Tape is made for deep archiving, meaning you probably won't need to read the data anytime soon, but when you do it will be there. It is cheaper and more reliable than disk for this. Therefore, a lot of people still use them.
The fact is, we don't know how well movies would sell with no piracy. Some people would pay to see the movie if they couldn't pirate it, some wouldn't.
Saying a movie (Avatar) wasn't hurt by piracy because it sold well is based off just as little information as saying a movie (Hurt Locker) was hurt by piracy. In fact, the fact that Avatar did well could support the Hurt Locker producers' argument because people can't easily pirate 3D movies.
Well, that makes sense, you are listing large stable companies, and these companies always have modest P/E ratios. High P/E ratios indicate an expectation of growth, and your list are generally not companies that are capable of quick growth.
I have been saying Apple is overvalued for a long time now, and I've been consistently proven wrong. How? Compare it's earnings (http://i.imgur.com/28gMg.png) with Microsoft's (http://i.imgur.com/TO9rG.png). It has continued to grow into its valuation from a year or so back, something Microsoft would not be capable of if it had a higher P/E.
I still think Apple is overvalued, but Steve Jobs is known by investors for breaking expectations.
The only thing I'm saying is that Texas seceding would be terrible for the USA. I'm amazed that anyone thinks kicking out a state that represents 10% of the population and GDP would be good for us. I don't care for the state's politics, but at least the people there contribute positively to the economy.
If Texas split off, they would be wealthier than the US, especially if they deported poorer immigrants (which they would likely do, especially the 1-2 million estimated illegal immigrants there). They have a robust economy with lots of tech (Dell, AT&T, Texas Instruments), oil, and agriculture.
I don't think people in Texas strongly oppose seceding. Your argument is better used against the other poorer Confederate states.
He actually goes into a lot of detail on this (http://www.peta.org/hpl.htm#hpl_license_details) when clarifying the license. Apparently, the term "harm" comes from law.
"Lets start with the term "bodily harm". It is a phrase borrowed from English and Canadian law. It's generally understood to mean: "any hurt or injury that interferes with the health or comfort of a person and that is more than merely transient or trifling in nature". The therm also covers some forms of psychological harm, where there is formal medical evidence to verify the injury. In particular, killing is considered a type of "bodily harm".
We have used the phrase "intended purpose of causing bodily harm" to distinguish between cases of unintentional or accidental harm from more sinister cases, where the harm is really intended.
There are some cases where causing bodily harm is perfectly fine; in some sports, in body modification, in some forms of sexual activities, etc.. That is why we have added the phrase "without their [the harmed persons] consent". This makes it ok to use HPL licensed software for e.g. developing a computer aided tattoo drawing tool.
The part of the license that covers prevention of harming animals also requires some explaining. Since there is no consent clause regarding animals (animals can't consent to being harmed) we have added the wording "any other animal [than humans]". The reason for this is that the consent clause for humans could otherwise be eclipsed by the subsequent, more restrictive, animal clause.
The term "grievous bodily harm" is also borrowed from English law (where it applies to humans) and covers bodily harm that is more serious in nature. The reason for choosing a different degree of harm with regards to animals is that we do not want to prevent HPL licensed software from being used in some wildlife preservation applications (where animals might be sedated, tagged, etc.).
Finally, what does "animal from the phylum chordata" mean? Well, chordates are a group of animal species (phylum is a biological taxonomic rank), which includes all mammals, fishes, reptiles, amphibians and birds. We do not use the term animals unqualified since there are some rare cases where we wish HPL licensed software to be available for use in applications that do causes harm. These rare cases include fighting malaria by killing mosquitoes (not a chordate) and helping humans and animals suffering from parasites like fleas, flatworms, etc.."
Did you read the first sentence? "Using lead weights and *depth sounders*"
That is what they used to do. But it only samples a tiny bit of the ocean and is biased towards certain parts of the ocean, like shipping channels. As the article says, the depth of the ocean is not very smooth, so non-global estimates won't be accurate.
Culture doesn't move linearly like that. Globalization should, and has to some extent, modernized much of the world. The problem in much of the Middle East isn't that the people are extremist, it is that the Governments are.
I was thinking of a solution to the selection bias problem that I think would also help with this issue. The researchers could "profile" different users by looking at their history. New users (with little history) and frequent but consistent users (several negative messages about a candidate a day, effectively users that tweet very little useful information) can be discounted, while more dynamic users that change their opinions in interesting ways and correlate with polls can be counted more.
Pollsters often weight their results to improve accuracy, and this would be no different. It would also remove obvious attempts to influence the results.
Well, as they say, "the coding style is what you might expect from a self-taught high school student, so it could be a challenge to understand, but feel free to give it a shot!"
This 12,000 line file really does remind me of something I would have written in high school (http://hg.icculus.org/icculus/lugaru/file/0b8beb014a87/Source/GameTick.cpp).
Anyway, kudos to the developer for open sourcing it!
But the benefit of increased albedo from the new clouds is also a temporary effect. Therefore, it is important to determine if the project will have a net improvement. Otherwise, what's the point?
This is a good point, but clouds have high albedo which reflect significant amounts of sunlight off the Earth. The question is which effect is stronger? My guess is albedo; if most of the sunlight never reaches the Earth it can't be trapped by water vapor.
As the summary says, geoengineering is controversial. It is also incredibly complex. The research is in very early stages (300K is nothing for a project this size), and I'm sure water vapor's greenhouse effect is one of the things they will watch closely.
Representing yellow with a mix of green and red is already a hack. What's wrong with software determining that the color of a pixel is yellow and actually lighting up a yellow light?
Maybe a yellow light looks more convincing than a red and green light right next to each other. I'd want to see for myself before making blanket judgments.
Maybe they are employing him in a high level role. After all, he probably knows who is the best at this kinds of stuff. Also, I believe he worked closely with the optical engineers on the camera equipment for Avatar.
While the cynic in me initially believed this was a pure PR move, I actually think he may be a good choice for something like this.
Yeah, I was wondering that too, I'm surprised more people didn't catch the weirdness of it.
I can think of two things: Matt and Trey are messing with us, or someone at Comedy Central was trying to be funny. I doubt they want to bring too much attention to the controversy, because it only makes them look bad. As a cable channel, there is no sort of requirement that they have to censor anything.
I think how long it will take is a valid question; the impact on the industry will be *huge* when these things become mainstream.
Part of the problem is that unlike LCDs, SSDs are hidden from view. Average Joe doesn't demand it because he doesn't know the impact it will have on him.
You don't see the risk of reputable journals passing over legitimate research because it comes from China?
This could be the worst thing for science in China, and pretty terrible for science in general (imagine the split it could cause). Academic integrity should be bottom-up because fact checking from the top (from a journal's perspective) is often impossible.
We aren't a software company, you could implement our patents in 500 lines of code. It's not the implementation that is hard to come up with, it is the idea. I mean a stroke of genius to come up with it and dozens of hours to prove it is worth doing. Once you prove the idea is worth doing, anyone can learn it and implement it in a working day.
These are the kinds of things that are worth protecting, and exactly what patents are made for. But they still fall under the insanely broad category of "software patents".
I'm a bit troubled by Slashdot's blanket reaction to software patents.
In the line of work I am in (broadly: statistical analytics), almost all innovation comes in the form of creating improved methods that are implemented in software. It takes a large amount of resources to come up with these improved methods (they are generally far from obvious), and they can easily be transferred across the industry. Most companies in my industry would refuse to pay for innovation if they knew people could join, learn every recent innovation in two months, and then leave to the highest competitor bidder, effectively destroying any competitive advantage. Non-compete agreements are legally useless in my state, and NDAs are tenuous and practically hard to enforce. Patents (or stealing IP) are really the primary methods companies in my industry survive.
tldr: software patents can and do vastly encourage innovation in several competitive and useful industries.
People of Iowa and neighboring cities were surprised by a meteor shower on Wednesday night. The fireball resembling meteor is captured in a picture by an Iowa resident - that is believed to be a part of the meteor shower. This meteor wasn't like a flash - it appeared at 10 p.m. and stayed there for good 15 minutes!
According to the National Weather Service, the meteor was moving from west to east and before it reached the horizon, it broke up into smaller pieces and was lost from sight. Iowa was not the only place where this meteor was seen, but Wisconsin, Ohio, Missouri and Indiana also witnessed the fireball. It is still not confirmed by experts what caused the meteor fireball to stay in the sky like that or whether it would have hit the ground or not. It was definitely an exciting site in Iowa.
You are looking at it from your perspective, but do the masses really care about these things? Firefox's position is actually pretty tenuous - it comes largely from geeks telling their friends to use it, but if the geeks get annoyed at Firefox (something that has already started) there could be a mass exodus. Also, Firefox depends largely on Google for its revenue; while Google has not indicated they will stop supporting firefox, they could end their relationship if Firefox becomes weak enough.
BTW, Chrome's adblocking is about as good as firefox's at this point.
I don't get why people talk about NP hard in games that generally have fixed-sized worlds. The whole point of complexity in computer science is to talk about how an algorithm can scale up with N, but when N is fixed I would argue that the algorithm's complexity doesn't even matter; it is fixed for that game. For example, who cares if an AI takes 10x longer every time you add 1 to the width of a tetris world? 99.999% of people play on a 10x20 board. When I hear someone say "blah" is NP hard, I always ask "what is N?" You'd be amazed how many people can't answer that question.
Also, calling games like these NP-hard misses the more important point of how good heuristic algorithms are, which is the way most humans and current AIs attempt to solve them. A game is not more fun because is it NP-hard, it is often more fun because finding, learning, and applying the heuristics on the game is fun.
Slashdot Mirror
Tape is made for deep archiving, meaning you probably won't need to read the data anytime soon, but when you do it will be there. It is cheaper and more reliable than disk for this. Therefore, a lot of people still use them.
The fact is, we don't know how well movies would sell with no piracy. Some people would pay to see the movie if they couldn't pirate it, some wouldn't.
Saying a movie (Avatar) wasn't hurt by piracy because it sold well is based off just as little information as saying a movie (Hurt Locker) was hurt by piracy. In fact, the fact that Avatar did well could support the Hurt Locker producers' argument because people can't easily pirate 3D movies.
Maybe they should have made Hurt Locker in 3D ;)
Well, that makes sense, you are listing large stable companies, and these companies always have modest P/E ratios. High P/E ratios indicate an expectation of growth, and your list are generally not companies that are capable of quick growth.
I have been saying Apple is overvalued for a long time now, and I've been consistently proven wrong. How? Compare it's earnings (http://i.imgur.com/28gMg.png) with Microsoft's (http://i.imgur.com/TO9rG.png). It has continued to grow into its valuation from a year or so back, something Microsoft would not be capable of if it had a higher P/E.
I still think Apple is overvalued, but Steve Jobs is known by investors for breaking expectations.
The only thing I'm saying is that Texas seceding would be terrible for the USA. I'm amazed that anyone thinks kicking out a state that represents 10% of the population and GDP would be good for us. I don't care for the state's politics, but at least the people there contribute positively to the economy.
If Texas split off, they would be wealthier than the US, especially if they deported poorer immigrants (which they would likely do, especially the 1-2 million estimated illegal immigrants there). They have a robust economy with lots of tech (Dell, AT&T, Texas Instruments), oil, and agriculture.
I don't think people in Texas strongly oppose seceding. Your argument is better used against the other poorer Confederate states.
He actually goes into a lot of detail on this (http://www.peta.org/hpl.htm#hpl_license_details) when clarifying the license. Apparently, the term "harm" comes from law.
"Lets start with the term "bodily harm". It is a phrase borrowed from English and Canadian law. It's generally understood to mean: "any hurt or injury that interferes with the health or comfort of a person and that is more than merely transient or trifling in nature". The therm also covers some forms of psychological harm, where there is formal medical evidence to verify the injury. In particular, killing is considered a type of "bodily harm".
We have used the phrase "intended purpose of causing bodily harm" to distinguish between cases of unintentional or accidental harm from more sinister cases, where the harm is really intended.
There are some cases where causing bodily harm is perfectly fine; in some sports, in body modification, in some forms of sexual activities, etc.. That is why we have added the phrase "without their [the harmed persons] consent". This makes it ok to use HPL licensed software for e.g. developing a computer aided tattoo drawing tool.
The part of the license that covers prevention of harming animals also requires some explaining. Since there is no consent clause regarding animals (animals can't consent to being harmed) we have added the wording "any other animal [than humans]". The reason for this is that the consent clause for humans could otherwise be eclipsed by the subsequent, more restrictive, animal clause.
The term "grievous bodily harm" is also borrowed from English law (where it applies to humans) and covers bodily harm that is more serious in nature. The reason for choosing a different degree of harm with regards to animals is that we do not want to prevent HPL licensed software from being used in some wildlife preservation applications (where animals might be sedated, tagged, etc.).
Finally, what does "animal from the phylum chordata" mean? Well, chordates are a group of animal species (phylum is a biological taxonomic rank), which includes all mammals, fishes, reptiles, amphibians and birds. We do not use the term animals unqualified since there are some rare cases where we wish HPL licensed software to be available for use in applications that do causes harm. These rare cases include fighting malaria by killing mosquitoes (not a chordate) and helping humans and animals suffering from parasites like fleas, flatworms, etc.."
[citation needed]
I grew up with a boat, and our "sounder" was sonar. There's a reason why it's called a sounder...
Did you read the first sentence?
"Using lead weights and *depth sounders*"
That is what they used to do. But it only samples a tiny bit of the ocean and is biased towards certain parts of the ocean, like shipping channels. As the article says, the depth of the ocean is not very smooth, so non-global estimates won't be accurate.
Culture doesn't move linearly like that. Globalization should, and has to some extent, modernized much of the world. The problem in much of the Middle East isn't that the people are extremist, it is that the Governments are.
I was thinking of a solution to the selection bias problem that I think would also help with this issue. The researchers could "profile" different users by looking at their history. New users (with little history) and frequent but consistent users (several negative messages about a candidate a day, effectively users that tweet very little useful information) can be discounted, while more dynamic users that change their opinions in interesting ways and correlate with polls can be counted more.
Pollsters often weight their results to improve accuracy, and this would be no different. It would also remove obvious attempts to influence the results.
Well, as they say, "the coding style is what you might expect from a self-taught high school student, so it could be a challenge to understand, but feel free to give it a shot!"
This 12,000 line file really does remind me of something I would have written in high school (http://hg.icculus.org/icculus/lugaru/file/0b8beb014a87/Source/GameTick.cpp).
Anyway, kudos to the developer for open sourcing it!
But the benefit of increased albedo from the new clouds is also a temporary effect. Therefore, it is important to determine if the project will have a net improvement. Otherwise, what's the point?
This is a good point, but clouds have high albedo which reflect significant amounts of sunlight off the Earth. The question is which effect is stronger? My guess is albedo; if most of the sunlight never reaches the Earth it can't be trapped by water vapor.
As the summary says, geoengineering is controversial. It is also incredibly complex. The research is in very early stages (300K is nothing for a project this size), and I'm sure water vapor's greenhouse effect is one of the things they will watch closely.
Representing yellow with a mix of green and red is already a hack. What's wrong with software determining that the color of a pixel is yellow and actually lighting up a yellow light?
Maybe a yellow light looks more convincing than a red and green light right next to each other. I'd want to see for myself before making blanket judgments.
I believe this is the satellite Google maps used in my area:
http://www.geoeye.com/CorpSite/products/imagery-sources/Default.aspx#geoeye1
It has a resolution of 1-1.5 feet (the color is separately collected from a 4-5 foot resolution sensor).
My car is also visible from space, via Google Map's "satellite view".
Does that make my 1995 Chevy special?
Maybe they are employing him in a high level role. After all, he probably knows who is the best at this kinds of stuff. Also, I believe he worked closely with the optical engineers on the camera equipment for Avatar.
While the cynic in me initially believed this was a pure PR move, I actually think he may be a good choice for something like this.
Yeah, I was wondering that too, I'm surprised more people didn't catch the weirdness of it.
I can think of two things: Matt and Trey are messing with us, or someone at Comedy Central was trying to be funny. I doubt they want to bring too much attention to the controversy, because it only makes them look bad. As a cable channel, there is no sort of requirement that they have to censor anything.
I think how long it will take is a valid question; the impact on the industry will be *huge* when these things become mainstream.
Part of the problem is that unlike LCDs, SSDs are hidden from view. Average Joe doesn't demand it because he doesn't know the impact it will have on him.
You don't see the risk of reputable journals passing over legitimate research because it comes from China?
This could be the worst thing for science in China, and pretty terrible for science in general (imagine the split it could cause). Academic integrity should be bottom-up because fact checking from the top (from a journal's perspective) is often impossible.
We aren't a software company, you could implement our patents in 500 lines of code. It's not the implementation that is hard to come up with, it is the idea. I mean a stroke of genius to come up with it and dozens of hours to prove it is worth doing. Once you prove the idea is worth doing, anyone can learn it and implement it in a working day.
These are the kinds of things that are worth protecting, and exactly what patents are made for. But they still fall under the insanely broad category of "software patents".
I'm a bit troubled by Slashdot's blanket reaction to software patents.
In the line of work I am in (broadly: statistical analytics), almost all innovation comes in the form of creating improved methods that are implemented in software. It takes a large amount of resources to come up with these improved methods (they are generally far from obvious), and they can easily be transferred across the industry. Most companies in my industry would refuse to pay for innovation if they knew people could join, learn every recent innovation in two months, and then leave to the highest competitor bidder, effectively destroying any competitive advantage. Non-compete agreements are legally useless in my state, and NDAs are tenuous and practically hard to enforce. Patents (or stealing IP) are really the primary methods companies in my industry survive.
tldr: software patents can and do vastly encourage innovation in several competitive and useful industries.
Apparently 15 minutes: http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/5614609-meteor-stands-still-for-15-minutes-in-iowa-pictures
People of Iowa and neighboring cities were surprised by a meteor shower on Wednesday night. The fireball resembling meteor is captured in a picture by an Iowa resident - that is believed to be a part of the meteor shower. This meteor wasn't like a flash - it appeared at 10 p.m. and stayed there for good 15 minutes!
According to the National Weather Service, the meteor was moving from west to east and before it reached the horizon, it broke up into smaller pieces and was lost from sight. Iowa was not the only place where this meteor was seen, but Wisconsin, Ohio, Missouri and Indiana also witnessed the fireball. It is still not confirmed by experts what caused the meteor fireball to stay in the sky like that or whether it would have hit the ground or not. It was definitely an exciting site in Iowa.
You are looking at it from your perspective, but do the masses really care about these things? Firefox's position is actually pretty tenuous - it comes largely from geeks telling their friends to use it, but if the geeks get annoyed at Firefox (something that has already started) there could be a mass exodus. Also, Firefox depends largely on Google for its revenue; while Google has not indicated they will stop supporting firefox, they could end their relationship if Firefox becomes weak enough.
BTW, Chrome's adblocking is about as good as firefox's at this point.
I don't get why people talk about NP hard in games that generally have fixed-sized worlds. The whole point of complexity in computer science is to talk about how an algorithm can scale up with N, but when N is fixed I would argue that the algorithm's complexity doesn't even matter; it is fixed for that game.
For example, who cares if an AI takes 10x longer every time you add 1 to the width of a tetris world? 99.999% of people play on a 10x20 board. When I hear someone say "blah" is NP hard, I always ask "what is N?" You'd be amazed how many people can't answer that question.
Also, calling games like these NP-hard misses the more important point of how good heuristic algorithms are, which is the way most humans and current AIs attempt to solve them. A game is not more fun because is it NP-hard, it is often more fun because finding, learning, and applying the heuristics on the game is fun.