overrepresented in the dirtbag category. You don't have to be a statistician to figure out that 75 year old American women deserve less attention than 25 year old men from Saudi Arabia.
Olive complexion? Beard? Going to hassle anyone who isn't blonde-haired and blue-eyed and might be stressed about flying?
Olive complexion? No. Middle East passport? Yes. Stressed about flying? No. If his stress level increases dramatically when I ask him questions about what's in his baggage? Yes.
Focus on that group and I expect they would just recruit a nice All-American type.
Except there's a whole lot fewer All-American type kids willing to strap on a bomb and ride it to Allah. Let alone grandmothers.
Combine profiling with voice stress tests as developed by the Israelis - which are reputedly very effective - and you'd do a lot better than with physical screening, which any traveler knows is a joke.
Assuming we'd be allowed to do any of that.
FAST has been losing money like crazy, and Microsoft completely bailed them out by over-paying for the buy out. The acquisition does not make any sense. A company that is incapable of profiting from its products normally indicates that the product is lacking.
That thinking is, like, soooooooo pre-1998. Next thing you'll be telling me is that a company with nothing but a sock puppet and a Super Bowl ad won't make money. Get with the 90s.
In perl, you could do it in one line with a haiku poem.
Sure, but nobody could read it.
Assuming it costs them SOMETHING (even pennies) to register a domain with the central registry then I think this is an absolutely awesome idea. I'll run such a script if someone writes it. In fact maybe I'll write one myself, because screwing over NSI sounds like a much better way to spend my afternoon then doing anything productive ;)
If you can't write that in under three lines in the scripting language of your choice, you officially lose your nerd card. ;)
If I have to walk down to the retail store and then choose between Britney and Barry Manilow, I would rather save my hard-earned money.
If those are my choices, I'll opt for the home lobotomy kit.
The Nitrogen family on the periodic table like to form 3 bonds with symmetry. Phosphorus is also in the same column, but it can form up to 5 bonds, and I think would be troublesome to use to form the crystal.
But from a symmetry perspective, they also have a lone electron pair which acts somewhat like a bonded atom when forming molecules. Thus, N and P tend to have bond angles that are close to tetrahedral if one imagined that the lone pair were part of the tetrahedron. A perfect tetrahedron has bond angles of 109.5; ammonia (NH3) has angles of 107, which is pretty close.
Boron or aluminum, on the other hand, can form three bonds more easily. Aluminum has a simple cubic crystal structure, while boron has an interesting icosohedral structure.
Sounds like you just described the PageRank TM algorithm in general. Remember, the "Page" in PageRank TM is for the founders name, not web pages. It is not the complexity of the math, but of the ability to solve equations on a large scale quickly over the distributed systems that makes the Google methods so powerful in solving these "simple" math problems.
He described a Markov model, of which PageRank is a variant.
One additional possible application is a driver that only updates changed pixels, for applications in which most of the screen doesn't change between paints.
Microsoft, the last I heard, pays no dividends.
No longer true, I believe because they got sick of answering the questions you pose in your post. ;)
From http://www.microsoft.com/msft/FAQ/dividend.mspx: "Microsoft pays a quarterly dividend of $0.11 per share. Beginning in Fiscal Year 2005, Microsoft shifted from paying an annual dividend to a quarterly dividend."
So I think MS is probably a "stock for fools". If you buy a stock with the expectation of its price rising, you're gambling, not investing. That's not to say that gambling that Mars won't explode in the next two weeks isn't a good bet; some gambles are worthwhile.
As an aside, I think TMF has moved away from that sort of stance. Look at it this way - if I'm a long term invester (and it's better to be), then I don't need the dividend now. What would I do? Probably re-invest it. If I believe in the company enough to own their stock, I'd rather they didn't pay me the dividend, which I'd just re-invest, because (I think) if my investment isn't tax-protected that's actually better from a tax perspective. I don't want to be taxed on the dividends now while I'm working and presumably in a higher bracket, I'd rather be taxed on them later at the long-term cap gains rate.
Why, because authorities try to actually catch terrorists as opposed to letting terrorist cells fluorish like Britain and Germany do??
A better idea would be to purchase new, cheap hardware that has been manufactured in this century. It still doesn't make sense for me that the taxpayer will pay $40 to help someone trick hardware that's not worth $10 into working.
That said, I have to agree that the thrill is largely gone. Even slashdot, the stories all seem to be something I've read before, and so do the comments. The late 90's, they were fantastic. But like the hippies after Woodstock, this is not the low point of a cycle -- it's over. Whatever "it" was, it will only return in a different form, and it will revolve around people other than us.
That's a fantastic analogy, Abe Simpson. Let's try not to be so annoyingly self-indulgent as the Baby Boomers. The internet revolution, which the older of us experienced as teenagers, college students, or even adults, was one of the biggest transformations in the exchange of information that we'll ever see. The kiddies talk about how different "2.0" will be, but these little bastards have never used a card catalog system to know how different the internet is that what we had before. Things are good now. We're spoiled.
So expecting the changes of 1995-2000 to keep going would be stupid. But that doesn't mean what we're getting now is actually bad. Device creators are focusing more on UIs now, so that the stuff we have is actually, you know, not a pain in the ass to use. That's good. Online services continue to get better, if not in a "blow your mind" kind of way. That's good.
Many times I've been thinking - why is it so important to break the latest console to work with your "insert-homebrew-here"? Is it because it's some hardware that most have been importing in to your homes? is it because of the "scene" or is it because you "can"?.
I don't know. Did Edmund Hillary climb Everest because he thought there was prime real estate up there?
The judge, when he asked them whether they were unauthorized, was asking them whether they were "illegal". Their "yes" response is chilling.
I missed that little nugget actually. And, upon doing some Googling, I apparently missed it when they said the same in the Jammie Thomas case too, which is bizarre.
I'm actually glad they're doing this. I hope they make a number of similar asinine statements and I hope the defendant gets lawyered up by the EFF or similar. I'm not in favor of piracy but, as you say, this is fair use.
There's also the publishing effect - namely, articles reporting the effect of cell phone radiation upon some biological system X is so popular now that many, many researchers are examining it. If 20 people perform a study, and 1 finds a result that's statistically significant at the 95% confidence interval, the 1 study gets published...even though 1 such study out of 20 would find that result from a random system.
In the end, as a scientist I'm extremely leery of statistical correlation with no mechanism. What is the specific mechanism by which the specified radiation has the claimed effect? This is especially so with the cell phone/cancer studies, which have the very difficult job of claiming that non-ionizing radiation causes cancer. Because I've seen such bad science, I'm very skeptical of the cell phone studies in general.
I agree with you about the difference between 'authorized' and 'legal'. I still think the point of the lawsuit - and the part that's dropped in all the many stories on this topic - is the 'making available' portion, not the 'unauthorized copying'.
Is this the same retread story that's been making the rounds for the last two weeks?
Short summary: Guy ripped CD and placed MP3 in P2P shared directory. RIAA sues him for "making available" an "unauthorized copy". Media ignores first part and reports that RIAA is suing the guy for simply ripping a CD (how would they know if that's all he did?). Frenzied and completely incorrect stories are reported and posted to slashdot, with hundreds of comments posted by people who can't (or choose not to) read and correctly comprehend the actual events.
Will somebody please put a bullet in this undead zombie beast of a story? It seems to be submitted every day and the summary is damn near always wrong.
the RIAA is going to list the item "he made UNAUTHORIZED copies of CDs into MP3s on his computer and unauthorized copies copyright infringement".
...*snip*...
Yes, copying a CD into MP3 format is indeed "unauthorized". However that does not make it copyright infringement.
I'll play grammar pedant for a moment only because it's actually germane. In the first statement, they claim he made an "unauthorized copy". Unless that's just a redundancy, it implies there are "authorized copies" (say, for personal fair use) and "unauthorized copies" (say, for sharing via P2P). If that's the case, via interpretation of their exact language, I don't have a problem with that. Of course, a jury will decide whether "making available" is an actual violation, but I think it's a leap to take the specific statement cited and interpret it to mean that the RIAA is claiming that any copy anywhere is illegal.
Of course, they've still said a lot of other dumb stuff, but examining the current case very narrowly, I think it's being misinterpreted. Note that most of the media coverage of the case glosses over the P2P part conveniently, at which point this case becomes Same Old Story.