An Internet news addiction is far, far worse. I would be interested to know how many million person-hours of lost work productivity are spent on the Web per year.
A couple of years ago, I tried photographing the menu board in a McDonald's in Beijing, because so many items on the menu were so incredibly bizarre. A store manager came over and was very unfriendly to me about it, asked me to delete pictures from my camera, and basically told me he would throw me out of the restaurant if I kept trying to take pictures. I wonder if there is some corporate policy that inspires this sort of behavior?
You're right on the list of four languages. But Gmail (at least the frontend) is written in hand-coded Javascript. The whole point of the Closure javascript-to-javascript compiler was to optimize and obfuscate hand-coded Javascript for Gmail.
Google cars were all on public roadways. If it's not encrypted, you don't own it once you broadcast it. The only legally interesting part of this is to figure out how screwed up the legal system is in this area: if you're standing on public property but look in through the window of a private house and see a naked woman, you're a peeping tom. If you look in and see a naked man, he's an exhibitionist.
I have a Pulsar Y911 watch. This is my favorite watch ever despite its simplicity. It has four killer features: (1) it is 100% titanium, so it's very light. (2) It's cheap (got mine for $57 new or something). (3) it has a "white-on" display, which is a cool LCD technology that appears over the analog watch face in *white*, but only when you push a button. The watch doesn't have a backlight (the only real downside IMO), but white-on is just cool. (4) with two pushes of the top-right button, it enters "1-AL" ("Single-time alarm") mode. Every subsequent push of the same button sets a one-off alarm one minute further in the future from the current time. This makes it really easy to set a reminder alarm for something, at any small number of minutes into the future, without even looking, by pushing the button (2 + the number of minutes) times. I use this feature *all* the time, and in fact it is the best feature I have ever found in a watch. I have looked all over for other watches that have this feature, and failed to find one. Does anybody know of other watches with 1-AL mode?
Belize is a great place to host a shady site. I was scammed as a seller on eBay by a Russian reshipment fraud circle that operated a fake storefront website in Belize and recruited reshippers via monster.com, then used stolen PayPal accounts to deposit actual payment in sellers' bank accounts followed by having sellers ship to the reshippers, who then on-shipped to Russia.
Anyway, the short story is that probably these guys didn't like the fact that McAfee was blocking some of their scam websites...
I'm sick of reading this sort of thoughtlessness describing evolutionary biases. If you're going to say that an adaptation gives a reproductive or predatory advantage, then fine, you're talking Darwinian evolution -- survival of the fittest. If you're going to say, "Everybody in chummy societies had the same handedness so they could share tools", then please tell me how the heck that weak-sauce tiny (or effectively zero-magnitude) biological fitness bias is supposed to have produced a genotypic change to an entire species within the known anthropological lifetime of the species. Remember that Darwinism requires that for *your* random trait variation to survive and thrive, at a minimum you have to pass your genes on while somebody else does not.
Room-temperature semiconductors would enable the construction of at-home MEG systems, which would quickly become a far more interesting and powerful technology to construct a brain-machine interface with than an EEG. The only problem is, you'd need to wear a Faraday cage around your head...
Well assuming the laser pulses are completely uniform (which they are very close to being), then each wavefront of light is mathematically indistinguishable from the one before and after it, so in a very metaphysical sense, you could say that stitching together a video with frames of data taken from successive pulses is absolutely no different in the end than if they had collected all the data in a single shot. However they actually need to aggregate data from millions of frames into a single shot, because they get on average something like half a photon expected per frame without aggregation to increase the SNR -- see the longer presentation here (it's quite a remarkable presentation, I have seen about a third of it so far -- it talks a lot initially about their work to see around corners -- this is not a new thing to try to do, it has been done before with standard camera equipment and a projected pattern with some success, but doing it with laser pulses is new).
The cool thing about what they have done is that you can watch the actual wavefront move like an expanding contact lens through the scene. To my knowledge, nobody has ever seen this before. Sure, it's data from billions of expanding contact lenses, but it shows you in a very visual way that the universe works the way the mathematics say it does.
No, the camera is not a trillion frames per second, but it shows you events that happen over trillionth-of-a-second timescales, if it were possible to capture data that quickly (which it is not) and if it were possible to solve the SNR issues over that timescale (which it is not).
There's nothing more effective than an irate customer. Get into as many accounts as you can, grab an email address and the first and last 4 digits of their credit card info (or some other disambiguating information), then send emails to the customers from an email anonymizer, sharing whatever disambiguating information you obtained from their account, and stating the fact that the company won't fix their security. Step back and watch the customers make the company fix the problem.
The only plausible explanation for Carrier IQ is a government mandate to the carriers to install wiretapping capabilities. Which makes it ironic that a class-action lawsuit is proceeding which will probably eventually bring in the FCC too, i.e. the very government that put Carrier IQ in place in the first place.
It's not that there's too much data to store. There's too much to analyze. Storing 1M genomes is tractable today. Doing a pairwise comparison of 1M genomes requires half a trillion whole-genome comparisons. Even Google doesn't compute on that scale yet. (Disclaimer: I'm a postdoc in computational biology.)
'Oracle NoSQL might not offer the heady fun and "just build it" experimentation of many of the pure open source NoSQL projects, but that's not really its role.
Restated: Oracle started a new project from scratch, but still managed to make the code look like it had been maintained by a megacorporation for a decade, like other long-term Oracle and Sun projects?
Reading via word shape has been tested since the 80s: See "The Psychology of Reading" by Taylor & Taylor (1989), or read this: http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ctfonts/wordrecognition.aspx Apparently one part of the brain looks at global word shape, and another starts reading letters from the beginning and end of the word at the same time, and they both collectively converge on a mutually-consistent hypothesis. But word shape reading is faster and often pre-empts the local feature (letter) reading process.
Look at 0:53 and 1:50 in the video you posted -- this train is locked in position in *one orientation* at *one distance* from the track, and it happens when you cool the superconductor down. The video in the original post shows you can set the orientation and distance by applying greater than some threshold force, and then it is preserved. Orientation preservation is remarkable.
The chance of causing an autoimmune disease with this sort of treatment protocol seems enormous... Do you really think that nothing could possibly go wrong in training the body to kill its own cells of a specific narrow type?
Slashdot Mirror
An Internet news addiction is far, far worse. I would be interested to know how many million person-hours of lost work productivity are spent on the Web per year.
A couple of years ago, I tried photographing the menu board in a McDonald's in Beijing, because so many items on the menu were so incredibly bizarre. A store manager came over and was very unfriendly to me about it, asked me to delete pictures from my camera, and basically told me he would throw me out of the restaurant if I kept trying to take pictures. I wonder if there is some corporate policy that inspires this sort of behavior?
You're right on the list of four languages. But Gmail (at least the frontend) is written in hand-coded Javascript. The whole point of the Closure javascript-to-javascript compiler was to optimize and obfuscate hand-coded Javascript for Gmail.
Google cars were all on public roadways. If it's not encrypted, you don't own it once you broadcast it. The only legally interesting part of this is to figure out how screwed up the legal system is in this area: if you're standing on public property but look in through the window of a private house and see a naked woman, you're a peeping tom. If you look in and see a naked man, he's an exhibitionist.
I have a Pulsar Y911 watch. This is my favorite watch ever despite its simplicity. It has four killer features: (1) it is 100% titanium, so it's very light. (2) It's cheap (got mine for $57 new or something). (3) it has a "white-on" display, which is a cool LCD technology that appears over the analog watch face in *white*, but only when you push a button. The watch doesn't have a backlight (the only real downside IMO), but white-on is just cool. (4) with two pushes of the top-right button, it enters "1-AL" ("Single-time alarm") mode. Every subsequent push of the same button sets a one-off alarm one minute further in the future from the current time. This makes it really easy to set a reminder alarm for something, at any small number of minutes into the future, without even looking, by pushing the button (2 + the number of minutes) times. I use this feature *all* the time, and in fact it is the best feature I have ever found in a watch. I have looked all over for other watches that have this feature, and failed to find one. Does anybody know of other watches with 1-AL mode?
Belize is a great place to host a shady site. I was scammed as a seller on eBay by a Russian reshipment fraud circle that operated a fake storefront website in Belize and recruited reshippers via monster.com, then used stolen PayPal accounts to deposit actual payment in sellers' bank accounts followed by having sellers ship to the reshippers, who then on-shipped to Russia. Anyway, the short story is that probably these guys didn't like the fact that McAfee was blocking some of their scam websites...
I'm sick of reading this sort of thoughtlessness describing evolutionary biases. If you're going to say that an adaptation gives a reproductive or predatory advantage, then fine, you're talking Darwinian evolution -- survival of the fittest. If you're going to say, "Everybody in chummy societies had the same handedness so they could share tools", then please tell me how the heck that weak-sauce tiny (or effectively zero-magnitude) biological fitness bias is supposed to have produced a genotypic change to an entire species within the known anthropological lifetime of the species. Remember that Darwinism requires that for *your* random trait variation to survive and thrive, at a minimum you have to pass your genes on while somebody else does not.
Cue a comment about Bolivian tree lizards.
My brain read "Zimmerman" as "Zuckerberg". How alarming.
Seriously.
Better hope you don't get hit by a gust of wind traveling at 180km/h on land.
See the "Quest" view at top-right. It gets even better when you zoom all the way in to StreetView.
Room-temperature semiconductors would enable the construction of at-home MEG systems, which would quickly become a far more interesting and powerful technology to construct a brain-machine interface with than an EEG. The only problem is, you'd need to wear a Faraday cage around your head...
http://www.metalev.org/2012/03/stephen-wolfram-quantified-self-and.html -- just sayin'.
See my other comment about this -- http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2572024&cid=38366336
Well assuming the laser pulses are completely uniform (which they are very close to being), then each wavefront of light is mathematically indistinguishable from the one before and after it, so in a very metaphysical sense, you could say that stitching together a video with frames of data taken from successive pulses is absolutely no different in the end than if they had collected all the data in a single shot. However they actually need to aggregate data from millions of frames into a single shot, because they get on average something like half a photon expected per frame without aggregation to increase the SNR -- see the longer presentation here (it's quite a remarkable presentation, I have seen about a third of it so far -- it talks a lot initially about their work to see around corners -- this is not a new thing to try to do, it has been done before with standard camera equipment and a projected pattern with some success, but doing it with laser pulses is new).
The cool thing about what they have done is that you can watch the actual wavefront move like an expanding contact lens through the scene. To my knowledge, nobody has ever seen this before. Sure, it's data from billions of expanding contact lenses, but it shows you in a very visual way that the universe works the way the mathematics say it does.
No, the camera is not a trillion frames per second, but it shows you events that happen over trillionth-of-a-second timescales, if it were possible to capture data that quickly (which it is not) and if it were possible to solve the SNR issues over that timescale (which it is not).
There's nothing more effective than an irate customer. Get into as many accounts as you can, grab an email address and the first and last 4 digits of their credit card info (or some other disambiguating information), then send emails to the customers from an email anonymizer, sharing whatever disambiguating information you obtained from their account, and stating the fact that the company won't fix their security. Step back and watch the customers make the company fix the problem.
The only plausible explanation for Carrier IQ is a government mandate to the carriers to install wiretapping capabilities. Which makes it ironic that a class-action lawsuit is proceeding which will probably eventually bring in the FCC too, i.e. the very government that put Carrier IQ in place in the first place.
It's not that there's too much data to store. There's too much to analyze. Storing 1M genomes is tractable today. Doing a pairwise comparison of 1M genomes requires half a trillion whole-genome comparisons. Even Google doesn't compute on that scale yet. (Disclaimer: I'm a postdoc in computational biology.)
'Oracle NoSQL might not offer the heady fun and "just build it" experimentation of many of the pure open source NoSQL projects, but that's not really its role.
Restated: Oracle started a new project from scratch, but still managed to make the code look like it had been maintained by a megacorporation for a decade, like other long-term Oracle and Sun projects?
Reading via word shape has been tested since the 80s: See "The Psychology of Reading" by Taylor & Taylor (1989), or read this: http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ctfonts/wordrecognition.aspx Apparently one part of the brain looks at global word shape, and another starts reading letters from the beginning and end of the word at the same time, and they both collectively converge on a mutually-consistent hypothesis. But word shape reading is faster and often pre-empts the local feature (letter) reading process.
Look at 0:53 and 1:50 in the video you posted -- this train is locked in position in *one orientation* at *one distance* from the track, and it happens when you cool the superconductor down. The video in the original post shows you can set the orientation and distance by applying greater than some threshold force, and then it is preserved. Orientation preservation is remarkable.
Sound travels extremely well and fast in water, and is close to inescapable to ocean life. The noise pollution produced by boats is having adverse effects on at least whales and dolphins: http://news.discovery.com/animals/whales-scream-noise-pollution.html http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7003587/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/noise-pollution-disrupts-whale-communication/
If you watched the movie "Contagion", you wouldn't think this was such a great idea.
The chance of causing an autoimmune disease with this sort of treatment protocol seems enormous... Do you really think that nothing could possibly go wrong in training the body to kill its own cells of a specific narrow type?