Who cares about train improvements in Texas? Most of national population, i.e. most of gas-guzzling cars are in the highly urban areas and are used to drive between the cities and suburbs for the hourly commutes. If trains can fix these areas, then it can give a big positive impact to USA while texans continue to drive exactly as before.
They may not be the most accurate searchers, but Bing, Yahoo and many, many smaller players DO have all the same information crawled and indexed.
Hell, I'd bet that even if the TFA idea of changing names became common, then at least one of these search providers would find a way to gather the name-change records and offer a service that allows you to be linked to your college transgressions in any case. Even if there would be no public data available, then simple algorithms checking "hey, Johnny Wildcard went missing from public friendlists of 1001 guys on Facebook, but John W. Angel appeared on these same friendlists the following week" would give good enough data.
The attitude is not "I can do illegal stuff in your country because I'm not there" - the extradition treaties between Sweden and USA work just fine for such criminals.
The attitude is that "The stuff is not illegal, even if some other government has sold out and outlawed it." Swedish government and Swedish people have absolute sovereign rights to decide that doing X in their country is completely legal. (Unless they have also voluntarily made an international treaty saying that they will do otherwise. Then they would be contradicting themselves and the treaty would be overriding. But in this or piratebay case no such obligations prevent Sweden from going whatever way they wish)
If I were a Swedish citizen I'd have serious doubts about voting for any politician that suggests that they should side with 'RIAA/MPAA and several governments... including the US' rather than with the freedoms of our citizens. It's a quite serious matter of principle. It's also quite clear what would be the position of US founding fathers in this situation.
What I hear from you is saying that the brain development can't be separated from other embryogenesis elements and such a project would have to reverse engineer the functions of *all* the genome elements, not just the parts directly relating to the brain. Of course the functions of proteins depend on where and when they are; what physical structures of cells and within cells are formed and what is the external environment, that's understandable - but it still changes the thesis only quantitatively, it doesn't say that the approach is wrong or futile - reverse engineering of the physical brain formation from the genome can bring us artificial brains, and also artificial better-than-brains.
Don't get me wrong - I understand that this is a massive task, but its likely result means that this is pretty much the only problem that the whole humanity will need to solve, ever.
So what is needed is ways and theories on how to structure it and start actually tackling the huge complexity that is involved! If it would take a lifetime of all neurologists, computer scientists and biochemists in the world, it would still be worth it.
Also, the brain's ability to develop depends on its connection to the human body and the sensory organs; having a human-like brain that exists without a body is a postulation, not something that will just happen given enough time.
Well, that is the simple part - the same tech improvements are already bringing us 'body' devices such as http://www.touchbionics.com/i-LIMB; and such a brain even nowadays can be easily connected to imaging, hearing, smelling and touching sensors exceeding human capabilities.
It does take a couple of years for a newborn human brain to learn to properly use them, so the same can be expected of an electronic copy, of course.
I can agree on the compression issue, which is quite huge change in problem size - however, the Meyer's arguments and examples in TFA seems to support the Kurzweil case:
The genomic "code" in the logic-code sense can be compared with the worst kind of spaghetti-programming imaginable in a bare-bones language such as assembly - or even esoteric languages such as brainf*ck (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck) due to the interactions between each protein and everything else, and because it was written by 'million monkeys on a typewriter' method.But the things that he mentions about the complexity and interrelatedness of these 12-base-pair elements of genome are exactly the same kind of things that would also apply to a 12-opcode assembly function in chaotically designed software system - which I've seen and had the headache to debug.
So there does seem to be a valid thesis that the time-cost of understanding and re-implementing the brain neuron 'code' is comparable to an analysis and full rewrite of a 3 billion LOC poor quality software system. Understanding and modifying or fixing it is complex as hell and hard to do, but it is something that can be actually planned and done within a lifetime.
Of course, once we have replicated a brain, then we'd have to actually train/teach it for years as we do with newborn homo sapiens brains - but we know how to do that already, it's not a problem. (Although it would be a problem when after x-teen years it would decide that it's parents are idiots, run away with some biker dude and get pregnant.)
Yes, I very roughly estimated the volume of the air as surface area of earth by thickness of atmosphere. "Did you take into account that it would slowly add pressure to the moons atmosphere, which would reduce the velocity of the air passing through the portal?" - No, but it would only increase the time required. Moon has too small gravity to hold this air, but the pressure difference would decrease due to earth losing atmosphere...
The calculation is very inaccurate, but in any case it means that it's on timescale of millenia instead of minutes.
I did some on-envelope calculations, and the "fairly rapidly" part comes out to ~9000 years for the earth's atmosphere to go through a ~2m/6ft diameter hole with 1 atmosphere-to-vacuum pressure difference. In essence, it would create a local meteorogical disturbance, with nice high winds around the area, but smaller and weaker than commonly arising low-pressure areas.
The list is working as intended - to very quickly point out the multiple critical flaws that make your proposal not really that useful as you think.
First, it's a classic whitelist proposal with all the related problems. You may not use it to get the spam out of your inbox unless there is 100% cooperation from anybody at once. All you get is another factor to add to a bayesian filter to possibly improve it's sorting quality - and it remains to be seen if it will really be a better factor than the current ones used.
Second, your certification fee will not guarantee you anything - since your ISP might get on the blacklist as per your proposal "If the Certifier refuses to do anything about the Spamming Server (because they are 'in on it', friendly to spammers, or just incompetent), then ALL Certifications from that Certifier can be marked as 'bad', either on a client-by-client basis, or thru the use of a Certifier black-list."
This your sentence effectively describes the existing publicly available e-mail server / open relay blacklists, dropping traffic from known offenders, with no added advantage over the existing situation.
Third, the spam reporting mirrors the ancient practice (1980's?) of reporting offenders at links like abuse@yourIPS.com / postmaster@yourIPS.com. The certifiers would be just as effective in removing offenders as the IPS are removing them now - so no added benefit there. In your statement "From that moment forward, ALL email the Email server in question sends will be NON-certified (and quite frankly, probably deleted by the recipients).", the last part is flawed - it will NOT be deleted by the recipients - you won't have 100% coverage, so recipients will expect to receive normal uncertified mail.
Fourth, the "stuck with it" part - if this system is implemented, then we will be stuck with an additional layer of complexity and a mandatory payment requirement that can be abused. This is a Bad Thing(tm).
In essence, the system can be implemented, but the argument is that unless some magic gets involved, this system will not bring any useful benefits.
If you are saying 'people won't get any problems, since they can just ignore it' - then this means that your solution won't solve anything. 1) If not every one uses certified mail; then everybody will want and need to still appropriately receive and see non-certified mail. 2) If everybody needs to see non-certified mail, then most people don't see a big improvement - since they still receive spam. 3) If there is not a big improvement, then most people will choose not to take the certified mail additional costs (certification cost + software upgrade). 4) go back to square 1, do not collect $200.
I hope that this explains the issues a bit more. The list is a much quicker way:) I would like your idea to work, but it won't, it's just wishful thinking.
Ideas are generally not copyrightable at all; stitching literal copies of the tweets together would be copyright violation on a large scale, but rephrasing them and making a story - that generally wouldn't be treated as a derivative work, but as a purely your createion.
It's not only about the fact of speaking, the local paper can legally use the content of the speech. They are allowed to say- "The exact words of madman's pronounement were 'Mayor Doolitle is a darned space alien from Jupiter!'"
Stuff doesn't dissappear - the only thing that is changing is worse recovery in case of power failure and crashes. And if your application wants to secure data from power failure, then it should do these additional (slower) things to ensure that.
This problem doesn't affect at all "Ruby and Python developers who rarely use files".
This problem affects developers who call directly the POSIX API write() without properly calling the fsync().
If you are using a high-level language, then it's high-level method.WriteItAllToDiskAndBeSureItsOK() will either do these tasks properly (and won't be affected), or has the same bug in it's implementation as the mentioned Gnome configuration file handling.
Well, but in such cases the business really would be kept operating... the original owner/investor would lose the spent startup costs, but the operations would be continued by whomever the bank or bankruptcy court or whatever sells the company remains. The spent money is already gone and spent on the previous launches (most of it on the first one). Now the decisions for the next launches have to take into account only the direct cost of these launches.
HR's job is not to determine if you are a good match for the job - they have to find one (1) candidate that is a good match for the job.
Let's assume that in current conditions some random vacancy receives 70 applications of which 7 people would be a good match for the job. In this case an HR's job is to make filtering process that allows to make a short-list of 5-10 applications to interview that would contain, say, 3 of these appropriate candidates. If some unlucky SOB was filtered out since his name matched a convicted paedophile, then, well, it's his problem. The company/HR would lose only in the case if their filtering threw out *ALL* suitable candidates, and they had to choose from poorly fitting ones - but in this economy, you can bet that there were quite a few others that were just as suitable as he was.
There is no disagreement there - the article states that 'there was no global or hemispheric warming' and that 'there was a local warming in the area around north atlantic'. European Atlantic coast is a culturally sensitive area for us; but it is irrelevantly small in climatic scale. The 'other regions' part and the other reseach cited there claims that everywhere else in the world there were only minor unrelated fluctuations in temperature, and that the medial warm period was a purely local phenomenon
WTF is an executive doing reading some licencing agreements? He should have the legal department or outside lawyer review it, and they would state their opinion and answer any questions about what the agreement would mean. It does not matter if the agreement is 3 lines or 300 pages, in any case - and especially the 3-line agreements must be very carefully reviewed by lawyers, since much more of the agreement's real meaning is 'implied' by relevant legislation instead of the agreement itself.
Companies are not 'giving' their employees anything. Employees use the premises, computers and software as agents of the company, nowhere there happens the transfer/giving of the computer or software to the employee.
If it adds presentation without hampering functionality, then hey, Flash is great!
But the fact about (un)ability to bookmark/copy/email links to specific places is a big issue that just means that people will not bookmark that info or your site, and will not e-mail links to your information to their friends.
Slashdot Mirror
Who cares about train improvements in Texas? Most of national population, i.e. most of gas-guzzling cars are in the highly urban areas and are used to drive between the cities and suburbs for the hourly commutes. If trains can fix these areas, then it can give a big positive impact to USA while texans continue to drive exactly as before.
They may not be the most accurate searchers, but Bing, Yahoo and many, many smaller players DO have all the same information crawled and indexed.
Hell, I'd bet that even if the TFA idea of changing names became common, then at least one of these search providers would find a way to gather the name-change records and offer a service that allows you to be linked to your college transgressions in any case.
Even if there would be no public data available, then simple algorithms checking "hey, Johnny Wildcard went missing from public friendlists of 1001 guys on Facebook, but John W. Angel appeared on these same friendlists the following week" would give good enough data.
The attitude is not "I can do illegal stuff in your country because I'm not there" - the extradition treaties between Sweden and USA work just fine for such criminals.
The attitude is that "The stuff is not illegal, even if some other government has sold out and outlawed it." Swedish government and Swedish people have absolute sovereign rights to decide that doing X in their country is completely legal.
(Unless they have also voluntarily made an international treaty saying that they will do otherwise. Then they would be contradicting themselves and the treaty would be overriding. But in this or piratebay case no such obligations prevent Sweden from going whatever way they wish)
If I were a Swedish citizen I'd have serious doubts about voting for any politician that suggests that they should side with 'RIAA/MPAA and several governments ... including the US' rather than with the freedoms of our citizens.
It's a quite serious matter of principle. It's also quite clear what would be the position of US founding fathers in this situation.
What I hear from you is saying that the brain development can't be separated from other embryogenesis elements and such a project would have to reverse engineer the functions of *all* the genome elements, not just the parts directly relating to the brain. Of course the functions of proteins depend on where and when they are; what physical structures of cells and within cells are formed and what is the external environment, that's understandable - but it still changes the thesis only quantitatively, it doesn't say that the approach is wrong or futile - reverse engineering of the physical brain formation from the genome can bring us artificial brains, and also artificial better-than-brains.
Don't get me wrong - I understand that this is a massive task, but its likely result means that this is pretty much the only problem that the whole humanity will need to solve, ever.
So what is needed is ways and theories on how to structure it and start actually tackling the huge complexity that is involved! If it would take a lifetime of all neurologists, computer scientists and biochemists in the world, it would still be worth it.
Also, the brain's ability to develop depends on its connection to the human body and the sensory organs; having a human-like brain that exists without a body is a postulation, not something that will just happen given enough time.
Well, that is the simple part - the same tech improvements are already bringing us 'body' devices such as http://www.touchbionics.com/i-LIMB; and such a brain even nowadays can be easily connected to imaging, hearing, smelling and touching sensors exceeding human capabilities.
It does take a couple of years for a newborn human brain to learn to properly use them, so the same can be expected of an electronic copy, of course.
I can agree on the compression issue, which is quite huge change in problem size - however, the Meyer's arguments and examples in TFA seems to support the Kurzweil case:
The genomic "code" in the logic-code sense can be compared with the worst kind of spaghetti-programming imaginable in a bare-bones language such as assembly - or even esoteric languages such as brainf*ck (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck) due to the interactions between each protein and everything else, and because it was written by 'million monkeys on a typewriter' method.But the things that he mentions about the complexity and interrelatedness of these 12-base-pair elements of genome are exactly the same kind of things that would also apply to a 12-opcode assembly function in chaotically designed software system - which I've seen and had the headache to debug.
So there does seem to be a valid thesis that the time-cost of understanding and re-implementing the brain neuron 'code' is comparable to an analysis and full rewrite of a 3 billion LOC poor quality software system.
Understanding and modifying or fixing it is complex as hell and hard to do, but it is something that can be actually planned and done within a lifetime.
Of course, once we have replicated a brain, then we'd have to actually train/teach it for years as we do with newborn homo sapiens brains - but we know how to do that already, it's not a problem. (Although it would be a problem when after x-teen years it would decide that it's parents are idiots, run away with some biker dude and get pregnant.)
Yes, I very roughly estimated the volume of the air as surface area of earth by thickness of atmosphere.
"Did you take into account that it would slowly add pressure to the moons atmosphere, which would reduce the velocity of the air passing through the portal?" - No, but it would only increase the time required. Moon has too small gravity to hold this air, but the pressure difference would decrease due to earth losing atmosphere...
The calculation is very inaccurate, but in any case it means that it's on timescale of millenia instead of minutes.
I did some on-envelope calculations, and the "fairly rapidly" part comes out to ~9000 years for the earth's atmosphere to go through a ~2m/6ft diameter hole with 1 atmosphere-to-vacuum pressure difference. In essence, it would create a local meteorogical disturbance, with nice high winds around the area, but smaller and weaker than commonly arising low-pressure areas.
The list is working as intended - to very quickly point out the multiple critical flaws that make your proposal not really that useful as you think.
First, it's a classic whitelist proposal with all the related problems. You may not use it to get the spam out of your inbox unless there is 100% cooperation from anybody at once. All you get is another factor to add to a bayesian filter to possibly improve it's sorting quality - and it remains to be seen if it will really be a better factor than the current ones used.
Second, your certification fee will not guarantee you anything - since your ISP might get on the blacklist as per your proposal "If the Certifier refuses to do anything about the Spamming Server (because they are 'in on it', friendly to spammers, or just incompetent), then ALL Certifications from that Certifier can be marked as 'bad', either on a client-by-client basis, or thru the use of a Certifier black-list."
This your sentence effectively describes the existing publicly available e-mail server / open relay blacklists, dropping traffic from known offenders, with no added advantage over the existing situation.
Third, the spam reporting mirrors the ancient practice (1980's?) of reporting offenders at links like abuse@yourIPS.com / postmaster@yourIPS.com. The certifiers would be just as effective in removing offenders as the IPS are removing them now - so no added benefit there. In your statement "From that moment forward, ALL email the Email server in question sends will be NON-certified (and quite frankly, probably deleted by the recipients).", the last part is flawed - it will NOT be deleted by the recipients - you won't have 100% coverage, so recipients will expect to receive normal uncertified mail.
Fourth, the "stuck with it" part - if this system is implemented, then we will be stuck with an additional layer of complexity and a mandatory payment requirement that can be abused. This is a Bad Thing(tm).
In essence, the system can be implemented, but the argument is that unless some magic gets involved, this system will not bring any useful benefits.
If you are saying 'people won't get any problems, since they can just ignore it' - then this means that your solution won't solve anything.
1) If not every one uses certified mail; then everybody will want and need to still appropriately receive and see non-certified mail.
2) If everybody needs to see non-certified mail, then most people don't see a big improvement - since they still receive spam.
3) If there is not a big improvement, then most people will choose not to take the certified mail additional costs (certification cost + software upgrade).
4) go back to square 1, do not collect $200.
I hope that this explains the issues a bit more. The list is a much quicker way :) I would like your idea to work, but it won't, it's just wishful thinking.
... these games also don't really require 30fps streaming graphics, and can be rendered on the device.
Ideas are generally not copyrightable at all; stitching literal copies of the tweets together would be copyright violation on a large scale, but rephrasing them and making a story - that generally wouldn't be treated as a derivative work, but as a purely your createion.
Some songs have lyrics that would fit within 140 characters. And of course, these are copyrightable.
It's not only about the fact of speaking, the local paper can legally use the content of the speech. They are allowed to say-
"The exact words of madman's pronounement were 'Mayor Doolitle is a darned space alien from Jupiter!'"
Stuff doesn't dissappear - the only thing that is changing is worse recovery in case of power failure and crashes. And if your application wants to secure data from power failure, then it should do these additional (slower) things to ensure that.
This problem doesn't affect at all "Ruby and Python developers who rarely use files".
This problem affects developers who call directly the POSIX API write() without properly calling the fsync().
If you are using a high-level language, then it's high-level method .WriteItAllToDiskAndBeSureItsOK() will either do these tasks properly (and won't be affected), or has the same bug in it's implementation as the mentioned Gnome configuration file handling.
They seem to be marketing a usage of 'quickly boot to us, then quickly boot back to windows if you really need something there'.
For such an proposed computer usage, boot times do become very important.
Well, but in such cases the business really would be kept operating... the original owner/investor would lose the spent startup costs, but the operations would be continued by whomever the bank or bankruptcy court or whatever sells the company remains. The spent money is already gone and spent on the previous launches (most of it on the first one). Now the decisions for the next launches have to take into account only the direct cost of these launches.
HR's job is not to determine if you are a good match for the job - they have to find one (1) candidate that is a good match for the job.
Let's assume that in current conditions some random vacancy receives 70 applications of which 7 people would be a good match for the job. In this case an HR's job is to make filtering process that allows to make a short-list of 5-10 applications to interview that would contain, say, 3 of these appropriate candidates. If some unlucky SOB was filtered out since his name matched a convicted paedophile, then, well, it's his problem. The company/HR would lose only in the case if their filtering threw out *ALL* suitable candidates, and they had to choose from poorly fitting ones - but in this economy, you can bet that there were quite a few others that were just as suitable as he was.
Are you sure that none of your friends or family have posted a photo there that contains your face?
The quality does not need to be that high..
There is no disagreement there - the article states that 'there was no global or hemispheric warming' and that 'there was a local warming in the area around north atlantic'. European Atlantic coast is a culturally sensitive area for us; but it is irrelevantly small in climatic scale. The 'other regions' part and the other reseach cited there claims that everywhere else in the world there were only minor unrelated fluctuations in temperature, and that the medial warm period was a purely local phenomenon
Seeing a small voltage != being able to extract that voltage for any significant power.
Power = voltage * current. Most of such biobatteries have very, very insignificant current ratio.
WTF is an executive doing reading some licencing agreements?
He should have the legal department or outside lawyer review it, and they would state their opinion and answer any questions about what the agreement would mean. It does not matter if the agreement is 3 lines or 300 pages, in any case - and especially the 3-line agreements must be very carefully reviewed by lawyers, since much more of the agreement's real meaning is 'implied' by relevant legislation instead of the agreement itself.
Companies are not 'giving' their employees anything. Employees use the premises, computers and software as agents of the company, nowhere there happens the transfer/giving of the computer or software to the employee.
If it adds presentation without hampering functionality, then hey, Flash is great!
But the fact about (un)ability to bookmark/copy/email links to specific places is a big issue that just means that people will not bookmark that info or your site, and will not e-mail links to your information to their friends.