I too have had experience dropping a lot of weight relatively effortlessly but now I seem to be in a high stress low exercise, high processed food area where I should not be. I'll look at those links!
Hello, I would like to mention some points from the Japanese PDF.
First of all, Japan has some very strict new laws on how corporations must handle personal information of individuals to protect their privacy. Along with the changes in the Corporation Law recently, these laws mean that virtually all major corporations in Japan have been rewriting their articles of incorporation, employee manuals, IT department guidelines, and so on. It doesn't mean things are more secure, but it does mean they are supposed to be more secure. IIRC if your company handles the personal information on more than 500 people then you have to implement certain procedures. (Anyway I am not attempting to provide authoritative information here.)
There also have been a number of scandals (mainly at big banks) on customer information being leaked. So now all corporations' fundamental articles include words like "leakage" and "falsification" of information as things that must be prevented. Japanese companies usually have their fiscal year begin April 1 which means that just a couple weeks ago, most corporations had their general shareholders meetings (many on the same day, to avoid organized crime from interfering) where things like this got voted on (if they weren't the previous year). ODF and standards haven't been on the plate but maybe they will be next year with this announcement.
Okay, on to the PDF. The PDF includes definitions of many terms including "vendor lockin", "open standards", etc. ODF and XML are mentioned by name. It seems to be well written (though I have not read the whole thing). It would seem to exclude allowing Microsoft's horrible new format as an open format because it mentions in the vendor lockin definition the nonavailability of an API, or the limitation on ability to implement it due to licensing requirements. IANAL but it would seem that the government has the leeway to make sane judgements, even in the case of for example Microsoft taking over the standards process and making OOXML an international standard. That said, Japan is probably Microsoft's best or second best market.
The document also states clearly that open formats are to be preferred, and must be used to promote exchange of information between ministries. The word "saiyou" (adopt, use) is used in the statements that say software that adopts open standards is desirable. It is not clear that this forbids the software to also support closed formats, but the spirit of the document would seem to prefer fully open software/solutions so that data may not be saved in closed formats, as this would hamper free exchange of information and the ability to store/view the documents into perpetuity.
Here is a translation of section 4.2.3 on page 19. I, Matthew Rosin, hereby release this translated text to the world in the public domain but deny responsibility for any mistakes.
--- 4.2.3. Policy related to giving priority to open standards
It is desirable for the government and public organizations to secure the mutual interoperability of information systems between administrative organizations and with related private sector and international organizations, in order to pursue efficient administration and to provide highly convenient service. To this end, it is necessary to procure software for which protocols, APIs, etc. that use interfaces that are compatible with open standards, to the extent to which implementation is possible.
The government and public organizations, in order to secure transparency related to policy, fulfill their responsibility for providing explanations, and realize expanded participation by the citizenry, software must be procured, to the extent to which implementation is possible, for which the formats of data and files are compatible with open standards, in order to guarantee for public documents the ease of access and ability to save and browse over the long term.
Mutual interconnection between related organizations, including governmental organs, and the free exchange of data among
Not only that. In a high level conference on research collaboration between the EU and Japan this week, the words open source and standards were included in the draft. A few years ago I remember "open source" being dropped.. Times change and Microsoft is entirely to blame for its own shortcomings.
This is really interesting. Two questions for anyone with knowledge.
1. Lustig says:
Well it's glycaemic index plus fibre. Fibre turns any food into a low glycaemic load food. In fact we are supposed to eat our carbohydrate with fibre, that's the key. Processed wheat is white, when you go out into the field it's brown but by the time it gets to your bakery it's white. What happened? Well the bran was stripped off, well the bran is the good part, the bran is what we're supposed to be eating.
So if we eat significant fiber with everything we ingest does everything become low GI? Or what? This will definitely make me eat French bread (if that has bran?) and no more white bread (which I have known is a "slab of sugar" but didn't really use that knowledge). And what is a compact source of fiber? I doubt you could drink a cola with HFCS and neutralize its evil with a graham cracker (if that has bran in it?) but what's the score there?
2. The experiment in which a drug was administered to children whose brains could not detect leptin resulted in the kids spontaneously working out, doing sports, eliminating soda from their diet, etc. I'd like to know what the kids thought / felt during the study, and want to know if we can "fool" ourselves into doing the same kind of activities and getting a similar effect, in effect bootstrapping a similar kind of health benefit without taking the drug Octreotide. (and what is that drug, sounds pretty strong!)
3. Extremely refreshing and seemingly sensible comments about why it is important to exercise. This has got to be massively important for geeks. Personally I had an obese father who as a doctor unfortunately must have been an ultrageek since he didn't want to do any sports that could hurt his hands (since he couldn't do surgery). He got diabetes. I've been heavy (not astoundingly, but overweight) since I was little and he encouraged me to sit in my room and play with my Apple II all summer I remember well, and now after he got diabetes and bypasses he said "turns out I was wrong, exercise is important!" I coulda killed him!
So anyway this is quite important and felt like a revelation: While calories are one thing I thought exercise was basically to boost the metabolism to burn food faster. Well this article says exercise increases skeletal muscle insulin sensitivity (so less insulin is made so less blood sugar is shunted into fat), lowers cortisol (which is a "megastress hormone" that the article says triggers deposition of bad fat, and finally detoxifies fructose.
These are all awesomely understandable reasons why you gotta exercise and at least to me at this moment it makes me want to throw this glass of diet cola (who cares! anything unhealthy!) off the table and never look a piece of white bread in the face again. Now we need some "best practices" or programming style guides that include exercise with this info in it, of course optimized for maximum concentration and efficiency with minimum weight gain.
It is really well timed, the deadline is the day that the bigwigs of wireless in Japan give their talks at the Wireless Expo. Talk about a jab! To me this is bullshit and also not aimed at phones. Look, I have a landline and a mobile phone. The mobile used to cost me $200/mo. but now I've cut back a lot and it is about $100/mo.
But the tax or whatever it is would be a large percentage of the cost of household devices, not just radio control robots (and how do you get them to pay yearly anyway??) but also zigbee stuff, etc. Poof, there goes ubiquitous low-cost sensor nets eh? Speaking of which Japan is probably the leader in rolling out ubiquitous things, they are starting an experiment in September in which two thoroughfares in the Ginza (like Broadway) are embedded with RFID of one kind or another.
My guess is the tax is an attempt to keep track of these things and not let them get too ubiquitous and pesky but not bothering to read the source beyond TFA it might have some other wonderful reasoning behind it, like making money, etc. Probably what will happen I'd guess is that the tax would get shifted to the industry association but who knows. There used to be a thing where all modems had to be modified so they couldn't war dial - only 3 calls per 2 minutes I think? Don't know if that is in effect still or not either.
Is the Hutter Prize is a bit optimistic and perhaps misleading? We are not 1% away from "AI", whatever that means, even though one might think so. It would appear that the Prize set the milestone a bit too easily in reach of non-AI systems, in other words systems that are mechanistically, strategically smart but not anything like what one would think of as AI. In other words, that text compression is NOT equivalent in scale or depth to the Turing test and they only look similar as they closely approach unity. Put another way, does PAQ do anything beyond language and math tricks, or is it really "understanding" anything at all in the text?
I guess you don't deal with Word docs much. Most of the business world uses them and they have to be saved (compliance, reference, etc.). For example I am editing a corporate financial report right now, and it includes huge chunks of what was used last year. PDF wouldn't hack it. However you have hit the nail on the head in two very interesting ways: 1) Corporate documents really need to be able to include some smart way of guaranteeing that past versions are locked and visible (at certain milestones, so data can't be falsified.. just copied to a new differently named file maybe? Signed versioning? Secure archiving with checksums?) and that the author is made very aware of the presence of old data in a document (as PDF for example does not, letting you black out things and then retrieve them again). The first might be addable to all apps via the OS, but the second needs rewritten apps I think.
It was my understanding that MS Word's save with password command is seriously broken, and I have told clients that. It doesn't affect their policy, in fact one uses the *same* password for all files, all employees. Just so they can say they are doing something even if it is the ultimate minimum.
But that same client sometimes has ultra sensitive documents and they still use the same thing. Some people do save in password encyrpted zip files.
Now if the Save as ODF plugin provides a really secure encryption method (which the Sun page does NOT say), that would be a very good thing to announce to people. Does anyone know about this? Even if say Word 2003 has better saving that would still be no difference as there are less than 10 machines probably with Word 2003 on it in a hundred person office I know and it would probably cost a bit to upgrade (they are used only to edit docs that have to edited in 2003).
The only problem is, this would not be good for documents that must not change. Sometimes opening a Word doc in OOo and saving back to.doc will introduce slight changes. Also I am going to have a hard time believing the metafile drawings in Word will save correctly but interested in ways to spread OOo.
Finally I'd like to mention I often install OOo on an Internet cafe machine (gets erased on reboot anyway) since the autocorrect saves me much typing. (I use an ipod but a usb pendrive would be the same). Check out www.portableapps.com, the OpenOffice on it works absolutely fabulously, no need to install on the hard disk and everything that normally goes in the windows folder stays on your usb drive! It is lightning quick and includes the Gimp and other packages too.
Zork and Wumpus, obviously. Doh! Tetris, okay that is on their top 10 and that makes sense. Nobody has mentioned f'ing Breakout or Pong even. Since we're talking about GAMES people wouldn't the best game be NOT the one that requires hundreds and hundreds of dollars to be spent, but rather something that can be played on the most platforms, is available for free, had a major effect on culture, has been around the longest, has been a basis for whole genres of game design, etc. Maybe Donkey Kong ought to be there but surely Pacman and a bunch of others too. It's one thing to sell a lot of FPS games to people who have splurged on the latest console, but what about games that get people to feed quarters in them for decades? Why don't they mention space invaders or Galaxian/Galaga? I haven't seen much interesting in a lot of the recent games and none of the games on their list except tetris makes me say darn I wish I had that. Even when I had no money once I was torn and wanted to buy a Saturn just for Nights. There have been totally groundbreaking, incredible games back into the text era and for many platforms since, but despite their ability to put tetris on the list and say Mario should be it, they really do not spend any meaningful time talking about how they judge and why not others that are better known. Heck Wizardry ][ and Ultima ][ for the Apple ][ were far more interesting at the time than games on the list are these days. And all the Infocom games (especially the versions of Zork that allowed full text parsing) were incredible. No mention of Sim City or even Spore which in its conceptual stage is still also interesting.
This week was IVR, the industrial virtual reality show, in Tokyo. SGI was showing a 4K SXRD projector (FWIW a 35mm slide is 8K, if you printed one at 4K it would suck, but 4K is 4 times better than high def.) and despite their very annoying switching between showing fact sheets in 2D (so your right eye felt blind in the polarized glasses) and 3D, what was cool was the window into the room to see what was driving it. They were using their Asterism high-end Windows machines (I think maybe 4, at least that was what the picture showed) networked to some number of NVIDIA Quadro PLEX rendering units (that's what I want for Christmas!). Having seen their infinite reality systems in the past I was not totally stunned, and in fact they had a very annoying ferrari 3D model that stuck so close to your eyes it hurt, but clearly they had built an interesting rendering network.
Many other exhibitors were also using these NVIDIA standalone rendering bricks and one booth I noticed was using two Dell PCs to drive a stereo view. Some were using 2 projectors superimposed on each other for higher contrast. So this stuff is all here already, heck I saw a Hi-Vision system using two superimposed projectors like 10 years ago, but easy self configuring and aligning systems that would let you plug in more pcs, rendering resources or projectors would be very cool.
The French were the first to be widely known to commit economic espionage against U.S. firms, I remember. Then IIRC the U.S. decided to get back at them.
In this case the French threw away a nice intel weapon in that they could have coordinated disinformation via their blackberries in an attempt to either disseminate fake information to the U.S. intentionally, or to detect the routes taken by info gleaned from the RIM network much as people make extra email addresses to track spammers.
The problem is, the politicians are only human, and these gadgets are just too darned cute to keep your fingers off 'em.
I wonder why RIM wouldn't be willing to offer the French government their own locally hosted servers.
Interesting. Not that I sort of expected something like it for a while.. though maybe not as a "functional network". There is so much going on or that could be going on in there, maybe we need to have simulations made like the ones that allowed circuits to program themselves wierdly/organically using induced currents, just so we can get a handle on the tricks that evolution may have drawn on. For example rereading a sequence with a byte offset. Incremental diffs (maybe some of this happens in polyploidal plants..), even something really hard to understand conceptually like using holographic information storage in some bits, or electromagnetic/quantum/local chemistry effects between different parts of dna. IANAbiologist but it stands to reason that valuable tricks which increase robustness or variation at little expense are bound to get taken up in an organism. It may be that much "junk" dna really is junk but that parts of it are laced with important data bits that do in fact get used. Hope we can find some relatively simple microorganism that demonstrates some of these same issues... Anyway it seems we have made another milestone if the report is true and now we get a slightly better handle on what is going on. Only thing... last time I checkd it was extremely hard for grads of a joint biology/cs program (students who wanted to go into this field) to get a paying job after graduation (except sometimes at a drug company) (in Japan). I don't know if this has changed but certainly we need a lot more people who know a hell of a lot about biology and computer science to crack this in our lifetimes.
Thank you, very interesting. I have long wondered what was the obstacle to a real online library. Presumably a library must buy at least one copy of each book it has but is that even required?
I can't tell but it seems to me the universities ought to be able to receive the raw scan data (or cleaned up pre-OCR) for use by the university (or university group). The question then is whether they can show the digital copy to more than one person at a time, and if they can still do so when the book is checked out. Many books say no reproduction for any use but it seems to me that libraries may require some additional legal protections so they can advance into the 20th century. There is a conflict also between limited budgets, and the scarcity of the printed media version which can only be viewed by one person at a time, but which would become prohibitive if the library had to pay the publisher for more concurrent copies. What is the solution? Perhaps a "site license" from publishers? What about textbooks, do libraries even carry up to date versions? They could if it was electronic but then kids wouldn't have to buy the $100 things or lug them around necessarily. Maybe buy a license to extra workbook problems online for your edition?
I understand my elementary school nephews in Stowe, Vermont are going to be learning on Vista in their school. It's nice they are getting any exposure at all (though they've been playing Harry Potter on a PC at home for years) but I'm worried about what their first experience will be, and also why an OS that most businesses are leery about and which ties up huge computing resources is being used in an elementary school. True I had a fabulous opportunity when I was young to learn on a keypunch terminal and feed Hollerith cards into a job hopper, and I had an early Apple II later.. but I think most households in the U.S. anyway young kids have experience with games (Wii fun, PS2 has too much gore and difficult games, PC has the ones you spend hours on constantly) and not much else. They don't "get" computers but they use them. What kind of lessons are they going to be taught? And will Cancel/Allow train their minds? Will they even learn there is a box to think outside of or will it always be what are they allowed to do? Apparently kids these days are told a lot more about what they are "allowed" to do from what they (my 3 nephews) tell me.
The video is very nice and seems to show of Silverlight's canvas function pretty well, if that is indeed Silverlight. The developer seems to have a very good artist's eye in the way the photos are pleasingly laid out.
I confess I had to watch the video without sound in my office but if as people are saying the image warping is automated, then it sounds very much like work done by Paul Haeberli of Silicon Graphics and posted in his Grafica Obscura notebook. He calls it image merging via a projective warp and works IIRC by lining up patterns in a collection of images automatically. It took like an hour to do this on something probably as powerful as a top of the line PC though so perhaps the tech in the video is not really doing the same thing.
It should be noted that he posts a bibliography too (below). I don't see SIGGRAPH but he does have the following. Not to diminish (too far) the developer's work but these things aren't created in a vaccuum you know. I do agree with other posts though, this is stunning and I'd like to have my OS built around this!
Incidentally there is also a creative commons attribtued video about drm that involves panning around a giant page with embedded videos in it. Also past work by famed computer graphic artist Daizaburo Harada did some things like that too, though of course about 100 times more beautiful and with music if I remember. Something also going on with morphing images of eyebrows and nether regions until your sensory apparatus is irretrievably hacked...
M. Irani and S. Peleg. Improving Resolution by Image Registration. Graphical Models and Image Processing, May, 1991. S. Mann and R. W. Picard. Virtual Bellows: Constructing High Quality Stills from Video. IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, Mov, 1994.
At first I thought it was just a research project to show how advanced they are, after all it may not be ASIMO but walking on two legs with something on top of them was one of the hard problems. You could stick the two legs under anything you like. I even read how wheeled robots don't fit into stairs, cars, and other things made for humans but legged ones do.
But then I realized, ahah! I had an ahah moment. This year is the 30th anniversary of Star Wars and of course that that means this is really a power droid
...and perseverance, you could make a PAC (political action committee) to get your own congressman elected (a competitor of one of the 50).
My father (now retired) was a doctor who gathered a large number of other doctors to fund a congressman and see do a study on starting their own hospital. Despite hating politics he proved quite effective and even after a successful initial study and having the whole project stolen by lawyer sharks they even came back and asked him to take it over again (which he refused). It seems an emininently doable and practical thing for a bunch of organized geeks to make their goal. Basically in this system it seems money talks, and only people who can get other people fired up *and organized* (and donating money to the project) will get ahead. But they can have a major effect not limited to their own state even. I think he had 3000 doctors in 3 states at one point. In the end of course it wasn't fun anymore I guess, but if you can stomach it, and you want it enough *anybody* can do this.
Two steps really, since the posts to this thread reveal a trend of looking for "funny" ads even when they are otherwise skipping ads.
1. Do a study to determine what kind of ads are "funny" i.e. sticky to people with ad skip controllers in their hands. This will lead to more interesting ads, possibly with "fun" or "interactivity". Like a Cowboy Neal poll or a window on a live chat.. people might even find the "commercials" to be more interesting that the tv show and want to extend the length of them!
2. Make an experimental interface (heck use Zudeo) and separate torrents for every TV show of every TV station, essentially copying a cable feed into a test server, torrents indexed by day/time or maybe topic, show name, or maybe a TV Guide style show calendar.
Anyway the point is, insert commercials into the torrents so they stay with their TV shows. Maybe try some with commercials all at the beginning, etc.
Do the same study as TFA but have families access the torrents instead. It *ought* to show that commercials embedded/preceding tv shows distributed via bittorrent are in fact MORE effective than ordinary television in selling a product.
NO. Kristallnacht was a real historical event: "Crystal Night", i.e. "The Night of Broken Glass" on November 9-10, 1938 in which Nazis burned piles of books EXACTLY as the Kansas bookseller does.
For you to make any utterance remotely suggesting this not to be the case, or suggesting that the introduction of the word Nazis renders any comment superfluous as is the fashion, equates you to a revisionist and supporter of stupidity. The same kind of reckless, nasty, rat-like stupidity of the Germans in 1938. Lots of people use the word Nazi and Hitler in stupid ways but this is one case in which it is DIRECTLY relevant. I would appreciate an apology.
I don't think I could bring myself to patronize a store whose owner burns books. The idea that it is right to burn books in any situation whatsoever is a tiny but critical element that enabled Kristalnacht (nazi book burning). Any bookseller who knows the book Farenheit 451 (which is also temperature at which paper spontaneously combusts) and still does this is one of the most unethical creatures around. Perhaps he eats babies too.
I like mysql but.. I made a varchar(5) column thinking it would expand automatically if a longer string was added. It truncated. Made it text instead. Undoubtedly this is fixable if I read more manual but I was under the impression from working with mysql 3 that this wouldn't happen and yet with mysql4 it did (probably because of this unsafe being default)..
This phone never really closes; the display with the mail,imode,offhook and joystick key grouping are always facing outwards though the rest of the kepad swivels out.
Well, it calls people from my pocket apparently and sometimes that is the last person I called, but now late at night which causes angry phone calls back to me. For some reason that person doesn't hang up, saying "I heard everything" whatever it was they heard. Once I was at a part and the guy next to me slammed into it and my coworker thought I was having a raucous time. And if they don't hang up ("I just heard walking all the time") then I wonder how much money that is costing me. Finally, the button that is used like a mouse button to select things seems to have halfway broken due to the stress.. it only works when you swivel the phone OPEN now, as if there was a difference with this stupid phone! (Oh yeah and the CCD died). Only neat thing is the hologram logo and sparkly pearl paint like a girl's fingernails. Time to move on.. but it's only a year or two old!
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you very much for your comment.
I too have had experience dropping a lot of weight relatively effortlessly but now I seem to be in a high stress low exercise, high processed food area where I should not be. I'll look at those links!
Matt
Thank you very much for your comment.
Matt
Hello, I would like to mention some points from the Japanese PDF.
First of all, Japan has some very strict new laws on how corporations must handle personal information of individuals to protect their privacy. Along with the changes in the Corporation Law recently, these laws mean that virtually all major corporations in Japan have been rewriting their articles of incorporation, employee manuals, IT department guidelines, and so on. It doesn't mean things are more secure, but it does mean they are supposed to be more secure. IIRC if your company handles the personal information on more than 500 people then you have to implement certain procedures. (Anyway I am not attempting to provide authoritative information here.)
There also have been a number of scandals (mainly at big banks) on customer information being leaked. So now all corporations' fundamental articles include words like "leakage" and "falsification" of information as things that must be prevented. Japanese companies usually have their fiscal year begin April 1 which means that just a couple weeks ago, most corporations had their general shareholders meetings (many on the same day, to avoid organized crime from interfering) where things like this got voted on (if they weren't the previous year). ODF and standards haven't been on the plate but maybe they will be next year with this announcement.
Okay, on to the PDF. The PDF includes definitions of many terms including "vendor lockin", "open standards", etc. ODF and XML are mentioned by name. It seems to be well written (though I have not read the whole thing). It would seem to exclude allowing Microsoft's horrible new format as an open format because it mentions in the vendor lockin definition the nonavailability of an API, or the limitation on ability to implement it due to licensing requirements. IANAL but it would seem that the government has the leeway to make sane judgements, even in the case of for example Microsoft taking over the standards process and making OOXML an international standard. That said, Japan is probably Microsoft's best or second best market.
The document also states clearly that open formats are to be preferred, and must be used to promote exchange of information between ministries. The word "saiyou" (adopt, use) is used in the statements that say software that adopts open standards is desirable. It is not clear that this forbids the software to also support closed formats, but the spirit of the document would seem to prefer fully open software/solutions so that data may not be saved in closed formats, as this would hamper free exchange of information and the ability to store/view the documents into perpetuity.
Here is a translation of section 4.2.3 on page 19. I, Matthew Rosin, hereby release this translated text to the world in the public domain but deny responsibility for any mistakes.
---
4.2.3. Policy related to giving priority to open standards
It is desirable for the government and public organizations to secure the mutual interoperability of information systems between administrative organizations and with related private sector and international organizations, in order to pursue efficient administration and to provide highly convenient service. To this end, it is necessary to procure software for which protocols, APIs, etc. that use interfaces that are compatible with open standards, to the extent to which implementation is possible.
The government and public organizations, in order to secure transparency related to policy, fulfill their responsibility for providing explanations, and realize expanded participation by the citizenry, software must be procured, to the extent to which implementation is possible, for which the formats of data and files are compatible with open standards, in order to guarantee for public documents the ease of access and ability to save and browse over the long term.
Mutual interconnection between related organizations, including governmental organs, and the free exchange of data among
Not only that. In a high level conference on research collaboration between the EU and Japan this week, the words open source and standards were included in the draft. A few years ago I remember "open source" being dropped.. Times change and Microsoft is entirely to blame for its own shortcomings.
1. Lustig says:
So if we eat significant fiber with everything we ingest does everything become low GI? Or what? This will definitely make me eat French bread (if that has bran?) and no more white bread (which I have known is a "slab of sugar" but didn't really use that knowledge). And what is a compact source of fiber? I doubt you could drink a cola with HFCS and neutralize its evil with a graham cracker (if that has bran in it?) but what's the score there?
2. The experiment in which a drug was administered to children whose brains could not detect leptin resulted in the kids spontaneously working out, doing sports, eliminating soda from their diet, etc. I'd like to know what the kids thought / felt during the study, and want to know if we can "fool" ourselves into doing the same kind of activities and getting a similar effect, in effect bootstrapping a similar kind of health benefit without taking the drug Octreotide. (and what is that drug, sounds pretty strong!)
3. Extremely refreshing and seemingly sensible comments about why it is important to exercise. This has got to be massively important for geeks. Personally I had an obese father who as a doctor unfortunately must have been an ultrageek since he didn't want to do any sports that could hurt his hands (since he couldn't do surgery). He got diabetes. I've been heavy (not astoundingly, but overweight) since I was little and he encouraged me to sit in my room and play with my Apple II all summer I remember well, and now after he got diabetes and bypasses he said "turns out I was wrong, exercise is important!" I coulda killed him!
So anyway this is quite important and felt like a revelation: While calories are one thing I thought exercise was basically to boost the metabolism to burn food faster. Well this article says exercise increases skeletal muscle insulin sensitivity (so less insulin is made so less blood sugar is shunted into fat), lowers cortisol (which is a "megastress hormone" that the article says triggers deposition of bad fat, and finally detoxifies fructose.
These are all awesomely understandable reasons why you gotta exercise and at least to me at this moment it makes me want to throw this glass of diet cola (who cares! anything unhealthy!) off the table and never look a piece of white bread in the face again. Now we need some "best practices" or programming style guides that include exercise with this info in it, of course optimized for maximum concentration and efficiency with minimum weight gain.
It is really well timed, the deadline is the day that the bigwigs of wireless in Japan give their talks at the Wireless Expo. Talk about a jab! To me this is bullshit and also not aimed at phones. Look, I have a landline and a mobile phone. The mobile used to cost me $200/mo. but now I've cut back a lot and it is about $100/mo.
But the tax or whatever it is would be a large percentage of the cost of household devices, not just radio control robots (and how do you get them to pay yearly anyway??) but also zigbee stuff, etc. Poof, there goes ubiquitous low-cost sensor nets eh? Speaking of which Japan is probably the leader in rolling out ubiquitous things, they are starting an experiment in September in which two thoroughfares in the Ginza (like Broadway) are embedded with RFID of one kind or another.
My guess is the tax is an attempt to keep track of these things and not let them get too ubiquitous and pesky but not bothering to read the source beyond TFA it might have some other wonderful reasoning behind it, like making money, etc. Probably what will happen I'd guess is that the tax would get shifted to the industry association but who knows. There used to be a thing where all modems had to be modified so they couldn't war dial - only 3 calls per 2 minutes I think? Don't know if that is in effect still or not either.
Is the Hutter Prize is a bit optimistic and perhaps misleading? We are not 1% away from "AI", whatever that means, even though one might think so. It would appear that the Prize set the milestone a bit too easily in reach of non-AI systems, in other words systems that are mechanistically, strategically smart but not anything like what one would think of as AI. In other words, that text compression is NOT equivalent in scale or depth to the Turing test and they only look similar as they closely approach unity. Put another way, does PAQ do anything beyond language and math tricks, or is it really "understanding" anything at all in the text?
I guess you don't deal with Word docs much. Most of the business world uses them and they have to be saved (compliance, reference, etc.). For example I am editing a corporate financial report right now, and it includes huge chunks of what was used last year. PDF wouldn't hack it. However you have hit the nail on the head in two very interesting ways: 1) Corporate documents really need to be able to include some smart way of guaranteeing that past versions are locked and visible (at certain milestones, so data can't be falsified.. just copied to a new differently named file maybe? Signed versioning? Secure archiving with checksums?) and that the author is made very aware of the presence of old data in a document (as PDF for example does not, letting you black out things and then retrieve them again). The first might be addable to all apps via the OS, but the second needs rewritten apps I think.
It was my understanding that MS Word's save with password command is seriously broken, and I have told clients that. It doesn't affect their policy, in fact one uses the *same* password for all files, all employees. Just so they can say they are doing something even if it is the ultimate minimum.
.doc will introduce slight changes. Also I am going to have a hard time believing the metafile drawings in Word will save correctly but interested in ways to spread OOo.
But that same client sometimes has ultra sensitive documents and they still use the same thing. Some people do save in password encyrpted zip files.
Now if the Save as ODF plugin provides a really secure encryption method (which the Sun page does NOT say), that would be a very good thing to announce to people. Does anyone know about this? Even if say Word 2003 has better saving that would still be no difference as there are less than 10 machines probably with Word 2003 on it in a hundred person office I know and it would probably cost a bit to upgrade (they are used only to edit docs that have to edited in 2003).
The only problem is, this would not be good for documents that must not change. Sometimes opening a Word doc in OOo and saving back to
Finally I'd like to mention I often install OOo on an Internet cafe machine (gets erased on reboot anyway) since the autocorrect saves me much typing. (I use an ipod but a usb pendrive would be the same). Check out www.portableapps.com, the OpenOffice on it works absolutely fabulously, no need to install on the hard disk and everything that normally goes in the windows folder stays on your usb drive! It is lightning quick and includes the Gimp and other packages too.
Zork and Wumpus, obviously. Doh! Tetris, okay that is on their top 10 and that makes sense. Nobody has mentioned f'ing Breakout or Pong even. Since we're talking about GAMES people wouldn't the best game be NOT the one that requires hundreds and hundreds of dollars to be spent, but rather something that can be played on the most platforms, is available for free, had a major effect on culture, has been around the longest, has been a basis for whole genres of game design, etc. Maybe Donkey Kong ought to be there but surely Pacman and a bunch of others too. It's one thing to sell a lot of FPS games to people who have splurged on the latest console, but what about games that get people to feed quarters in them for decades? Why don't they mention space invaders or Galaxian/Galaga? I haven't seen much interesting in a lot of the recent games and none of the games on their list except tetris makes me say darn I wish I had that. Even when I had no money once I was torn and wanted to buy a Saturn just for Nights. There have been totally groundbreaking, incredible games back into the text era and for many platforms since, but despite their ability to put tetris on the list and say Mario should be it, they really do not spend any meaningful time talking about how they judge and why not others that are better known. Heck Wizardry ][ and Ultima ][ for the Apple ][ were far more interesting at the time than games on the list are these days. And all the Infocom games (especially the versions of Zork that allowed full text parsing) were incredible. No mention of Sim City or even Spore which in its conceptual stage is still also interesting.
This week was IVR, the industrial virtual reality show, in Tokyo. SGI was showing a 4K SXRD projector (FWIW a 35mm slide is 8K, if you printed one at 4K it would suck, but 4K is 4 times better than high def.) and despite their very annoying switching between showing fact sheets in 2D (so your right eye felt blind in the polarized glasses) and 3D, what was cool was the window into the room to see what was driving it. They were using their Asterism high-end Windows machines (I think maybe 4, at least that was what the picture showed) networked to some number of NVIDIA Quadro PLEX rendering units (that's what I want for Christmas!). Having seen their infinite reality systems in the past I was not totally stunned, and in fact they had a very annoying ferrari 3D model that stuck so close to your eyes it hurt, but clearly they had built an interesting rendering network.
Many other exhibitors were also using these NVIDIA standalone rendering bricks and one booth I noticed was using two Dell PCs to drive a stereo view. Some were using 2 projectors superimposed on each other for higher contrast. So this stuff is all here already, heck I saw a Hi-Vision system using two superimposed projectors like 10 years ago, but easy self configuring and aligning systems that would let you plug in more pcs, rendering resources or projectors would be very cool.
Many other
The French were the first to be widely known to commit economic espionage against U.S. firms, I remember. Then IIRC the U.S. decided to get back at them.
In this case the French threw away a nice intel weapon in that they could have coordinated disinformation via their blackberries in an attempt to either disseminate fake information to the U.S. intentionally, or to detect the routes taken by info gleaned from the RIM network much as people make extra email addresses to track spammers.
The problem is, the politicians are only human, and these gadgets are just too darned cute to keep your fingers off 'em.
I wonder why RIM wouldn't be willing to offer the French government their own locally hosted servers.
Interesting. Not that I sort of expected something like it for a while.. though maybe not as a "functional network". There is so much going on or that could be going on in there, maybe we need to have simulations made like the ones that allowed circuits to program themselves wierdly/organically using induced currents, just so we can get a handle on the tricks that evolution may have drawn on. For example rereading a sequence with a byte offset. Incremental diffs (maybe some of this happens in polyploidal plants..), even something really hard to understand conceptually like using holographic information storage in some bits, or electromagnetic/quantum/local chemistry effects between different parts of dna. IANAbiologist but it stands to reason that valuable tricks which increase robustness or variation at little expense are bound to get taken up in an organism. It may be that much "junk" dna really is junk but that parts of it are laced with important data bits that do in fact get used. Hope we can find some relatively simple microorganism that demonstrates some of these same issues... Anyway it seems we have made another milestone if the report is true and now we get a slightly better handle on what is going on. Only thing... last time I checkd it was extremely hard for grads of a joint biology/cs program (students who wanted to go into this field) to get a paying job after graduation (except sometimes at a drug company) (in Japan). I don't know if this has changed but certainly we need a lot more people who know a hell of a lot about biology and computer science to crack this in our lifetimes.
Thank you, very interesting. I have long wondered what was the obstacle to a real online library. Presumably a library must buy at least one copy of each book it has but is that even required?
I can't tell but it seems to me the universities ought to be able to receive the raw scan data (or cleaned up pre-OCR) for use by the university (or university group). The question then is whether they can show the digital copy to more than one person at a time, and if they can still do so when the book is checked out. Many books say no reproduction for any use but it seems to me that libraries may require some additional legal protections so they can advance into the 20th century. There is a conflict also between limited budgets, and the scarcity of the printed media version which can only be viewed by one person at a time, but which would become prohibitive if the library had to pay the publisher for more concurrent copies. What is the solution? Perhaps a "site license" from publishers? What about textbooks, do libraries even carry up to date versions? They could if it was electronic but then kids wouldn't have to buy the $100 things or lug them around necessarily. Maybe buy a license to extra workbook problems online for your edition?
I understand my elementary school nephews in Stowe, Vermont are going to be learning on Vista in their school. It's nice they are getting any exposure at all (though they've been playing Harry Potter on a PC at home for years) but I'm worried about what their first experience will be, and also why an OS that most businesses are leery about and which ties up huge computing resources is being used in an elementary school. True I had a fabulous opportunity when I was young to learn on a keypunch terminal and feed Hollerith cards into a job hopper, and I had an early Apple II later.. but I think most households in the U.S. anyway young kids have experience with games (Wii fun, PS2 has too much gore and difficult games, PC has the ones you spend hours on constantly) and not much else. They don't "get" computers but they use them. What kind of lessons are they going to be taught? And will Cancel/Allow train their minds? Will they even learn there is a box to think outside of or will it always be what are they allowed to do? Apparently kids these days are told a lot more about what they are "allowed" to do from what they (my 3 nephews) tell me.
I confess I had to watch the video without sound in my office but if as people are saying the image warping is automated, then it sounds very much like work done by Paul Haeberli of Silicon Graphics and posted in his Grafica Obscura notebook. He calls it image merging via a projective warp and works IIRC by lining up patterns in a collection of images automatically. It took like an hour to do this on something probably as powerful as a top of the line PC though so perhaps the tech in the video is not really doing the same thing.
It should be noted that he posts a bibliography too (below). I don't see SIGGRAPH but he does have the following. Not to diminish (too far) the developer's work but these things aren't created in a vaccuum you know. I do agree with other posts though, this is stunning and I'd like to have my OS built around this!
Incidentally there is also a creative commons attribtued video about drm that involves panning around a giant page with embedded videos in it. Also past work by famed computer graphic artist Daizaburo Harada did some things like that too, though of course about 100 times more beautiful and with music if I remember. Something also going on with morphing images of eyebrows and nether regions until your sensory apparatus is irretrievably hacked...
At first I thought it was just a research project to show how advanced they are, after all it may not be ASIMO but walking on two legs with something on top of them was one of the hard problems. You could stick the two legs under anything you like. I even read how wheeled robots don't fit into stairs, cars, and other things made for humans but legged ones do.
But then I realized, ahah! I had an ahah moment. This year is the 30th anniversary of Star Wars and of course that that means this is really a power droid
Her homepage,
tortola and
possibly unrelated paper
...and perseverance, you could make a PAC (political action committee) to get your own congressman elected (a competitor of one of the 50).
My father (now retired) was a doctor who gathered a large number of other doctors to fund a congressman and see do a study on starting their own hospital. Despite hating politics he proved quite effective and even after a successful initial study and having the whole project stolen by lawyer sharks they even came back and asked him to take it over again (which he refused). It seems an emininently doable and practical thing for a bunch of organized geeks to make their goal. Basically in this system it seems money talks, and only people who can get other people fired up *and organized* (and donating money to the project) will get ahead. But they can have a major effect not limited to their own state even. I think he had 3000 doctors in 3 states at one point. In the end of course it wasn't fun anymore I guess, but if you can stomach it, and you want it enough *anybody* can do this.
Two steps really, since the posts to this thread reveal a trend of looking for "funny" ads even when they are otherwise skipping ads.
1. Do a study to determine what kind of ads are "funny" i.e. sticky to people with ad skip controllers in their hands. This will lead to more interesting ads, possibly with "fun" or "interactivity". Like a Cowboy Neal poll or a window on a live chat.. people might even find the "commercials" to be more interesting that the tv show and want to extend the length of them!
2. Make an experimental interface (heck use Zudeo) and separate torrents for every TV show of every TV station, essentially copying a cable feed into a test server, torrents indexed by day/time or maybe topic, show name, or maybe a TV Guide style show calendar.
Anyway the point is, insert commercials into the torrents so they stay with their TV shows. Maybe try some with commercials all at the beginning, etc.
Do the same study as TFA but have families access the torrents instead. It *ought* to show that commercials embedded/preceding tv shows distributed via bittorrent are in fact MORE effective than ordinary television in selling a product.
NO. Kristallnacht was a real historical event: "Crystal Night", i.e. "The Night of Broken Glass" on November 9-10, 1938 in which Nazis burned piles of books EXACTLY as the Kansas bookseller does.
For you to make any utterance remotely suggesting this not to be the case, or suggesting that the introduction of the word Nazis renders any comment superfluous as is the fashion, equates you to a revisionist and supporter of stupidity. The same kind of reckless, nasty, rat-like stupidity of the Germans in 1938. Lots of people use the word Nazi and Hitler in stupid ways but this is one case in which it is DIRECTLY relevant. I would appreciate an apology.
Matthew Rosin
I don't think I could bring myself to patronize a store whose owner burns books. The idea that it is right to burn books in any situation whatsoever is a tiny but critical element that enabled Kristalnacht (nazi book burning). Any bookseller who knows the book Farenheit 451 (which is also temperature at which paper spontaneously combusts) and still does this is one of the most unethical creatures around. Perhaps he eats babies too.
I like mysql but.. I made a varchar(5) column thinking it would expand automatically if a longer string was added. It truncated. Made it text instead. Undoubtedly this is fixable if I read more manual but I was under the impression from working with mysql 3 that this wouldn't happen and yet with mysql4 it did (probably because of this unsafe being default)..
This phone never really closes; the display with the mail,imode,offhook and joystick key grouping are always facing outwards though the rest of the kepad swivels out.
Well, it calls people from my pocket apparently and sometimes that is the last person I called, but now late at night which causes angry phone calls back to me. For some reason that person doesn't hang up, saying "I heard everything" whatever it was they heard. Once I was at a part and the guy next to me slammed into it and my coworker thought I was having a raucous time. And if they don't hang up ("I just heard walking all the time") then I wonder how much money that is costing me. Finally, the button that is used like a mouse button to select things seems to have halfway broken due to the stress.. it only works when you swivel the phone OPEN now, as if there was a difference with this stupid phone! (Oh yeah and the CCD died). Only neat thing is the hologram logo and sparkly pearl paint like a girl's fingernails. Time to move on.. but it's only a year or two old!