You don't need the government in order to have a monopoly or oligopoly that screws its customers. At the risk of stating the obvious, the government's role is often to lay down the rules of fair play: take our anti-trust laws, for example.
--
My first rule: be suspicious of hard and fast rules.
If he's convicted he gets to go to minimum security federal jail for probably 2-4 years.
The article argues otherwise. FTFA:
If McKinnon is extradited, he could be given a 70-year sentence in a high-security prison (he would, as an overseas national, be considered a "flight risk", hence imprisonment with violent criminals rather than in an open prison).
I'm not talking enterprise database software here, I'm talking about spreadsheets and word processors..
All of the gains we make in hardware are eaten up as fast or faster than they are produced by two main consumers: useless eye-candy for end users
Oh c'mon.. It's not like I know how to put my fast processor to any better use.
..it doesn't always work that way in practice...a statistical test should be treated with the same skepticism as the factually unsupported personal opinion of a someone with a reputation..
On the other hand (and this does not contradict your observation), reputable scientists sometimes fall in disrepute by establishment hit men. Just ask Fleischmann and Pons.
You raise an interesting point about how sometimes measuring less might mean more.
but Suppose in some parallel universe.. similar scientists had been more diligent, and conducted statistical analyses on not just X, but on 10^10 other variables... Same as in the other universe, they find that 99.9% of the variance in X can be predicted by the data set, but since they tested so many variables, they can't claim significance. By random chance, a lot of other variables did even better than X.
However,
I thought the way science is supposed to work is that you make an a priori hypothesis about how X should behave and then try to validate it by experiment or measurement. A posteriori correlations discovered after an experiment or measurement (no matter how few or many variables measured) usually count for naught--as in the familiar adage "Correlation is not causation."
This man did many things and touched many lives. Bill Gates's and Paul Allen's, included. FTA:
Roberts founded Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, which sold the kits. A young Gates and Allen would later found their fledgling Microsoft firm in Albuquerque, N.M., where MITS was based, and provide a computer language that helped hobbyists program and operate the Altair.
After selling his company, he tries both farming, and then medicine. (He's in his 40s at this time.)
He sold his company in 1977 and retired to a life of vegetable farming in rural Georgia before going to medical school and getting a medical degree from Mercer University, in 1986.
Roberts worked as an internist, seeing as many as 30 patients a day
I know next to nothing about the aerospace industry (hope someone more knowledgeable will opine), but it seems to me Burt Rutan and his ilk produce these wonderful machines faster, and at lower cost, than the big boys with their big design committees can.
The researchers think carbon-dating fine wines could help nip in the bud the growing practice of vintage fraud.
According to the study, wine experts have estimated that up to 5% of fine wines sold today are not all they are cracked up to be on the label or in the price tag.
Nothing about the researchers estimating that 5%: that's made up by the "wine experts". (They should know.)
Actually, I like your idea of randomizing which deck to draw the next card from the bottom of better. Simple and effective, and to boot, it addresses the problem of which deck to start from. Interesting!
If you want to simulate a real-life shuffle, it should be simple enough to create an algorithm to do that. I'll give it a shot here..
What do you think?
It's a start. I'm not sure this simulates a real dovetail (rifle) shuffle, but it does seem to capture 2 points of randomization: one, imperfections in halving of deck, and two, imperfections in interleaving the cards from the two halves.
Talking about random shuffles, does anyone know of a shuffle algorithm emulating a "real" dovetail shuffle of a deck of cards?
In the late 80's, Dave Bayer and Persi Diaconis (Trailing the dovetail shuffle to its lair. The Annals of Applied Probability) showed that 7 shuffles of a deck of 52 was sufficiently random for most purposes. The
New York Times ran a story and following a number of critiques showing that the results were not sufficiently random for every
kind of application (see New Age Solitaire), I heard no more of this seemingly promising NlogN approach to shuffling.
Agreed. The blogger's article is a bit pointless: he can't show a bias in favor of any one browser; he only shows that there is a non-random distribution. Perhaps with a bit more analysis he could have determined if any of the browsers in fact did enjoyed a bias. That would have been interesting, but as it stands, the article is little more than supercilious pedantry.
Then turning more serious, he argued--convincingly, IMO--that a company like Apple that takes risks needs the safety net of cash in the bank.
My point was that it appears Jobs thinks the textbook answer to his hypothetical question
Would you rather be a company with our same stock price and $40 billion in cash, or a company with the same stock price and no cash?
is, as you say, door #1. In general, that's not the case. If you owned a gravel company, for example, you'd prefer a cash distribution. (Remember, he says, "a company"; he doesn't say, "Apple.")
As to why he makes this mistake, I was suggesting it might have something to do with the fact that he sees things more from an insider's point of view and not from a shareholder's.
I'm no expert in spaceships and such, so all I can go on are the linked articles. This passage from the Mongol News, however (the only article I could find that mentions anything about a Delta rocket) is not terribly trust inspiring:
According to a team comprising specialists from defense, emergency and astrology, who inspected the object, the two objects described by local people as meteoroids, were parts of U.S delivery rocket Delta-2.
I for one would take this with a pinch of salt. Especially if it comes from an astrologer, or from one who can't tell one from an astronomer.
Despite its title, the article references a number of other goings in Apple's shareholder meeting. One passage that stood out to me concerned a number of exchanges Steve Jobs had with shareholders regarding what to do with Apple's substantial cash reserves. Proposals ranged from distributing the spoils as dividends to shareholders to investing in the Tesla motor company. FTA:
To that [last proposal], Jobs replied he was planning on throwing "a toga party" with the money instead.
Then turning more serious, he argued--convincingly, IMO--that a company like Apple that takes risks needs the safety net of cash in the bank. This next comment by him, however--if I'm not reading it out of context--is plainly a gaffe:
Jobs also rejected the idea of giving stockowners more of that cash through dividends because, he said, he believed the stock price, currently at $201.60 a share, would be unaffected either way. He asked one shareholder, "Would you rather be a company with our same stock price and $40 billion in cash, or a company with the same stock price and no cash?"
Given his two hypothetical choices, if the stock price isn't going to change, any investor would prefer the one with a cash distribution. (To the shareholder, it would be an example of unlocking value.) Conversely, for any officer of the company, it is preferable to be sitting on a $40B cash hoard. So when Jobs presented that false hypothetical dichotomy, he forgot he was addressing shareholders and not Apple insiders, and instead presented a glimpse of his conflicted interests.
Heat dissipates by two means: conduction and radiation. (Convection is a by-product of conduction.) It's that former category of heat dissipation that's missing in space.
What to do with our corporeal remains
on
A Geek Funeral
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
When we die our remains will be nothing more than a snapshot of the atoms we occupied right before we died. Had we lived a year longer, a good proportion of those atoms would have been replaced with new material we drank, ate and breathed in through the year. It is as if living is a type of standing wave through which matter flows.
My point? I wouldn't care what happened to my remains. I was a wave, and all that remains of me are ripples left behind in a shared pool of memories.
Williams, however, was quicker to speculate. âoeUltimately we might be able to do all kinds of interesting manipulations of the retina,â he said. âoeNot only might we be able to cure disease, but we might engineer eyes with remarkable capabilities. You can imagine conferring enhanced night vision in normal eyes, or engineering genes that make photopigments with spectral properties for whatever you want your eye to see.â
âoeThis study makes that kind of science fiction future a distinct possibility, as opposed to a fantasy,â continued Williams.
During the experiment, the team also found that people exiting in a single-file line were by far the most efficient. Yanagisawa said that the next step is to program models of people intelligent enough to self-organize into a line.
It would also been interesting to see if a few spoilers can break the flow. (As in the onset of turbulence in a fluid?)
Slashdot Mirror
You don't need the government in order to have a monopoly or oligopoly that screws its customers. At the risk of stating the obvious, the government's role is often to lay down the rules of fair play: take our anti-trust laws, for example.
--
My first rule: be suspicious of hard and fast rules.
I don't understand. What would that fix? Net neutrality? Seems to me that would break net neutrality.
If he's convicted he gets to go to minimum security federal jail for probably 2-4 years.
The article argues otherwise. FTFA:
If McKinnon is extradited, he could be given a 70-year sentence in a high-security prison (he would, as an overseas national, be considered a "flight risk", hence imprisonment with violent criminals rather than in an open prison).
I'm not talking enterprise database software here, I'm talking about spreadsheets and word processors.. All of the gains we make in hardware are eaten up as fast or faster than they are produced by two main consumers: useless eye-candy for end users
Oh c'mon.. It's not like I know how to put my fast processor to any better use.
Agreed wholeheartedly:
..it doesn't always work that way in practice. ..a statistical test should be treated with the same skepticism as the factually unsupported personal opinion of a someone with a reputation..
On the other hand (and this does not contradict your observation), reputable scientists sometimes fall in disrepute by establishment hit men. Just ask Fleischmann and Pons.
You raise an interesting point about how sometimes measuring less might mean more.
but Suppose in some parallel universe .. similar scientists had been more diligent, and conducted statistical analyses on not just X, but on 10^10 other variables. .. Same as in the other universe, they find that 99.9% of the variance in X can be predicted by the data set, but since they tested so many variables, they can't claim significance. By random chance, a lot of other variables did even better than X.
However, I thought the way science is supposed to work is that you make an a priori hypothesis about how X should behave and then try to validate it by experiment or measurement. A posteriori correlations discovered after an experiment or measurement (no matter how few or many variables measured) usually count for naught--as in the familiar adage "Correlation is not causation."
IANAL, but isn't Mr. Corbett himself abusing his office here? And in doing so, isn't he exposing himself to criminal liability?
If so, this might culminate in something much more unpleasant than simply the Streisand Effect.
--
Corbettifect: Prosecution of a corrupt official exposed by the Streisand Effect.
Thank you for that excellent joke. I'm still laughing..
This man did many things and touched many lives. Bill Gates's and Paul Allen's, included. FTA:
Roberts founded Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, which sold the kits. A young Gates and Allen would later found their fledgling Microsoft firm in Albuquerque, N.M., where MITS was based, and provide a computer language that helped hobbyists program and operate the Altair.
After selling his company, he tries both farming, and then medicine. (He's in his 40s at this time.)
He sold his company in 1977 and retired to a life of vegetable farming in rural Georgia before going to medical school and getting a medical degree from Mercer University, in 1986.
Roberts worked as an internist, seeing as many as 30 patients a day
Talk about multi-dimensional..
I know next to nothing about the aerospace industry (hope someone more knowledgeable will opine), but it seems to me Burt Rutan and his ilk produce these wonderful machines faster, and at lower cost, than the big boys with their big design committees can.
--
Where are the canards, btw?
From TFA:
The researchers think carbon-dating fine wines could help nip in the bud the growing practice of vintage fraud.
According to the study, wine experts have estimated that up to 5% of fine wines sold today are not all they are cracked up to be on the label or in the price tag.
Nothing about the researchers estimating that 5%: that's made up by the "wine experts". (They should know.)
Late to this party.. Similar thoughts on how to pull something like this off here.
Actually, I like your idea of randomizing which deck to draw the next card from the bottom of better. Simple and effective, and to boot, it addresses the problem of which deck to start from. Interesting!
If you want to simulate a real-life shuffle, it should be simple enough to create an algorithm to do that. I'll give it a shot here..
What do you think?
It's a start. I'm not sure this simulates a real dovetail (rifle) shuffle, but it does seem to capture 2 points of randomization: one, imperfections in halving of deck, and two, imperfections in interleaving the cards from the two halves.
Talking about random shuffles, does anyone know of a shuffle algorithm emulating a "real" dovetail shuffle of a deck of cards?
In the late 80's, Dave Bayer and Persi Diaconis (Trailing the dovetail shuffle to its lair. The Annals of Applied Probability) showed that 7 shuffles of a deck of 52 was sufficiently random for most purposes. The New York Times ran a story and following a number of critiques showing that the results were not sufficiently random for every kind of application (see New Age Solitaire), I heard no more of this seemingly promising NlogN approach to shuffling.
Agreed. The blogger's article is a bit pointless: he can't show a bias in favor of any one browser; he only shows that there is a non-random distribution. Perhaps with a bit more analysis he could have determined if any of the browsers in fact did enjoyed a bias. That would have been interesting, but as it stands, the article is little more than supercilious pedantry.
I agree with you. I said (emphasis added)
Then turning more serious, he argued--convincingly, IMO--that a company like Apple that takes risks needs the safety net of cash in the bank.
My point was that it appears Jobs thinks the textbook answer to his hypothetical question
Would you rather be a company with our same stock price and $40 billion in cash, or a company with the same stock price and no cash?
is, as you say, door #1. In general, that's not the case. If you owned a gravel company, for example, you'd prefer a cash distribution. (Remember, he says, "a company"; he doesn't say, "Apple.")
As to why he makes this mistake, I was suggesting it might have something to do with the fact that he sees things more from an insider's point of view and not from a shareholder's.
According to a team comprising specialists from defense, emergency and astrology, who inspected the object, the two objects described by local people as meteoroids, were parts of U.S delivery rocket Delta-2.
I for one would take this with a pinch of salt. Especially if it comes from an astrologer, or from one who can't tell one from an astronomer.
Despite its title, the article references a number of other goings in Apple's shareholder meeting. One passage that stood out to me concerned a number of exchanges Steve Jobs had with shareholders regarding what to do with Apple's substantial cash reserves. Proposals ranged from distributing the spoils as dividends to shareholders to investing in the Tesla motor company. FTA:
To that [last proposal], Jobs replied he was planning on throwing "a toga party" with the money instead.
Then turning more serious, he argued--convincingly, IMO--that a company like Apple that takes risks needs the safety net of cash in the bank. This next comment by him, however--if I'm not reading it out of context--is plainly a gaffe:
Jobs also rejected the idea of giving stockowners more of that cash through dividends because, he said, he believed the stock price, currently at $201.60 a share, would be unaffected either way. He asked one shareholder, "Would you rather be a company with our same stock price and $40 billion in cash, or a company with the same stock price and no cash?"
Given his two hypothetical choices, if the stock price isn't going to change, any investor would prefer the one with a cash distribution. (To the shareholder, it would be an example of unlocking value.) Conversely, for any officer of the company, it is preferable to be sitting on a $40B cash hoard. So when Jobs presented that false hypothetical dichotomy, he forgot he was addressing shareholders and not Apple insiders, and instead presented a glimpse of his conflicted interests.
Heat dissipates by two means: conduction and radiation. (Convection is a by-product of conduction.) It's that former category of heat dissipation that's missing in space.
When we die our remains will be nothing more than a snapshot of the atoms we occupied right before we died. Had we lived a year longer, a good proportion of those atoms would have been replaced with new material we drank, ate and breathed in through the year. It is as if living is a type of standing wave through which matter flows.
My point? I wouldn't care what happened to my remains. I was a wave, and all that remains of me are ripples left behind in a shared pool of memories.
Why not go infra-red? From the article..
Williams, however, was quicker to speculate. âoeUltimately we might be able to do all kinds of interesting manipulations of the retina,â he said. âoeNot only might we be able to cure disease, but we might engineer eyes with remarkable capabilities. You can imagine conferring enhanced night vision in normal eyes, or engineering genes that make photopigments with spectral properties for whatever you want your eye to see.â
âoeThis study makes that kind of science fiction future a distinct possibility, as opposed to a fantasy,â continued Williams.
Aye. A story deserving of being /.
www.bankofsweden.me.se And nobody will notice. I bet that even a www.bankofsweden.yahoo.com will fool most of stupid users
Agreed. There are few cures for stupidity, and regulating the word "bank" in a domain name is not one of them.
Folks will need to activate this new feature by choice, and the exact location data won't be stored for an extended period of time.
Fat chance, me thinks. If this catches on, you can bet there will be 3rd party services that cache and index this location data indefinitely.
During the experiment, the team also found that people exiting in a single-file line were by far the most efficient. Yanagisawa said that the next step is to program models of people intelligent enough to self-organize into a line.
It would also been interesting to see if a few spoilers can break the flow. (As in the onset of turbulence in a fluid?)