Using the Presidents up to Reagan, the odds were good that a President elected in a year ending in zero would die in office -- Jefferson, Monroe, and Teddy Roosevelt didn't but WH Harrison, Lincoln, Garfield, Harding, FDR, and Kennedy all did. If the pattern holds true, expect the winner of the 2020 election to die in office.
I think the fact that GW was President means we're in a Bizarro Universe...
T. Roosevelt didn't die in office but also wasn't elected in a "0" year. If you google McKinley, though . . .
How do you define what's bad for the planet anyway? All we can or should care about is what's bad for us. The planet has been inhospitable for human life before, and will be again. We just need to make sure that doesn't happen sooner rather than later.
That is generally what we mean by "bad for the planet" -- making it less hospitable for us as far as comfort, safety, adequate food, etc. goes. Obviously, the planet itself will survive with or without us. And life (of some sort) will somehow find a way
That depends on who "we" are. There are some people who think humans are the problem.
Falcon
I've heard of them, but never actually met one. Statistically, I don't doubt that someone does believe that. And if we manage to make the planet uninhabitable for ourselves, we'd probably take other species with us to oblivion. And that does seem wrong, kind of like poisoning your whole family with carbon monoxide just to do yourself in in the garage.
But we are part of nature. I don't think you can really call us "good" or "bad": we just are, like any other species. And species come and go, sometimes with the help of others. Not that we should be trying, of course.
How do you define what's bad for the planet anyway? All we can or should care about is what's bad for us. The planet has been inhospitable for human life before, and will be again. We just need to make sure that doesn't happen sooner rather than later.
That is generally what we mean by "bad for the planet" -- making it less hospitable for us as far as comfort, safety, adequate food, etc. goes. Obviously, the planet itself will survive with or without us. And life (of some sort) will somehow find a way
...trying to accuse a journalist of stealing property (it was abandoned, therefore not stolen, plus he returned it to Apple)...
It was lost/forgotten, not purposefully "abandoned". If you're in a bar and you loose your wallet (which I did once), you are not abandoning it. Plus, the finder did not return it to Apple. Gizmodo did after disassembling it and taking and publishing pictures (trade secrets). Both Gizmodo and the fellow who found the phone should be prosecuted.
If you lost your wallet, I'd look inside to find your ID so I could return it to you. Giz just assumed that the owner put a label in their iPhone. Wouldn't you?
First of all, you can't just claim you own something if you find it. They teach you this on Sesame Street: You have to either give it to the police to hold for 30 days or report it to the management of the place you found it. Selling something you do not rightfully own is illegal.
This has nothing to do with the bad customer service stories. This incident easily cost Apple millions of dollars in lost sales as people who were going to buy iPhones between now and the summer will instead wait for the new version.
Even assuming that the guy failed to fully obey the statues regarding lost property, consequential damages are not his problem. Don't believe me, check the disclaimer printed on his underwear. "But, officer, I was about to purchase a winning powerball ticket with the money I lost! See, I got the winning number right here! He owes me $250 million."
If you put your trash out on the curb, and a neighbor helps himself to the iPhone you accidentally dropped inside the bag, you can't later turn-round and sue your neighbor for stolen property in order to get it back. Abandoned property belongs to nobody.
Actually, you can turn-around and sue your neighbor for stolen property to get it back. I don't think you understand the legal system. You can pretty much sue anyone for anything. Whether you win or not is a whole different story.
Bzzt. I'm pretty sure the SCOTUS ruled that your trash was up for grabs years ago. But I'm too lazy to look it up.
Well, once a "trade secret" is revealed, it ain't secret, is it? It's not like Apple has legal authority to classify something "Top Secret". Trade secret means you don't tell anyone. Presumably, people and firms that work with Apple agree to something like that. But third parties -- wait for it -- don't generally enter into agreements with every possible entity whose secrets they might discover. Everyone in that category is pretty much on their own to determine what to do with such a windfall. Sorry, Apple.
Personally, I think that there should, first of all, be fewer occasions where you need to authenticate. Usually, it doesn't matter who you are, so why require authentication? Secondly, authentication should not always disclose everything. If the same data that I need to hand over to buy a $50 mobile phone can be used to get a $20000 loan, that's a security hole.
This is a good idea. I just can't figure why one needs to hand over an SSN to buy even a prepaid phone plan. Even worse, I was expected to give it out for a blood draw/lab work. I went in all adamant about kicking ass when they demanded it, telling them that they weren't paying me anything so they didn't need to make any IRS filings, privacy, etc. Then they didn't even care when I left the field on the form blank -- I was almost disappointed. I suppose that many times, SSNs are demanded just because the guy creating the paper/online form saw it somewhere else and copied it or else they just can't be bothered coming up with their own unique client ID. Naturally, online forms are the worst, since they'll just keep asking till you type something plausible.
Thirdly, when you're lending money, that's your choice. You can charge interest and/or fees to make it worth your while. What you can't do is get someone who wasn't a party to the agreement to be responsible for getting the money back to you. If you lent it to the wrong person based on false credentials, that's your mistake, not that of the person whose credentials were misused. Somehow, institutions seem to be able to strong-arm that person into paying up anyway. I'd like to see the end of that, too.
You'd think this is a no-brainer, wouldn't you? I get collections calls all the time for (I guess) the guy who previously had my number. If I look up the calling number, it's always a debt scavenger. If I actually get a person on the line when I answer I tell them that there's no "Gary" here, and the calls stop for a week for two. Then they start up again from a different number of a different scavenger, and we repeat. I suppose the collector sold the debt down the food chain. So I'm on-the-hook for some guy's bills because of only a phone number.
But not really. It's just a nuisance. I'm not Gary, and the only credential we share is a phone number. Still, I wonder if these agencies are hoping that a certain faction of "victims" will pay up just to be rid of the hassle. If you're buying the debt at pennies on the dollar, I guess you play the percentages.
So why should someone be really liable for a debt just because it was incurred with their SSN, address, etc., instead of just their phone number? I guess it's because the SSN is the ultimate blackmail tool: give it to the credit reporting bureaus if the victim doesn't comply. That's a lot more leverage than annoying calls.
I can understand that banks/etc. want to recoup their losses in these cases. That's understandable. But if they go and threaten to financially ruin an innocent 3rd party, there should be a punishment. Seriously, if you can't be bothered to do your due diligence on the front end of the transaction, then you better do it on the back or face the consequences.
How about a lawnmower analogy for a change . . . If someone steals my lawnmower by saying 'Hey, I'm your neighbor down the block, can I borrow your mower?', can I then go the alleged neighbor's house and take their mower? I'm pretty sure a court would say 'no.'
...I think Lucas is so pissed the he will forever be remembered for Star Wars and nothing else that he is purposely driving it into the ground...yet somehow, it still makes him a ton of money.
It's a shame...oh well, at least THX-1138 isn't getting this kind of attention. The "modernization" of it was actually really well done, minus the unnecessary car-chase and CGI scorpion.
Whatever keeps Lucas busy and away from American Graffiti, I'm cool with.
I am tired and perhaps not thinking clearly, but how is this possible?
"low income was more correlated to lower IQ than higher income correlated to higher IQ"
I don't want to put words in oodaloop's mouth, here, but this is my take on it. Also, this is PIDOOMA, so it could be entirely wrong, but it's how I think it could at least be possible/plausible.
Practically speaking, I would say that a person of below average intelligence would have their money-making potential compromised by their intellectual deficiency. It's hard to get a fair deal if you can't even figure out the deal. Even if they wished to become rich, it would be hard to do. So the overall earing power of the less mentally gifted would be lower.
A person of average or better IQ, on the other hand, has the opportunity to do well financially. They might not choose to, they might lack the "EQ" to properly schmooze their way to the top, they could suffer physical disability or mental illness, or for any other reason not be willing or able to take advantage of their gifts.
So a fool has little chance, whereas "nobody's fool" has more random odds of becoming prosperous.
If you were to plot a scattergram of data that followed my hypothesis, then you might see a trend of income varying with increasing IQ up to a point at which the income data points start spreading out, giving you much bigger error w.r.t. the earlier trend.
Again, I'm not a sociologist or economist or anything like that, so this could be total BS.
Possibly, but that should be easy to answer. We need the data for ages for all owners of the affected cars.
Bingo. If we don't know the distribution of the drivers/owners of these Toyota products, we really can't be sure of anything. After all, readers of ads in AARP magazine tend to be older adults. Is that because the younger readers skip the ads, or that readership is almost exclusively 55+?
I think he did RTFA, but was just pointing out that he thought low income was more correlated to lower IQ than higher income correlated to higher IQ - not that the study was poorly controlled. That's what I tell myself, too. Also the subject of my second favorite bible passage. Ecclesiastes 9:11, "The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all."
From what I hear, it is generally accepted that a 5-15 min break every workhour is healthy for you, as well as for your ability to stay focused. I find that if I'm working on a difficult problem, taking a walk while thinking on it is a good way to get ideas for breaking it. Most people just don't take those breaks for a number of reasons, such as forgetting to do it or fear that a boss may think that they are lazy. Smokers, however, have a regular craving, that reminds them to take a smoking break. And it is (still) more acceptable for a smoker to take a smoking break than it is for a non-smoker to take a similar break.(emphasis mine)
My Dad joined the US Navy in '45 (since he was about to be "invited" to join the army). If you smoked, you got a a smoke break every hour. If you didn't smoke, you didn't need a smoke break, now did you? Also cigarettes were free for the sailors -- at least everywhere my Dad was stationed. Philip Morris did his part for the boys. It took Dad 50 years to quit, by which time it was too late.
You are forgetting that some of us smoke because::gasp:: we enjoy it.
That's probably why, statistically speaking, there are more smokers than say, auto-finger-smasher-with-hammerers -- the former gets more enjoyment. So I doubt the point was missed.
That's an awfully specific set of tools. Don't you think you could have gotten your point across without resorting to dropping names of your pet tools?
Sure man. He gets a nickel every time someone uses MySQL.
You will not collect users’ content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission.
An empty robots.txt is not blank-check permission to crawl and use the data for whatever you want.
But has the guy even signed up? We're not talking the Geneva Convention, here. Could facebook really impose its facebook Constitution on a non member? Sure I understand they'd want to. But wanting and having are two different things, he said, noting the absence of his army of Natalie Portman fembots.
Do you suggest that this work falls in the realm of unauthorized access? Do you think facebook has specifically authorized Google? There are facebook pages in Google's cache. So does Yahoo! And bing, dogpile, redz . . . Have they really authorized all of these? These sites are certainly not providing their services without an eye to making money off of them.
But I could be wrong. Every search engine provider could have a deal with every web page that its system crawls . . .
You assume such anonymization is actually possible, I somehow doubt it.
If it can only be done clandestinely, then you should definately doubt it. On the other hand, if it's done above the covers with the lights on, you could evaluate the anonymity of the data yourself. Of course, it would be too late then, you might want to review the anonymizing scheme before the data is posted. Again, an above board researcher is more likely to submit his scheme for peer review or, perhaps even better, use a known good system. If you're really certain that such a claim is bogus, and you can back it up, you can publish your own results to that effect.
If you are a typical programmer, you'll be using libraries that already have the difficult math-y stuff worked out. If you can understand simple arithmetic, you've got all the math skill you need to be a programmer.
There's plenty of "math-y" stuff that the libraries can do for you, but if you don't know what to do with them they don't help much.
I'd like to see programmers knowing more about the basics of using math (or even arithmetic) at least for the application they're working in.
Example: When numbers are used to represent real-world values like quantities, volumes, speeds, and amounts of currency, you need to know how to properly handle such things as rounding and truncation for your particular application. If a number is the result of a sensor measurement of mass (or if you prefer, weight of the mass at 1g), your sensor will have a certain precision. Maybe you measure 2.608 pounds and your sensor is precise to +/-.001 pounds. Your application needs to be able to present or store this in other metrics. So you call PoundsToKg from your math library. You'd saved your pounds as a floating point number, so your result is floating point as well. Perhaps you know the range of expected values well enough that you pick the proper size of float. Well, I just did this with Google. They query "what is 2.608 pounds in kg" yields: "2.60800 pounds = 1.1829689 kilograms". Google apparently assume that my 2.608 was accurate to the limit of single precision floating point. If you ask about 1 pound, you get "1 pound = 0.45359237 kilograms". So google's library knows the ratio of lb to kg to 8 significant figures. So google's result is not only more precise than my original data (4 places) or even of google's assumption of my original data's precision (6 places), it's the 8 places from the kg/lb value it used. In reality, we only know the result to be 1.183 kg.
Is the Google calculator wrong? Not really, it's just behaving as a calculator or a math library. This is where it's important for the user/programmer to know the limitations of the data and the libraries operating on the data. I've had this situation come up with programmers. I was an EE working with other EEs and Computer Engineers on a measurement and recording system. When it came time to write the PC interface to the system, we brought in temporary CS-type guys to provide more manpower to the app written. On multiple occasions, I had just this sort of problem with the programmers. I'd tell them to round to the actual precision of the data and they'd be shocked, asking me why I would throw away all those perfectly good digits the libraries gave them! In cases where this was merely cosmetic, I just let it slide because there was no way in Hell I was going to convince them that the computer was "wrong". In more crucial areas, I noted where the problem was and came back to fix it after the temps were gone.
If you use numbers from the real world in your programming you need to know enough math to manipulate them properly, even if you are relying on your software libraries to do the heavy lifting. Perhaps the errors/miscalculations/misrepresentations/etc. are trivial or cosmetic. But if you don't know your math, how do you know that? How do you even know to think of it?
And we haven't even begun to discuss the limitations of floating point representation itself. Let alone all the other issues with numbers that can come up.
Most of the younger generation (such as my self) has either never heard of C64 or never used one. I've never used one of these machines before; I might be interested in getting a modern remake if it was just as limited as the original, just to see how far we've come since that time period, but the brand means very little to me in a modern computer. The all-in-one design would be very hard for me to use on a day to day basis because of my desk arrangement, and the same applies to many of my friends' desks as well. I concur that this will flop.
Presumably, if you were to get such a device, you would move your existing computer elsewhere . ..
For that matter, I see people of all ages using "all-in-one" computers every day. They call them laptops, notebooks, netbooks, etc. And these are even "all-in-oner" than a keyboard/computer with separate monitor like this "Commodore" sounds like -- haven't seen it, site is Slashdotted.
Slashdot Mirror
Using the Presidents up to Reagan, the odds were good that a President elected in a year ending in zero would die in office -- Jefferson, Monroe, and Teddy Roosevelt didn't but WH Harrison, Lincoln, Garfield, Harding, FDR, and Kennedy all did. If the pattern holds true, expect the winner of the 2020 election to die in office.
I think the fact that GW was President means we're in a Bizarro Universe...
T. Roosevelt didn't die in office but also wasn't elected in a "0" year. If you google McKinley, though . . .
How do you define what's bad for the planet anyway? All we can or should care about is what's bad for us. The planet has been inhospitable for human life before, and will be again. We just need to make sure that doesn't happen sooner rather than later.
That is generally what we mean by "bad for the planet" -- making it less hospitable for us as far as comfort, safety, adequate food, etc. goes. Obviously, the planet itself will survive with or without us. And life (of some sort) will somehow find a way
That depends on who "we" are. There are some people who think humans are the problem.
Falcon
I've heard of them, but never actually met one. Statistically, I don't doubt that someone does believe that. And if we manage to make the planet uninhabitable for ourselves, we'd probably take other species with us to oblivion. And that does seem wrong, kind of like poisoning your whole family with carbon monoxide just to do yourself in in the garage.
But we are part of nature. I don't think you can really call us "good" or "bad": we just are, like any other species. And species come and go, sometimes with the help of others. Not that we should be trying, of course.
How do you define what's bad for the planet anyway? All we can or should care about is what's bad for us. The planet has been inhospitable for human life before, and will be again. We just need to make sure that doesn't happen sooner rather than later.
That is generally what we mean by "bad for the planet" -- making it less hospitable for us as far as comfort, safety, adequate food, etc. goes. Obviously, the planet itself will survive with or without us. And life (of some sort) will somehow find a way
...trying to accuse a journalist of stealing property (it was abandoned, therefore not stolen, plus he returned it to Apple)...
It was lost/forgotten, not purposefully "abandoned". If you're in a bar and you loose your wallet (which I did once), you are not abandoning it. Plus, the finder did not return it to Apple. Gizmodo did after disassembling it and taking and publishing pictures (trade secrets). Both Gizmodo and the fellow who found the phone should be prosecuted.
If you lost your wallet, I'd look inside to find your ID so I could return it to you. Giz just assumed that the owner put a label in their iPhone. Wouldn't you?
First of all, you can't just claim you own something if you find it. They teach you this on Sesame Street: You have to either give it to the police to hold for 30 days or report it to the management of the place you found it. Selling something you do not rightfully own is illegal. This has nothing to do with the bad customer service stories. This incident easily cost Apple millions of dollars in lost sales as people who were going to buy iPhones between now and the summer will instead wait for the new version.
Even assuming that the guy failed to fully obey the statues regarding lost property, consequential damages are not his problem. Don't believe me, check the disclaimer printed on his underwear. "But, officer, I was about to purchase a winning powerball ticket with the money I lost! See, I got the winning number right here! He owes me $250 million."
If you put your trash out on the curb, and a neighbor helps himself to the iPhone you accidentally dropped inside the bag, you can't later turn-round and sue your neighbor for stolen property in order to get it back. Abandoned property belongs to nobody.
Actually, you can turn-around and sue your neighbor for stolen property to get it back. I don't think you understand the legal system. You can pretty much sue anyone for anything. Whether you win or not is a whole different story.
Bzzt. I'm pretty sure the SCOTUS ruled that your trash was up for grabs years ago. But I'm too lazy to look it up.
No wait, there's this google thing:
California vs. Greenwood
Well, once a "trade secret" is revealed, it ain't secret, is it? It's not like Apple has legal authority to classify something "Top Secret". Trade secret means you don't tell anyone. Presumably, people and firms that work with Apple agree to something like that. But third parties -- wait for it -- don't generally enter into agreements with every possible entity whose secrets they might discover. Everyone in that category is pretty much on their own to determine what to do with such a windfall. Sorry, Apple.
"Working" as in, you pull the chord and the ear moves?
Or "working" as in, you go for the chord, but the things runs off and starts multiplying and plotting the demise of your species?
Both. How strange the change from major to minor!
Cole Porter references on Slashdot? I guess Sideshow Bob did perform it on The Simpsons, so I suppose it's permissible.
However, once you make them take the hit, all that will happen is they pass on the costs to the customers by increasing their charges.
This oft-used expression runs counter to the model of supply-and-demand in a market with any demand elasticity.
Personally, I think that there should, first of all, be fewer occasions where you need to authenticate. Usually, it doesn't matter who you are, so why require authentication? Secondly, authentication should not always disclose everything. If the same data that I need to hand over to buy a $50 mobile phone can be used to get a $20000 loan, that's a security hole.
This is a good idea. I just can't figure why one needs to hand over an SSN to buy even a prepaid phone plan. Even worse, I was expected to give it out for a blood draw/lab work. I went in all adamant about kicking ass when they demanded it, telling them that they weren't paying me anything so they didn't need to make any IRS filings, privacy, etc. Then they didn't even care when I left the field on the form blank -- I was almost disappointed. I suppose that many times, SSNs are demanded just because the guy creating the paper/online form saw it somewhere else and copied it or else they just can't be bothered coming up with their own unique client ID. Naturally, online forms are the worst, since they'll just keep asking till you type something plausible.
Thirdly, when you're lending money, that's your choice. You can charge interest and/or fees to make it worth your while. What you can't do is get someone who wasn't a party to the agreement to be responsible for getting the money back to you. If you lent it to the wrong person based on false credentials, that's your mistake, not that of the person whose credentials were misused. Somehow, institutions seem to be able to strong-arm that person into paying up anyway. I'd like to see the end of that, too.
You'd think this is a no-brainer, wouldn't you? I get collections calls all the time for (I guess) the guy who previously had my number. If I look up the calling number, it's always a debt scavenger. If I actually get a person on the line when I answer I tell them that there's no "Gary" here, and the calls stop for a week for two. Then they start up again from a different number of a different scavenger, and we repeat. I suppose the collector sold the debt down the food chain. So I'm on-the-hook for some guy's bills because of only a phone number.
But not really. It's just a nuisance. I'm not Gary, and the only credential we share is a phone number. Still, I wonder if these agencies are hoping that a certain faction of "victims" will pay up just to be rid of the hassle. If you're buying the debt at pennies on the dollar, I guess you play the percentages.
So why should someone be really liable for a debt just because it was incurred with their SSN, address, etc., instead of just their phone number? I guess it's because the SSN is the ultimate blackmail tool: give it to the credit reporting bureaus if the victim doesn't comply. That's a lot more leverage than annoying calls.
I can understand that banks/etc. want to recoup their losses in these cases. That's understandable. But if they go and threaten to financially ruin an innocent 3rd party, there should be a punishment. Seriously, if you can't be bothered to do your due diligence on the front end of the transaction, then you better do it on the back or face the consequences.
How about a lawnmower analogy for a change . . . If someone steals my lawnmower by saying 'Hey, I'm your neighbor down the block, can I borrow your mower?', can I then go the alleged neighbor's house and take their mower? I'm pretty sure a court would say 'no.'
I'm confident the technology exists to keep something dry, in 2010.
I, for one, am quite happy with my "roof", as it's called.
Clearly the article said it turned it into an expensive brick!
But a brick that can still contribute to your electric bill.
...I think Lucas is so pissed the he will forever be remembered for Star Wars and nothing else that he is purposely driving it into the ground...yet somehow, it still makes him a ton of money.
It's a shame...oh well, at least THX-1138 isn't getting this kind of attention. The "modernization" of it was actually really well done, minus the unnecessary car-chase and CGI scorpion.
Whatever keeps Lucas busy and away from American Graffiti, I'm cool with.
I am tired and perhaps not thinking clearly, but how is this possible?
"low income was more correlated to lower IQ than higher income correlated to higher IQ"
I don't want to put words in oodaloop's mouth, here, but this is my take on it. Also, this is PIDOOMA, so it could be entirely wrong, but it's how I think it could at least be possible/plausible.
Practically speaking, I would say that a person of below average intelligence would have their money-making potential compromised by their intellectual deficiency. It's hard to get a fair deal if you can't even figure out the deal. Even if they wished to become rich, it would be hard to do. So the overall earing power of the less mentally gifted would be lower.
A person of average or better IQ, on the other hand, has the opportunity to do well financially. They might not choose to, they might lack the "EQ" to properly schmooze their way to the top, they could suffer physical disability or mental illness, or for any other reason not be willing or able to take advantage of their gifts.
So a fool has little chance, whereas "nobody's fool" has more random odds of becoming prosperous.
If you were to plot a scattergram of data that followed my hypothesis, then you might see a trend of income varying with increasing IQ up to a point at which the income data points start spreading out, giving you much bigger error w.r.t. the earlier trend.
Again, I'm not a sociologist or economist or anything like that, so this could be total BS.
Possibly, but that should be easy to answer. We need the data for ages for all owners of the affected cars.
Bingo. If we don't know the distribution of the drivers/owners of these Toyota products, we really can't be sure of anything. After all, readers of ads in AARP magazine tend to be older adults. Is that because the younger readers skip the ads, or that readership is almost exclusively 55+?
I think he did RTFA, but was just pointing out that he thought low income was more correlated to lower IQ than higher income correlated to higher IQ - not that the study was poorly controlled. That's what I tell myself, too. Also the subject of my second favorite bible passage. Ecclesiastes 9:11, "The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all."
From what I hear, it is generally accepted that a 5-15 min break every workhour is healthy for you, as well as for your ability to stay focused. I find that if I'm working on a difficult problem, taking a walk while thinking on it is a good way to get ideas for breaking it. Most people just don't take those breaks for a number of reasons, such as forgetting to do it or fear that a boss may think that they are lazy. Smokers, however, have a regular craving, that reminds them to take a smoking break. And it is (still) more acceptable for a smoker to take a smoking break than it is for a non-smoker to take a similar break.(emphasis mine)
My Dad joined the US Navy in '45 (since he was about to be "invited" to join the army). If you smoked, you got a a smoke break every hour. If you didn't smoke, you didn't need a smoke break, now did you? Also cigarettes were free for the sailors -- at least everywhere my Dad was stationed. Philip Morris did his part for the boys. It took Dad 50 years to quit, by which time it was too late.
You are forgetting that some of us smoke because ::gasp:: we enjoy it.
That's probably why, statistically speaking, there are more smokers than say, auto-finger-smasher-with-hammerers -- the former gets more enjoyment. So I doubt the point was missed.
That's an awfully specific set of tools. Don't you think you could have gotten your point across without resorting to dropping names of your pet tools?
Sure man. He gets a nickel every time someone uses MySQL.
Twilight was written by a Morman Author.
Do you mean The Charch of Jesas Chrast of Lattar Day Saants?
An empty robots.txt is not blank-check permission to crawl and use the data for whatever you want.
But has the guy even signed up? We're not talking the Geneva Convention, here. Could facebook really impose its facebook Constitution on a non member? Sure I understand they'd want to. But wanting and having are two different things, he said, noting the absence of his army of Natalie Portman fembots.
Do you suggest that this work falls in the realm of unauthorized access? Do you think facebook has specifically authorized Google? There are facebook pages in Google's cache. So does Yahoo! And bing, dogpile, redz . . . Have they really authorized all of these? These sites are certainly not providing their services without an eye to making money off of them.
But I could be wrong. Every search engine provider could have a deal with every web page that its system crawls . . .
You assume such anonymization is actually possible, I somehow doubt it.
If it can only be done clandestinely, then you should definately doubt it. On the other hand, if it's done above the covers with the lights on, you could evaluate the anonymity of the data yourself. Of course, it would be too late then, you might want to review the anonymizing scheme before the data is posted. Again, an above board researcher is more likely to submit his scheme for peer review or, perhaps even better, use a known good system. If you're really certain that such a claim is bogus, and you can back it up, you can publish your own results to that effect.
If you are a typical programmer, you'll be using libraries that already have the difficult math-y stuff worked out. If you can understand simple arithmetic, you've got all the math skill you need to be a programmer.
There's plenty of "math-y" stuff that the libraries can do for you, but if you don't know what to do with them they don't help much.
I'd like to see programmers knowing more about the basics of using math (or even arithmetic) at least for the application they're working in.
Example: When numbers are used to represent real-world values like quantities, volumes, speeds, and amounts of currency, you need to know how to properly handle such things as rounding and truncation for your particular application. If a number is the result of a sensor measurement of mass (or if you prefer, weight of the mass at 1g), your sensor will have a certain precision. Maybe you measure 2.608 pounds and your sensor is precise to +/- .001 pounds. Your application needs to be able to present or store this in other metrics. So you call PoundsToKg from your math library. You'd saved your pounds as a floating point number, so your result is floating point as well. Perhaps you know the range of expected values well enough that you pick the proper size of float. Well, I just did this with Google. They query "what is 2.608 pounds in kg" yields: "2.60800 pounds = 1.1829689 kilograms". Google apparently assume that my 2.608 was accurate to the limit of single precision floating point. If you ask about 1 pound, you get "1 pound = 0.45359237 kilograms". So google's library knows the ratio of lb to kg to 8 significant figures. So google's result is not only more precise than my original data (4 places) or even of google's assumption of my original data's precision (6 places), it's the 8 places from the kg/lb value it used. In reality, we only know the result to be 1.183 kg.
Is the Google calculator wrong? Not really, it's just behaving as a calculator or a math library. This is where it's important for the user/programmer to know the limitations of the data and the libraries operating on the data. I've had this situation come up with programmers. I was an EE working with other EEs and Computer Engineers on a measurement and recording system. When it came time to write the PC interface to the system, we brought in temporary CS-type guys to provide more manpower to the app written. On multiple occasions, I had just this sort of problem with the programmers. I'd tell them to round to the actual precision of the data and they'd be shocked, asking me why I would throw away all those perfectly good digits the libraries gave them! In cases where this was merely cosmetic, I just let it slide because there was no way in Hell I was going to convince them that the computer was "wrong". In more crucial areas, I noted where the problem was and came back to fix it after the temps were gone.
Lest anyone think that ignorance of this issue is unimportant, consider this example that predates the modern practice of "programming": THE FIELD ARTILLERY JOURNAL - NOVEMBER - DECEMBER - 1929.
If you use numbers from the real world in your programming you need to know enough math to manipulate them properly, even if you are relying on your software libraries to do the heavy lifting. Perhaps the errors/miscalculations/misrepresentations/etc. are trivial or cosmetic. But if you don't know your math, how do you know that? How do you even know to think of it?
And we haven't even begun to discuss the limitations of floating point representation itself. Let alone all the other issues with numbers that can come up.
Most of the younger generation (such as my self) has either never heard of C64 or never used one. I've never used one of these machines before; I might be interested in getting a modern remake if it was just as limited as the original, just to see how far we've come since that time period, but the brand means very little to me in a modern computer. The all-in-one design would be very hard for me to use on a day to day basis because of my desk arrangement, and the same applies to many of my friends' desks as well. I concur that this will flop.
Presumably, if you were to get such a device, you would move your existing computer elsewhere . . .
For that matter, I see people of all ages using "all-in-one" computers every day. They call them laptops, notebooks, netbooks, etc. And these are even "all-in-oner" than a keyboard/computer with separate monitor like this "Commodore" sounds like -- haven't seen it, site is Slashdotted.
If someone watched Spy Kids 3D and doesn't have kids, he or she should probably not be on slashdot.
He or she is also probably on a special list, too.