Illegal immigrants in total are estimated to number about 11 million[3]. Even if they don't pay taxes (which I'm not defending, merely removing from the calculation for ease) do you really believe that they don't spend $1000 per person per year on average into our economy? Because if they do, they've already paid more in economic gains than we've lost in tax dollars spent educating their children.
I've (unintentionally) overstayed a resident visa in the past, so I don't have a bias against illegal immigrants—I actually was one.
With that said, your argument is rubbish. Spending doesn't represent contribution to the economy, earning does. Workers are paid for their production at it's market value, which is the actual value of their contributions.
A consumer who doesn't pay taxes and receives government services free of charge is NOT making a net contribution. This consumer's total economic impact can be seen as:
Production (wages)
Consumption (spent wages)
Government Services
Assuming that the consumer in question doesn't burn or bury money, they will eventually spend their income and consume resources equal in value to their wages. Unfortunately, in this situation, the consumer also continues to consume resources in excess of their contributions. All consumers pay sales tax, but to the extent that illegal immigrants don't pay income tax or property tax (contrary to your assumption, illegal immigrants also contribute significantly to illegal housing), they are effectively benefiting from services that they haven't paid for.
I have worked with materialized views and, yes, you are entirely correct. It takes one "CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW" statement to have exactly what GP is describing. Unfortunately, in my experience, Oracle often requires so much tuning that a roll-your-own solution can be favorable (though less uniform and thus not suit-friendly).
Miyamoto: (While watching Super Mario Brothers [The first Super Mario action game, released 9/13/1985.] on a big screen TV.) To see it in such detail is a little embarrassing, don't you think?
Itoi: Oh, really? What about it?
Miyamoto: Long ago, things like the brown pipes [?] and the blurriness weren't displayed so clearly.
That and the things that were sort of fudged, when they're displayed in so much detail, it's a somewhat [embarrassing]. (Laughs)
Itoi: For example, things like drawing the lines on the mountains in the background more correctly?
Miyamoto: No, lines and such were limited by the technology of the time, so in that sense it's not embarrassing.
Itoi: The things that were properly apparent when you created it aren't embarrassing.
Miyamoto: Right. (Laughs)
Itoi: I think I understand that. But how to fix it, that's difficult, isn't it. Me, too, when I read the books I wrote long ago, they are embarrassing.
Miyamoto: Yeah, that happens, doesn't it.
Itoi: It does. It does. They're always full of things that the person I am now wouldn't write. That includes everything from style to the use of kanji or hiragana. However, when I've considered changing things, I thought "But if I change it, it just feels something will be lost."
Miyamoto: Ah.
Itoi: Even things that one absolutely wouldn't create now, if they were changed, regrettably, something would be lost.
Miyamoto: That's true, isn't it.
Itoi: Yep.
Miyamoto: Well, when porting a game I made long ago, sometimes I'm uncomfortable with the port and I ask myself "There's no way it was like this, right?" Usually, I can answer "No, it was like this." (Laughs)
Itoi: I see. (Laughs)
Miyamoto: To think they shouldn't be changed now, that these kind of rough spots are also part of games... that's properly appreciating them, isn't it?
Itoi: In short, one's body [?] at that time requested that it should be made that way, right?
Miyamoto: Right, right.
Itoi: So, for example, when the director's cut for a hit movie is released, the version in which the director has redone all the details is not always better, right?
At Nintendo we're commemorating "Super Mario 25th Anniversary" with a promotion, but at the same time we're planning to release "The CEO Asks" pertaining to Super Mario's history in several installments.
Obviously, we thought to start by bringing to all of you word from the parent who gave birth to Super Mario, Miyamoto Shigeru, but thus far Mr. Miyamoto has appeared in "The CEO Asks" as a guest more than anyone else, and to me, who has asked Mr. Miyamoto the same questions many times, the more I thought about it the more I began to feel that in order to bring fresh questions to you all it was perhaps best to have someone else conduct the interview.
The initial impetus for "The CEO Asks" was when, as I was interviewed by Itoi Shigesato for the Hobo Nikkan Itoi Shinbun [Almost Daily Itoi Newspaper], I was moved to the following realization: "When people are asked skillfully, they can speak in detail as rich as this!"
Mr. Itoi and Mr. Miyamoto are already old friends, so to commemorate this 25th anniversary, I thought Itoi Shigesato most qualified to give a different perspective than mine in asking Mr. Miyamoto about his creation.
So saying, the opening move of the plans for 25th Anniversary Memorial will be Itoi Shigesato's interview "Super Mario 25th Anniversary." It truly became a long and rich interview. Enjoy!
Introduction
Iwata:
Hello everyone. I'm Iwata for Nintendo.
Today is the 25th anniversary to the day of September 13th, 1985 when the first generation of Super Mario Brothers for the Family Computer [NES] went on sale. Even today, after 25 years have passed thanks to our customers all over the world, Mario continues to jump energetically on game screens. Passing a quarter of a century, we truly thank you, our worldwide patrons.
While it's easy to point fingers—and fun, too!—neither you nor I fixed those bugs, either.
Even those who aren't developers don't have an excuse. Paying a developer to fix a bug is no more taxing a contribution than that of a developer who volunteers to fix the same bug without compensation.
require them to release all collected data on a user to that user on request (while also making sure that the information is provided securely and confidentially)
I believe I understand the theoretical basis of your proposal, which seems to be that consumers require perfect information to make correct decisions. That seems reasonable.
However, businesses like Google typically have policies forbidding the release of any information to anyone outside the company, with some exceptions. What's more, most user information is probably already somewhat anonymized (For example, there's no need to store specific user information when calculating term frequencies or click-through rates.) and stored in separate databases in different physical locations. Being able to provide user data on request requires the creation of a single, monolithic user database and software designed to retrieve all data related to a specific user and transmit it to a third party. Isn't that a huge leap in the wrong direction?
Providing only meta-data (in this case the scope of the data that is being collected) would be much safer. In database terms, this would mean publishing the definitions of tables that contain user information, but not making the actual user-specific data available. Users would typically know their own personal information anyway. The issue is that they don't know which information is being collected and stored.
Somewhere around half a percent of the Earth itself and 1 percent of soil is titanium, so it isn't exactly rare. There's a large market for titanium dioxide in industrial quantities and it currently costs about $1.50 per pound.
I couldn't find any sources of GFP in industrial quantities (or any industrial uses of it), but looking at the production costs of other recombinant proteins is telling. In 1997, heparinase I production was estimated to cost around $250,000 per pound with capital costs in the tens of millions of dollars for an annual production of only 3 kg. On the other hand, bovine somatotropin is currently produced, and costs about $6.60 per 500 mg dose, which works out to about $6000 per pound.
I'm no expert, but the idea that GFP (a recombinant protein) is cheap and TiO2 (processed dirt) is expensive seems a bit strange to me. Can someone explain?
The sole reason this story is notable is the power source, which happens to be electric. OP may be incorrect, since it's likely that nuclear power was used to charge the batteries in question, but this story is about electric power. Questioning the efficiency, practicality or environmental consequences of electric power is not offtopic, even if makes some people uncomfortable.
It was while trying to read your informative, insightful (and on-topic!) post that I stumbled over your minor typo. I apologize for lowering the S/N ratio. I'll try to keep my humorless musings to myself (starting right after this post, evidently).
brain@kumanopuusan ~ % parse-english < "Most who have tried it view Swype's mechanic as the future of touchscreen text input (and it will no doubt migrate in some for to the iPhone at some point)." SYNTAX ERROR: PREPOSITION OBJECT NOT FOUND AT LINE 1, COLUMN 116: (A)bort, (R)etry, (I)gnore? >R SYNTAX ERROR: PREPOSITION OBJECT NOT FOUND AT LINE 1, COLUMN 116: (A)bort, (R)etry, (I)gnore? >I SYNTAX ERROR: PREPOSITION OBJECT NOT FOUND AT LINE 1, COLUMN 124: (A)bort, (R)etry, (I)gnore? >I SYNTAX ERROR: PREPOSITION OBJECT NOT FOUND AT LINE 1, COLUMN 128: (A)bort, (R)etry, (I)gnore? >I FATAL ERROR: CEREBRAL ANEURYSM DETECTED
One would need to watch less than a minute of political news to realize that not only do "left" and "right" exist, but that politicians who aren't in either group are studied by cryptozoologists. The heart of modern American politics is the business of moving voters, blocs and districts from one side to the other. With only two options, it is a zero sum game. Accordingly, demonizing the opposition is effective as proposing solutions, while being significantly easier.
The scarcity of independent view points is self-perpetuating, because all useful discussion is overshadowed by the mindless jockeying of "left" and "right" for first place. In a country where politics is not concerned with meaningful policies, who can blame voters for supporting the least repugnant of "left" or "right" and being otherwise entirely disinterested?
Europe isn't defined in terms of race, but in terms of politics and geography. The statement you attempt to dispute discusses Europe, a geopolitical entity, and Europeans, the inhabitants of Europe, not Caucasians nor white men. The assertion that Europeans will become extinct is a value-neutral fact (though not necessarily a true fact) about the population of a geographically defined region, which follows simply from the assumption of constant, negative population growth. Fortunately, the truth of short logical statements is unaffected by any amount of political agendas, straw men and unrelated anecdotes.
It is telling that, instead of responding to the contents of the post in question, you invented a completely unrelated opinion and then spent the majority of your post attacking your own opinion. I'm glad that you realize that your straw-man position is nonsense. Was your exhortation to kindly sod off also part of a dialogue with yourself?
I share your sentiment about racism, but passion is no substitute for thinking carefully and acting accordingly. Unquestioned opinions and careless, misguided policies may cause more harm than benefit to your endeavors against racist sentiments and unequal treatment.
Interestingly enough, yen and yuan are merely different simplifications of the same traditional character, which simply means round. The English transliterations may be different, but arguably it is a single written word.
Given that you mentioned Oracle and 32 core machines, I'm sure you're in a corporate environment that places severe restrictions on your ability to change existing solutions. With that said, your servers are taking more than 90 minutes to boot into a usable state. A huge win for you would be servers that can be rebooted, not servers that never need to be rebooted.
Somehow, I imagined the following conversation.
"Jimmy, are you ok?! There's blood everywhere!"
"OK?! I just had a huge win! I stain-proofed the carpet, so I don't need to worry about the blood anymore."
"Jimmy, are you hurt? Do you need a doctor?"
"What do doctors have to do with cleaning this mess off the carpet?"
(Hopefully my light-hearted tone is apparent. I have nothing but sympathy for fellow cogs still stuck in the machinery of the IT industry. I fell off of my axle and rolled out from under the machine a few years ago. Perhaps it happened because I have (am?) a loose nut.;-)
Objective scoring of importance can be problematic, although algorithms exist (for example, Google's PageRank for scoring webpages, automated methods of assigning importance to authors based on patterns of citation, or even Erds number;-). In this case, though, incorrect scope is more important than scoring errors.
The diagram's creator admits that he chose some merely popular individuals in addition to significant scientists, but let's suppose that we are trying to determine which events or persons are historically significant and those whose importance is merely transient. Imagine the importance (by some standard) of an individual or event as a (locally linear) function of time in a certain time window. Forgive the conceit of calling this an importance function.
Picking an appropriate time window is essential. When the sun supernovas, the entire history of this world will be erased, so the importance function of any terrestrial event is transient on a scale of billions of years. Any non-trivial importance function will be non-zero at some point, and so, by viewing such an object in a sufficiently brief window, it will appear non-transient (We have assumed local linearity.). In other words, the significance of an event depends both upon its importance and the time period used to evaluate that significance.
Further, let us assume that we estimate importance based on empirical data. Due to causality, observations of the future are not possible, so the latest possible upper bound of any time window is the present. Likewise, there are no observations of a given event before it occurs, so the earliest useful lower bound of a time window is the time at which the event occurs. To restate, the time window used to evaluate significance is constrained by both the time at which the event occurs and the time at which the evaluation occurs.
The preceding analysis is simply a formal way of stating that the historical significance of recent events and persons cannot be determined. The insight is the reason for this: only local characteristics of the importance function are available and only in a small interval, thus the long-term behavior of the importance function cannot be predicted.
Applying this to the specific topic of discussion, Phil Plait might well be felled by acute disease, natural disaster or random crime tomorrow and his importance function would drop suddenly. To be fair to Phil, let's imagine sudden success as well as tragedy. Perhaps tomorrow he will publish a paper that proves responsible for a new paradigm in cosmology and astronomy. Unfortunately Don Herbert has died, but the future of his legacy is also uncertain. Perhaps he will be eclipsed by Bill Nye or someone similar. The difference between Phil and Don is that there is evidence of Mr. Wizard's importance in previous decades, while Bad Astronomy is less than 10 years old. Of course, neither of them is comparable to scientists whose work has been influential for centuries or millennia.
Significance being related to uniqueness, it seems reasonable to assume the significance of an event of a certain type is a decreasing function of the number of events of that type (ceteris paribus). Then, it's natural that significant events are much rarer than insignificant events, which is intuitive. While the current popular interest in an event or person may be the best estimate of its short-term popularity, in light of the previous statement, we can see that most events in question will be revealed as historically insignificant in the future. Perhaps it is an unwitting assumption that popular interest will continue unchanged that accounts for the widely seen overestimation of the importance of the status quo. The article's author seems to share this bias with modern popular culture.
It's not so much that it's difficult to form new verbs in Japanese, it's that some words sound like verbs and some words don't. Almost all Japanese verbs end in -u, so unless the word, or a likely contraction of it, ends in -u, then it sounds unnatural when used as a verb. For words that sound right, their conjugations are generally intuitive to both the speaker and the listener. There are many such words in common use.
"Here, let me Google that for you..."
Gugurasete is allow/cause [someone] to google and gugutteageru is [I] google for [someone]. However, I think gugutteagemasyou (Why don't I google that for you?) is closer in meaning. Here, let me Google that for you...
In Japanese, verbs often end in ru. guguru (one transliteration of Google) ends in ru and it's used as a verb. With only a handful of exceptions, all Japanese verbs are regular, so once a new verb is coined all of its many forms are used more or less naturally.
From the verb stem (gugur-) one can derive all the other forms of the verb, including gugureba (if [one] googles), gugutta (googled), gugurimasu (google [polite]) and even gugurikata (googling technique), gugutteirassyaru (to google [exalted]), gugutteitadakereba (if [I] humbly receive the addressee's act of googling), guguritai ([I] want to google) and gugure (google [impolite imperative, similar to "Google it, motherfucker!"]).
>By 2020, nobody shall be seriously injured or killed in a new Volvo.
Solution I: Stop building Volvos. With no new Volvos to occupy, no one will die while occupying a new Volvo. Issue I: It will be more difficult to maintain profitability with no sales.
Solution II: Make new Volvos that are physically impossible to occupy. Possible form factors include a Volvo made of solid concrete or steel. Klein Bottle-shaped Volvos are strongly advised against. Issue II: The market for automobiles that cannot carry useful payloads is markedly smaller than the market for automobiles than can carry payloads.
Solution III: Make new Volvos that are possible to occupy, but restrict ownership to immortals. Issue III: Sales teams have had difficulty contacting Superman, Dracula and the Greek Pantheon.
Solution IV: Manufacture new Volvos without any components that could lead to a crash resulting in injury or death of mortal occupants. Issue IV: Completely removing the drive train, suspension, wheels and tires has significantly reduced manufacturing costs, but passengers are still capable of killing one another.
Solution V: New Volvos will be single-passenger stationary vehicles. Issue V: "Drivers" are still capable of killing or injuring themselves inside a new Volvo.
Solution VI: New Volvos with be fitted with restraint harnesses and bits to prevent self-injury. Issue VI: "Drivers" are still exposed to potential dangers such as urban violence or collisions with unsafe, mobile vehicles.
Solution VII: Place new Volvos in well-isolated, individual subterranean bunkers. Disused Cold War-era missile silos are recommended.
Yes, I lived there for a number of years, including a few brief periods during which my projects included web applications.
There are some places in the city (for instance near Shinjuku Station) that are covered with lights, flashing signs and colorful buildings (even the occasional giant motorized crab, if you look carefully).
However, there are even more places in Tokyo that are always quiet. You don't even need to leave the Yamanote Line. Take a walk between Ikebukuro Station and Sugamo Station sometime.
It's no surprise that you've only seen busy streets if you haven't gone far from the big stations.
To get back on topic, the idea that Japanese web sites are on the whole somehow over-complicated is a bit bizarre. If anything, the key difference between web design in Japan and web design in America, is what seems to be a lag of several years. Technologies that seemed rather commonplace in America such as Ajax, or even widely accepted best practices like CSS-based layout were fairly rare in my experience.
I don't have time to find good examples at the moment, but it's anything but difficult to find a Japanese web site that looks like it came straight out of 1995.
I acknowledge that you were joking, but I am annoyed to no end by the idea that gambling is always irrational behavior, suited only to the illiterate of the working class.
The expected value of the profit (in dollars) of a given player in any lottery is negative. The expected value of the profit (in dollars) of purchasing insurance is also negative. However, asserting that gambling or buying insurance are therefore irrational reveals a misunderstanding of the mathematics and economics involved.
A glaring mistake implicit in this idea is the assumption that the utility of dollars is linear. In other words, it assumes that, for example, $5 is exactly 5 times more valuable than $1. $5 can be worth more or less than 5 times the value of $1, depending on the circumstances. Consider a hungry customer standing in front of a hot dog stand that charges $3 for a hot dog. To him, $5 has the value of a single hot dog, but $1 has the value of zero hot dogs ($5 is worth 1/0 times the value of $1). To the same customer who only wishes to purchase a single hot dog, $6 is also worth only the value of a single hot dog ($6 is worth 1/1 times the value of $5). You should be able to generalize this silly example with little difficulty.
Given that different amounts of money can have wildly different utility to a given person, it's easy enough to see how both purchasing insurance or playing the lottery can be rational decisions. Call the small fixed cost (in dollars) c, the large payoff b (in dollars), the probability of a payoff p, and define a function u(d) that gives the utility of any amount of dollars. The expected utility is now u(b)*p - u(c), which is positive exactly when u(b)*p > u(c). It's reasonable to expect that x > y implies u(x) >= u(y), since anyone who has $x has $y, but there's not much else to be said about u in general without making some hasty assumptions.
Beyond that, basing a decision solely on a risk-agnostic expected value means effectively ignoring the real implications of risk.
Saying the Iphone4 is better then it's predicessors is like saying the DDR (West Germany) was better then the Soviet Union. Technically it's true but that doesn't make the DDR a nice place to live.
If West Germany was that bad, I don't even want to know what East Germany was like.
If you were in Japan, Spain, or about 20 other countries, 13 would be above the age of consent.
In Japan, 13 is the national age of consent. Age of consent is restricted by various prefectural laws and is generally 18. Your statement is similar to saying that there is no age of consent law in the USA. While it is true that there is no federally defined age of consent (for civilians) in the United States, no one is likely to believe such an obvious mis-statement.
There's a problem with trying to apply a number one finds on the internet to a foreign culture of which one has little direct knowledge.
Quickly estimating the plausibility of a given statement depends on one's familiarity with the facts with which the statement concerns itself.
Being mindless of one's ability to discern truth from untruth can lead to strikingly absurd statements being given full credit in society at large. Witness the Age of Exploration with its El Dorado, the bestiaries of the Middle Ages populated with fantastical creatures, or even the current fascination with popular psychology.
You might also consider PostScript. It's a lightweight solution and you can output it without relying on an external library. Making lines and text is simple, so it's well-suited to printed forms.
Slashdot Mirror
Illegal immigrants in total are estimated to number about 11 million[3]. Even if they don't pay taxes (which I'm not defending, merely removing from the calculation for ease) do you really believe that they don't spend $1000 per person per year on average into our economy? Because if they do, they've already paid more in economic gains than we've lost in tax dollars spent educating their children.
I've (unintentionally) overstayed a resident visa in the past, so I don't have a bias against illegal immigrants—I actually was one.
With that said, your argument is rubbish. Spending doesn't represent contribution to the economy, earning does. Workers are paid for their production at it's market value, which is the actual value of their contributions.
A consumer who doesn't pay taxes and receives government services free of charge is NOT making a net contribution. This consumer's total economic impact can be seen as:
Assuming that the consumer in question doesn't burn or bury money, they will eventually spend their income and consume resources equal in value to their wages. Unfortunately, in this situation, the consumer also continues to consume resources in excess of their contributions. All consumers pay sales tax, but to the extent that illegal immigrants don't pay income tax or property tax (contrary to your assumption, illegal immigrants also contribute significantly to illegal housing), they are effectively benefiting from services that they haven't paid for.
I have worked with materialized views and, yes, you are entirely correct. It takes one "CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW" statement to have exactly what GP is describing. Unfortunately, in my experience, Oracle often requires so much tuning that a roll-your-own solution can be favorable (though less uniform and thus not suit-friendly).
Things That Can't Be Put Into Words
Miyamoto: (While watching Super Mario Brothers [The first Super Mario action game, released 9/13/1985.] on a big screen TV.) To see it in such detail is a little embarrassing, don't you think?
Itoi: Oh, really? What about it?
Miyamoto: Long ago, things like the brown pipes [?] and the blurriness weren't displayed so clearly. That and the things that were sort of fudged, when they're displayed in so much detail, it's a somewhat [embarrassing]. (Laughs)
Itoi: For example, things like drawing the lines on the mountains in the background more correctly?
Miyamoto: No, lines and such were limited by the technology of the time, so in that sense it's not embarrassing.
Itoi: The things that were properly apparent when you created it aren't embarrassing.
Miyamoto: Right. (Laughs)
Itoi: I think I understand that. But how to fix it, that's difficult, isn't it. Me, too, when I read the books I wrote long ago, they are embarrassing.
Miyamoto: Yeah, that happens, doesn't it.
Itoi: It does. It does. They're always full of things that the person I am now wouldn't write. That includes everything from style to the use of kanji or hiragana. However, when I've considered changing things, I thought "But if I change it, it just feels something will be lost."
Miyamoto: Ah.
Itoi: Even things that one absolutely wouldn't create now, if they were changed, regrettably, something would be lost.
Miyamoto: That's true, isn't it.
Itoi: Yep.
Miyamoto: Well, when porting a game I made long ago, sometimes I'm uncomfortable with the port and I ask myself "There's no way it was like this, right?" Usually, I can answer "No, it was like this." (Laughs)
Itoi: I see. (Laughs)
Miyamoto: To think they shouldn't be changed now, that these kind of rough spots are also part of games... that's properly appreciating them, isn't it?
Itoi: In short, one's body [?] at that time requested that it should be made that way, right?
Miyamoto: Right, right.
Itoi: So, for example, when the director's cut for a hit movie is released, the version in which the director has redone all the details is not always better, right?
Miyamoto: Yep, yep.
At Nintendo we're commemorating "Super Mario 25th Anniversary" with a promotion, but at the same time we're planning to release "The CEO Asks" pertaining to Super Mario's history in several installments.
Obviously, we thought to start by bringing to all of you word from the parent who gave birth to Super Mario, Miyamoto Shigeru, but thus far Mr. Miyamoto has appeared in "The CEO Asks" as a guest more than anyone else, and to me, who has asked Mr. Miyamoto the same questions many times, the more I thought about it the more I began to feel that in order to bring fresh questions to you all it was perhaps best to have someone else conduct the interview.
The initial impetus for "The CEO Asks" was when, as I was interviewed by Itoi Shigesato for the Hobo Nikkan Itoi Shinbun [Almost Daily Itoi Newspaper], I was moved to the following realization: "When people are asked skillfully, they can speak in detail as rich as this!"
Mr. Itoi and Mr. Miyamoto are already old friends, so to commemorate this 25th anniversary, I thought Itoi Shigesato most qualified to give a different perspective than mine in asking Mr. Miyamoto about his creation.
So saying, the opening move of the plans for 25th Anniversary Memorial will be Itoi Shigesato's interview "Super Mario 25th Anniversary." It truly became a long and rich interview. Enjoy!
There are some pages in Nintendo's Super Mario 25th Anniversary Campaign web site that might be of more interest to gamers. One that caught my eye was an interview with Miyamoto Shigeru. I'll do my best to translate it here. It's remarkably long, so please excuse me for making multiple posts (and doing so slowly).
Introduction
Iwata: Hello everyone. I'm Iwata for Nintendo.
Today is the 25th anniversary to the day of September 13th, 1985 when the first generation of Super Mario Brothers for the Family Computer [NES] went on sale. Even today, after 25 years have passed thanks to our customers all over the world, Mario continues to jump energetically on game screens. Passing a quarter of a century, we truly thank you, our worldwide patrons.
While it's easy to point fingers—and fun, too!—neither you nor I fixed those bugs, either.
Even those who aren't developers don't have an excuse. Paying a developer to fix a bug is no more taxing a contribution than that of a developer who volunteers to fix the same bug without compensation.
require them to release all collected data on a user to that user on request (while also making sure that the information is provided securely and confidentially)
I believe I understand the theoretical basis of your proposal, which seems to be that consumers require perfect information to make correct decisions. That seems reasonable.
However, businesses like Google typically have policies forbidding the release of any information to anyone outside the company, with some exceptions. What's more, most user information is probably already somewhat anonymized (For example, there's no need to store specific user information when calculating term frequencies or click-through rates.) and stored in separate databases in different physical locations. Being able to provide user data on request requires the creation of a single, monolithic user database and software designed to retrieve all data related to a specific user and transmit it to a third party. Isn't that a huge leap in the wrong direction?
Providing only meta-data (in this case the scope of the data that is being collected) would be much safer. In database terms, this would mean publishing the definitions of tables that contain user information, but not making the actual user-specific data available. Users would typically know their own personal information anyway. The issue is that they don't know which information is being collected and stored.
Somewhere around half a percent of the Earth itself and 1 percent of soil is titanium, so it isn't exactly rare. There's a large market for titanium dioxide in industrial quantities and it currently costs about $1.50 per pound.
I couldn't find any sources of GFP in industrial quantities (or any industrial uses of it), but looking at the production costs of other recombinant proteins is telling. In 1997, heparinase I production was estimated to cost around $250,000 per pound with capital costs in the tens of millions of dollars for an annual production of only 3 kg. On the other hand, bovine somatotropin is currently produced, and costs about $6.60 per 500 mg dose, which works out to about $6000 per pound.
I'm no expert, but the idea that GFP (a recombinant protein) is cheap and TiO2 (processed dirt) is expensive seems a bit strange to me. Can someone explain?
The sole reason this story is notable is the power source, which happens to be electric.
OP may be incorrect, since it's likely that nuclear power was used to charge the batteries in question, but this story is about electric power.
Questioning the efficiency, practicality or environmental consequences of electric power is not offtopic, even if makes some people uncomfortable.
It was while trying to read your informative, insightful (and on-topic!) post that I stumbled over your minor typo.
I apologize for lowering the S/N ratio. I'll try to keep my humorless musings to myself (starting right after this post, evidently).
brain@kumanopuusan ~ % parse-english < "Most who have tried it view Swype's mechanic as the future of touchscreen text input (and it will no doubt migrate in some for to the iPhone at some point)."
SYNTAX ERROR: PREPOSITION OBJECT NOT FOUND AT LINE 1, COLUMN 116:
(A)bort, (R)etry, (I)gnore?
>R
SYNTAX ERROR: PREPOSITION OBJECT NOT FOUND AT LINE 1, COLUMN 116:
(A)bort, (R)etry, (I)gnore?
>I
SYNTAX ERROR: PREPOSITION OBJECT NOT FOUND AT LINE 1, COLUMN 124:
(A)bort, (R)etry, (I)gnore?
>I
SYNTAX ERROR: PREPOSITION OBJECT NOT FOUND AT LINE 1, COLUMN 128:
(A)bort, (R)etry, (I)gnore?
>I
FATAL ERROR: CEREBRAL ANEURYSM DETECTED
While we're picking nits, there appears to be a nit lodged between the y and the s in your spelling of attorneys general.
One would need to watch less than a minute of political news to realize that not only do "left" and "right" exist, but that politicians who aren't in either group are studied by cryptozoologists. The heart of modern American politics is the business of moving voters, blocs and districts from one side to the other. With only two options, it is a zero sum game. Accordingly, demonizing the opposition is effective as proposing solutions, while being significantly easier.
The scarcity of independent view points is self-perpetuating, because all useful discussion is overshadowed by the mindless jockeying of "left" and "right" for first place. In a country where politics is not concerned with meaningful policies, who can blame voters for supporting the least repugnant of "left" or "right" and being otherwise entirely disinterested?
Europe isn't defined in terms of race, but in terms of politics and geography. The statement you attempt to dispute discusses Europe, a geopolitical entity, and Europeans, the inhabitants of Europe, not Caucasians nor white men. The assertion that Europeans will become extinct is a value-neutral fact (though not necessarily a true fact) about the population of a geographically defined region, which follows simply from the assumption of constant, negative population growth. Fortunately, the truth of short logical statements is unaffected by any amount of political agendas, straw men and unrelated anecdotes.
It is telling that, instead of responding to the contents of the post in question, you invented a completely unrelated opinion and then spent the majority of your post attacking your own opinion. I'm glad that you realize that your straw-man position is nonsense. Was your exhortation to kindly sod off also part of a dialogue with yourself?
I share your sentiment about racism, but passion is no substitute for thinking carefully and acting accordingly. Unquestioned opinions and careless, misguided policies may cause more harm than benefit to your endeavors against racist sentiments and unequal treatment.
The following links may prove useful introductions to several of the preceding concepts.
Europe
Population growth
Anecdotal evidence (Generally, your life story is not relevant unless it is the topic of discussion.)
Straw man argument
Critical thinking
Interestingly enough, yen and yuan are merely different simplifications of the same traditional character, which simply means round. The English transliterations may be different, but arguably it is a single written word.
Somehow, I imagined the following conversation.
"Jimmy, are you ok?! There's blood everywhere!"
"OK?! I just had a huge win! I stain-proofed the carpet, so I don't need to worry about the blood anymore."
"Jimmy, are you hurt? Do you need a doctor?"
"What do doctors have to do with cleaning this mess off the carpet?"
(Hopefully my light-hearted tone is apparent. I have nothing but sympathy for fellow cogs still stuck in the machinery of the IT industry. I fell off of my axle and rolled out from under the machine a few years ago. Perhaps it happened because I have (am?) a loose nut. ;-)
Objective scoring of importance can be problematic, although algorithms exist (for example, Google's PageRank for scoring webpages, automated methods of assigning importance to authors based on patterns of citation, or even Erds number ;-). In this case, though, incorrect scope is more important than scoring errors.
The diagram's creator admits that he chose some merely popular individuals in addition to significant scientists, but let's suppose that we are trying to determine which events or persons are historically significant and those whose importance is merely transient. Imagine the importance (by some standard) of an individual or event as a (locally linear) function of time in a certain time window. Forgive the conceit of calling this an importance function.
Picking an appropriate time window is essential. When the sun supernovas, the entire history of this world will be erased, so the importance function of any terrestrial event is transient on a scale of billions of years. Any non-trivial importance function will be non-zero at some point, and so, by viewing such an object in a sufficiently brief window, it will appear non-transient (We have assumed local linearity.). In other words, the significance of an event depends both upon its importance and the time period used to evaluate that significance.
Further, let us assume that we estimate importance based on empirical data. Due to causality, observations of the future are not possible, so the latest possible upper bound of any time window is the present. Likewise, there are no observations of a given event before it occurs, so the earliest useful lower bound of a time window is the time at which the event occurs. To restate, the time window used to evaluate significance is constrained by both the time at which the event occurs and the time at which the evaluation occurs.
The preceding analysis is simply a formal way of stating that the historical significance of recent events and persons cannot be determined. The insight is the reason for this: only local characteristics of the importance function are available and only in a small interval, thus the long-term behavior of the importance function cannot be predicted.
Applying this to the specific topic of discussion, Phil Plait might well be felled by acute disease, natural disaster or random crime tomorrow and his importance function would drop suddenly. To be fair to Phil, let's imagine sudden success as well as tragedy. Perhaps tomorrow he will publish a paper that proves responsible for a new paradigm in cosmology and astronomy. Unfortunately Don Herbert has died, but the future of his legacy is also uncertain. Perhaps he will be eclipsed by Bill Nye or someone similar. The difference between Phil and Don is that there is evidence of Mr. Wizard's importance in previous decades, while Bad Astronomy is less than 10 years old. Of course, neither of them is comparable to scientists whose work has been influential for centuries or millennia.
Significance being related to uniqueness, it seems reasonable to assume the significance of an event of a certain type is a decreasing function of the number of events of that type (ceteris paribus). Then, it's natural that significant events are much rarer than insignificant events, which is intuitive. While the current popular interest in an event or person may be the best estimate of its short-term popularity, in light of the previous statement, we can see that most events in question will be revealed as historically insignificant in the future. Perhaps it is an unwitting assumption that popular interest will continue unchanged that accounts for the widely seen overestimation of the importance of the status quo. The article's author seems to share this bias with modern popular culture.
"Here, let me Google that for you..."
Gugurasete is allow/cause [someone] to google and gugutteageru is [I] google for [someone]. However, I think gugutteagemasyou (Why don't I google that for you?) is closer in meaning. Here, let me Google that for you...
gugusaserareru
Technically, guguru is a godan verb in the ra row. Wiktionary has a good list of conjugations here.
In Japanese, verbs often end in ru. guguru (one transliteration of Google) ends in ru and it's used as a verb. With only a handful of exceptions, all Japanese verbs are regular, so once a new verb is coined all of its many forms are used more or less naturally.
From the verb stem (gugur-) one can derive all the other forms of the verb, including gugureba (if [one] googles), gugutta (googled), gugurimasu (google [polite]) and even gugurikata (googling technique), gugutteirassyaru (to google [exalted]), gugutteitadakereba (if [I] humbly receive the addressee's act of googling), guguritai ([I] want to google) and gugure (google [impolite imperative, similar to "Google it, motherfucker!"]).
>By 2020, nobody shall be seriously injured or killed in a new Volvo.
Solution I: Stop building Volvos. With no new Volvos to occupy, no one will die while occupying a new Volvo.
Issue I: It will be more difficult to maintain profitability with no sales.
Solution II: Make new Volvos that are physically impossible to occupy. Possible form factors include a Volvo made of solid concrete or steel. Klein Bottle-shaped Volvos are strongly advised against.
Issue II: The market for automobiles that cannot carry useful payloads is markedly smaller than the market for automobiles than can carry payloads.
Solution III: Make new Volvos that are possible to occupy, but restrict ownership to immortals.
Issue III: Sales teams have had difficulty contacting Superman, Dracula and the Greek Pantheon.
Solution IV: Manufacture new Volvos without any components that could lead to a crash resulting in injury or death of mortal occupants.
Issue IV: Completely removing the drive train, suspension, wheels and tires has significantly reduced manufacturing costs, but passengers are still capable of killing one another.
Solution V: New Volvos will be single-passenger stationary vehicles.
Issue V: "Drivers" are still capable of killing or injuring themselves inside a new Volvo.
Solution VI: New Volvos with be fitted with restraint harnesses and bits to prevent self-injury.
Issue VI: "Drivers" are still exposed to potential dangers such as urban violence or collisions with unsafe, mobile vehicles.
Solution VII: Place new Volvos in well-isolated, individual subterranean bunkers. Disused Cold War-era missile silos are recommended.
Volvo. For life.
Ever been to Tokyo?
Yes, I lived there for a number of years, including a few brief periods during which my projects included web applications.
There are some places in the city (for instance near Shinjuku Station) that are covered with lights, flashing signs and colorful buildings (even the occasional giant motorized crab, if you look carefully).
However, there are even more places in Tokyo that are always quiet. You don't even need to leave the Yamanote Line. Take a walk between Ikebukuro Station and Sugamo Station sometime.
It's no surprise that you've only seen busy streets if you haven't gone far from the big stations.
To get back on topic, the idea that Japanese web sites are on the whole somehow over-complicated is a bit bizarre. If anything, the key difference between web design in Japan and web design in America, is what seems to be a lag of several years. Technologies that seemed rather commonplace in America such as Ajax, or even widely accepted best practices like CSS-based layout were fairly rare in my experience.
I don't have time to find good examples at the moment, but it's anything but difficult to find a Japanese web site that looks like it came straight out of 1995.
I acknowledge that you were joking, but I am annoyed to no end by the idea that gambling is always irrational behavior, suited only to the illiterate of the working class.
The expected value of the profit (in dollars) of a given player in any lottery is negative. The expected value of the profit (in dollars) of purchasing insurance is also negative. However, asserting that gambling or buying insurance are therefore irrational reveals a misunderstanding of the mathematics and economics involved.
A glaring mistake implicit in this idea is the assumption that the utility of dollars is linear. In other words, it assumes that, for example, $5 is exactly 5 times more valuable than $1. $5 can be worth more or less than 5 times the value of $1, depending on the circumstances. Consider a hungry customer standing in front of a hot dog stand that charges $3 for a hot dog. To him, $5 has the value of a single hot dog, but $1 has the value of zero hot dogs ($5 is worth 1/0 times the value of $1). To the same customer who only wishes to purchase a single hot dog, $6 is also worth only the value of a single hot dog ($6 is worth 1/1 times the value of $5). You should be able to generalize this silly example with little difficulty.
Given that different amounts of money can have wildly different utility to a given person, it's easy enough to see how both purchasing insurance or playing the lottery can be rational decisions. Call the small fixed cost (in dollars) c, the large payoff b (in dollars), the probability of a payoff p, and define a function u(d) that gives the utility of any amount of dollars. The expected utility is now u(b)*p - u(c), which is positive exactly when u(b)*p > u(c). It's reasonable to expect that x > y implies u(x) >= u(y), since anyone who has $x has $y, but there's not much else to be said about u in general without making some hasty assumptions.
Beyond that, basing a decision solely on a risk-agnostic expected value means effectively ignoring the real implications of risk.
(I still don't gamble, though ;-)
Saying the Iphone4 is better then it's predicessors is like saying the DDR (West Germany) was better then the Soviet Union. Technically it's true but that doesn't make the DDR a nice place to live.
If West Germany was that bad, I don't even want to know what East Germany was like.
If you were in Japan, Spain, or about 20 other countries, 13 would be above the age of consent.
In Japan, 13 is the national age of consent. Age of consent is restricted by various prefectural laws and is generally 18. Your statement is similar to saying that there is no age of consent law in the USA. While it is true that there is no federally defined age of consent (for civilians) in the United States, no one is likely to believe such an obvious mis-statement.
There's a problem with trying to apply a number one finds on the internet to a foreign culture of which one has little direct knowledge. Quickly estimating the plausibility of a given statement depends on one's familiarity with the facts with which the statement concerns itself. Being mindless of one's ability to discern truth from untruth can lead to strikingly absurd statements being given full credit in society at large. Witness the Age of Exploration with its El Dorado, the bestiaries of the Middle Ages populated with fantastical creatures, or even the current fascination with popular psychology.
You might also consider PostScript. It's a lightweight solution and you can output it without relying on an external library. Making lines and text is simple, so it's well-suited to printed forms.