It isn't because people in MMOs don't give you their phone number. They give you only they're nickname so you need an in-game IM system. Even MSN/Skype/etc won't do.
This is a very minor point but the paper is wrong about the origin Lord Kelvin's miscalculations of the age of Earth. He made his evaluation of 20 million years using thermal gradients which isn't a good model because Earth has a convective mantle. His assistant John Perry calculated an age of Earth of 2 to 3 billion years using the right model. That is a difference of two orders of magnitude. It's easy to see that radioactivity plays a minor role. An article appeared on GSA Today in January 2007 gives more details, John Perry's neglected critique of Kelvin's age for the Earth: A missed opportunity in geodynamics.
However even if the paper was wrong about the actual reason for Kelvin's mistake, the paper is right in asserting that the wrong model usually invalidates any calculation derived from it. The difference between the calculations of Perry and Kelvin might be an even better demonstration of this point.
Noting that a new season of Battlestar Galactica premieres today the guys that decided to run the Royal Navy on Windows will say that's not their fault: it's an attack of the Cylons! They have a far superior technology and no existing antivirus could defend the ships.
Ok, to be fair to the RN they're such an important target that an attacker would write a virus for any OS they run on, Linux, OSX, anything. However the network should have been protected. No USB drives, no connections with the outside, etc.
Yes I know, the Cylons have other ways to get into the networks (usually nice looking blondes - Cylons are so unimaginative...) and maybe that's what happened.
Good point and a video might explain it even better: how do you protect a car against this? It's the recording of a real accident on an Italian highway. Just suppose your crash proof Volvo is one of those two cars overtaking the red truck on the right side of the road.
a false positive rate of 1% really isn't that bad--especially on a fully automated system
Well, I'd say that a technology with that failure ratio isn't ready for production. Just try dropping every 100th page you load into your browser. I concede that maybe a
1% blockage of websites is completely acceptable to most folks
but a 1:100 false positive rate is unacceptable. Unless the opposition to the filters wins, I'll remove Australia from my list of countries I'd like to live in. Too bad, I remember it as a great country when I've been there on vacation years ago.
Definitely a bad summary, this is the abstract of the patent:
Patrons at a restaurant or bar can pay at their table using credit cards, without involving the restaurant or bar cashier and/or wait staff. Patrons are assisted using this system in dividing the bill by displaying the amount due (including tax) and allowing each patron to enter the amount they wish to pay. When the initial bill is presented, a balance due will be displayed and the indication will be provided that the bill has yet to be paid in full. As each transaction is entered, a running total will be displayed indicating the remaining balance due. When the running total reaches zero, the bill is paid in full, and an indication will be provided, such as by illuminating a green indicator light or by displaying a balance due of $0.00.
If you can patent a cash register you should also be able to patent this device.
Your company is supposed to pay you if you're working.
If they don't pay you for doing an activity it means that it's not work.
You're only supposed to work for your company when you're at your desk.
So don't boot up your computer if they're not paying you to do it. You might be sued for doing activities not related to your job!
Companies being honest to this policy of not paying people to boot up and shutdown pcs should hire somebody to do it. Considering the required degree of parallelism either they almost double the man power or they write some smart piece of software to bring up the necessary working environment on everybody's desktops.
The real challenge is how to catch all the metals and the other dangerous ions that the are produced by the process. Letting them flow freely into the atmosphere is not OK. Electrons must be added back to the ions, elements must be recycled. The plasma plant might be a better way to start the process than using solvents or the like.
As an Italian living in Italy I remember that the boys that were responsible for the harassment were prosecuted in 2006, at the time of the facts.
Google has been accused of abuses related to the failure of preventing defamation and to having made a profit out of that video thanks to the ads on the page (this is an abuse because our privacy laws). Those are criminal charges that can result in both a fine and jail time. Under Italian law individuals have criminal responsibility and not companies. That's why the state is suing managers of Google and not the company.
My take on this issue is that's impractical to scan and review every single video, picture or comment posted to the internet (Google Video, YouTube, Flickr, even Slashdot). It's just a matter of volume. Laws that were created with the press or the TV in mind should be rewritten to take in account that fact unless we want to shutdown the Internet in Italy.
I'm sure that in every country there are forces that want to tighten the control on the Internet and the freedom of speech of individuals, but I'm also sure that in most countries the majority of the citizens don't support them. Criminal responsibility is individual and only posters should be sued when controls on content are impractical. The service provider should be exempted from any accusations of complicity.
Shatner was 35 when he started acting as J.T. Kirk. Pine is 28. He has about the right age for the role he has to play in the story of the Kirk character. Furthermore people at 28 can already be everything they'll ever be if they're really good.
Lively is a disconnected collection of small rooms. If the web were be like that we'd have fixed-length non-scrollable pages with almost no way to jump from one to another but the bookmarks/favorites menu. I hope that Google's not only opening the API but is also going to remove the constraints on the room size or let people connect rooms together to create a continuous environment like SL (the latter would be enough). If they don't it will never become a 3D WWW.
Being cheap is always a good thing but notebooks have always been more expensive than equivalent desktops. Mobility and lightness come with a price premium. For this reason I think that netbooks will always be more expensive than an equally powerful notebook.
Said that, I agree with most of TFA but I really can't use track points. I'll never buy anything that doesn't have a touch pad. Bluetooth is a nice to have feature but not strictly necessary. The single most important feature is a 4+ hour battery life followed by lightness (max 1 kg) and a matte display for outdoor usage. Disk space is not so important: I may want to watch movies on a plane or a train but I don't have to keep them around for long. That makes 100+ GB HDs pretty useless and only detrimental to weight and battery duration. IMHO SSDs are a much better choice for this class of devices.
Ok, this might be so extreme that you could call me a troll but if all elections are so close why don't you just toss a coin and save a huge amount of money? I understand that's a matter of legitimacy and popular involvement however when the president of 300+ million people is decided by a 269 votes margin tossing a coin models the outcome quite faithfully.
By the way, this happens in many countries. The outcomes of the elections in my country (.it) is usually resolved by small margins and the distribution of voters among electoral colleges. The last ones have been the exception to the rule. As left and right wing coalitions take turns at the government since 1994 tossing a coin could be good for us too:-)
I'm serious now: we have a very complex decision algorithm that yields a result that looks random (ok, I understand that the number of samples is small but forgive me). Does that teach us anything about the way we the people vote? How can half of the people be right and half be wrong? People tends to agree when judging many common practical and ethical problems, at least among members of the same culture. Did we end up with two different cultures inside the same country or the differences between the candidates are so small that votes split evenly because it's difficult to decide who's the best one?
Yes, it might be so but it will take a great deal of marketing money before the masses will know about Ogg Vorbis and I don't see any company starting to invest on it.
IMHO it has to do with the phenomena for which most people believe that the Internet is that blue e icon on the desktop: cluelessness. In the case of digital music, many people believe that MP3 is free (as in pirated) music and AAC is a proprietary and DRM-protected format. Companies are just dealing with a general mindset that lead to a world full of MP3 players: trying to change it may cost them more than paying the MP3 licenses.
As TFA points out, that means that Google might use your and mine pictures to publish a photo book without paying neither you nor me.
I'm not using Picasa, but if I did I'd use it to show my pictures to my friends, not to give Google the right of doing whatever they want with my content. Similar ToS apply to Google Docs too: that means that Google might mail me all your docs, after all that's part of publicly distribute but would you like it?
Google's Terms of Use are too broad and they give Google some rights that are unrelated with the service that they say are providing. This is the whole point of the article and I think that they have a story. The fact that other companies have similar ToS just makes all the story worse: it's not Google bashing, it's bashing a whole industry and it's about our privacy. I think that I'll start again to read ToS and select accurately which service to use and which not.
The docs I care about are moving out of Google Docs now.
Well, this is a story. Maybe Slashdot should explain us why it's necessary that we grant it all those rights on our posts. They seem much broader than what's required to display our posts, quote somebody else's statements, backup and move them to new servers and media as technology progresses.
Google should do the same for their license and their services.
Third, all that money will go into the pockets of the companies that will deploy those pipes (buy their shares!), minus what occasionally will make its way back to who signed the bills;-)
I can't give you a number but if you look at a map (this one?) you can see that half of India is in the tropics, all the South-East Asia, most of Mexico, all central America, more than half of South America and Africa. I think that the number is at least 2 billions, maybe 3. I'd guess that 30-40% of the human population live in the tropics.
The map and the data provided by this Wikipedia page could help make a more precise estimation, if I had the time.
If the premise of the article is right let's cut the Internet connections of that 5% of power users. We end up using only 50% of the available bandwidth and ISP paying more than they should. I bet that they'll quickly sell the unused bandwidth (it's called cost reduction and profit maximization) and poor granny will start waiting for Ancestry.com again.
The Internet will never be fast because ISPs will give us no more than what we need to use it in a more or less acceptable way.
By the way, how it comes that poor granny's connection is slow while power users play WoW without problems?
Slashdot Mirror
It isn't because people in MMOs don't give you their phone number. They give you only they're nickname so you need an in-game IM system. Even MSN/Skype/etc won't do.
This is a very minor point but the paper is wrong about the origin Lord Kelvin's miscalculations of the age of Earth. He made his evaluation of 20 million years using thermal gradients which isn't a good model because Earth has a convective mantle. His assistant John Perry calculated an age of Earth of 2 to 3 billion years using the right model. That is a difference of two orders of magnitude. It's easy to see that radioactivity plays a minor role. An article appeared on GSA Today in January 2007 gives more details, John Perry's neglected critique of Kelvin's age for the Earth: A missed opportunity in geodynamics.
However even if the paper was wrong about the actual reason for Kelvin's mistake, the paper is right in asserting that the wrong model usually invalidates any calculation derived from it. The difference between the calculations of Perry and Kelvin might be an even better demonstration of this point.
Noting that a new season of Battlestar Galactica premieres today the guys that decided to run the Royal Navy on Windows will say that's not their fault: it's an attack of the Cylons! They have a far superior technology and no existing antivirus could defend the ships.
Ok, to be fair to the RN they're such an important target that an attacker would write a virus for any OS they run on, Linux, OSX, anything. However the network should have been protected. No USB drives, no connections with the outside, etc.
Yes I know, the Cylons have other ways to get into the networks (usually nice looking blondes - Cylons are so unimaginative...) and maybe that's what happened.
Good point and a video might explain it even better: how do you protect a car against this? It's the recording of a real accident on an Italian highway. Just suppose your crash proof Volvo is one of those two cars overtaking the red truck on the right side of the road.
a false positive rate of 1% really isn't that bad--especially on a fully automated system
Well, I'd say that a technology with that failure ratio isn't ready for production. Just try dropping every 100th page you load into your browser. I concede that maybe a
1% blockage of websites is completely acceptable to most folks
but a 1:100 false positive rate is unacceptable. Unless the opposition to the filters wins, I'll remove Australia from my list of countries I'd like to live in. Too bad, I remember it as a great country when I've been there on vacation years ago.
Definitely a bad summary, this is the abstract of the patent:
Patrons at a restaurant or bar can pay at their table using credit cards, without involving the restaurant or bar cashier and/or wait staff. Patrons are assisted using this system in dividing the bill by displaying the amount due (including tax) and allowing each patron to enter the amount they wish to pay. When the initial bill is presented, a balance due will be displayed and the indication will be provided that the bill has yet to be paid in full. As each transaction is entered, a running total will be displayed indicating the remaining balance due. When the running total reaches zero, the bill is paid in full, and an indication will be provided, such as by illuminating a green indicator light or by displaying a balance due of $0.00.
If you can patent a cash register you should also be able to patent this device.
Because for every spider we send to space, that's one less left here on earth trying to eat us.
If I promise to try eating you guys will somebody send me on the ISS? Please! :-)
Your company is supposed to pay you if you're working.
If they don't pay you for doing an activity it means that it's not work.
You're only supposed to work for your company when you're at your desk.
So don't boot up your computer if they're not paying you to do it. You might be sued for doing activities not related to your job!
Companies being honest to this policy of not paying people to boot up and shutdown pcs should hire somebody to do it. Considering the required degree of parallelism either they almost double the man power or they write some smart piece of software to bring up the necessary working environment on everybody's desktops.
The real challenge is how to catch all the metals and the other dangerous ions that the are produced by the process. Letting them flow freely into the atmosphere is not OK. Electrons must be added back to the ions, elements must be recycled. The plasma plant might be a better way to start the process than using solvents or the like.
As an Italian living in Italy I remember that the boys that were responsible for the harassment were prosecuted in 2006, at the time of the facts.
Google has been accused of abuses related to the failure of preventing defamation and to having made a profit out of that video thanks to the ads on the page (this is an abuse because our privacy laws). Those are criminal charges that can result in both a fine and jail time. Under Italian law individuals have criminal responsibility and not companies. That's why the state is suing managers of Google and not the company.
My take on this issue is that's impractical to scan and review every single video, picture or comment posted to the internet (Google Video, YouTube, Flickr, even Slashdot). It's just a matter of volume. Laws that were created with the press or the TV in mind should be rewritten to take in account that fact unless we want to shutdown the Internet in Italy.
I'm sure that in every country there are forces that want to tighten the control on the Internet and the freedom of speech of individuals, but I'm also sure that in most countries the majority of the citizens don't support them. Criminal responsibility is individual and only posters should be sued when controls on content are impractical. The service provider should be exempted from any accusations of complicity.
It sounds like a bad environment for a programmer. I'd leave them with their closed source programs and look for a job in a better company.
This http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:JamesTKirk.jpg is a somewhat younger looking picture.
Shatner was 35 when he started acting as J.T. Kirk. Pine is 28. He has about the right age for the role he has to play in the story of the Kirk character. Furthermore people at 28 can already be everything they'll ever be if they're really good.
Good! That row of icons that I never liked will be relegated to the Apple desktop and won't clutter anymore the screens of any other OS :-)
Lively is a disconnected collection of small rooms. If the web were be like that we'd have fixed-length non-scrollable pages with almost no way to jump from one to another but the bookmarks/favorites menu. I hope that Google's not only opening the API but is also going to remove the constraints on the room size or let people connect rooms together to create a continuous environment like SL (the latter would be enough). If they don't it will never become a 3D WWW.
Being cheap is always a good thing but notebooks have always been more expensive than equivalent desktops. Mobility and lightness come with a price premium. For this reason I think that netbooks will always be more expensive than an equally powerful notebook.
Said that, I agree with most of TFA but I really can't use track points. I'll never buy anything that doesn't have a touch pad. Bluetooth is a nice to have feature but not strictly necessary. The single most important feature is a 4+ hour battery life followed by lightness (max 1 kg) and a matte display for outdoor usage. Disk space is not so important: I may want to watch movies on a plane or a train but I don't have to keep them around for long. That makes 100+ GB HDs pretty useless and only detrimental to weight and battery duration. IMHO SSDs are a much better choice for this class of devices.
Ok, this might be so extreme that you could call me a troll but if all elections are so close why don't you just toss a coin and save a huge amount of money? I understand that's a matter of legitimacy and popular involvement however when the president of 300+ million people is decided by a 269 votes margin tossing a coin models the outcome quite faithfully.
By the way, this happens in many countries. The outcomes of the elections in my country (.it) is usually resolved by small margins and the distribution of voters among electoral colleges. The last ones have been the exception to the rule. As left and right wing coalitions take turns at the government since 1994 tossing a coin could be good for us too :-)
I'm serious now: we have a very complex decision algorithm that yields a result that looks random (ok, I understand that the number of samples is small but forgive me). Does that teach us anything about the way we the people vote? How can half of the people be right and half be wrong? People tends to agree when judging many common practical and ethical problems, at least among members of the same culture. Did we end up with two different cultures inside the same country or the differences between the candidates are so small that votes split evenly because it's difficult to decide who's the best one?
Vaporware?
Yeah after all it's Microsoft ;-)
That was too easy, it doesn't even deserves to be modded as funny.
Yes, it might be so but it will take a great deal of marketing money before the masses will know about Ogg Vorbis and I don't see any company starting to invest on it.
IMHO it has to do with the phenomena for which most people believe that the Internet is that blue e icon on the desktop: cluelessness. In the case of digital music, many people believe that MP3 is free (as in pirated) music and AAC is a proprietary and DRM-protected format. Companies are just dealing with a general mindset that lead to a world full of MP3 players: trying to change it may cost them more than paying the MP3 licenses.
As TFA points out, that means that Google might use your and mine pictures to publish a photo book without paying neither you nor me.
I'm not using Picasa, but if I did I'd use it to show my pictures to my friends, not to give Google the right of doing whatever they want with my content. Similar ToS apply to Google Docs too: that means that Google might mail me all your docs, after all that's part of publicly distribute but would you like it?
Google's Terms of Use are too broad and they give Google some rights that are unrelated with the service that they say are providing. This is the whole point of the article and I think that they have a story. The fact that other companies have similar ToS just makes all the story worse: it's not Google bashing, it's bashing a whole industry and it's about our privacy. I think that I'll start again to read ToS and select accurately which service to use and which not.
The docs I care about are moving out of Google Docs now.
Well, this is a story. Maybe Slashdot should explain us why it's necessary that we grant it all those rights on our posts. They seem much broader than what's required to display our posts, quote somebody else's statements, backup and move them to new servers and media as technology progresses.
Google should do the same for their license and their services.
Third, all that money will go into the pockets of the companies that will deploy those pipes (buy their shares!), minus what occasionally will make its way back to who signed the bills ;-)
I can't give you a number but if you look at a map (this one?) you can see that half of India is in the tropics, all the South-East Asia, most of Mexico, all central America, more than half of South America and Africa. I think that the number is at least 2 billions, maybe 3. I'd guess that 30-40% of the human population live in the tropics.
The map and the data provided by this Wikipedia page could help make a more precise estimation, if I had the time.
If the premise of the article is right let's cut the Internet connections of that 5% of power users. We end up using only 50% of the available bandwidth and ISP paying more than they should. I bet that they'll quickly sell the unused bandwidth (it's called cost reduction and profit maximization) and poor granny will start waiting for Ancestry.com again.
The Internet will never be fast because ISPs will give us no more than what we need to use it in a more or less acceptable way.
By the way, how it comes that poor granny's connection is slow while power users play WoW without problems?