Like Their Lawyers Would Let Something Slip
on
IRS Auditing Google
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Google's probably got nothing to worry about. They've been doing this for a while. So has Microsoft. And Facebook. And probably most other large companies. Most of this falls under something called transfer pricing. Which is a global problem that you will find anywhere from China to Britain to Argentina.
It's not quite right for this article to make it sound like a solely Google problem. It's far far larger than that. In the end, Google's got enough of the highest paid lawyers and accountants that this audit should turn up just about nothing.
Hmmm, maybe I'll just transfer all my profits to Bermuda... oh, right, I'm poor. We pay taxes. Corporations and people rich enough to afford shifty accountants don't. And, really, what motivation do my representatives have to change this situation? Their soft money doesn't come from me and my fellow citizens are too stupid, too easily misled and too illiterate to vote someone who would change this into office.
I have met and known two 'child prodigies' that were clearly not as intelligent as Gabriel. But before you advocate removing him from the school system, let me relate to you the story of one of my good friend's brothers, Jay. Jay was identified very early on as being very intelligent and as a result, by third grade his mother was homeschooling him to try to make the most of his time. And she did, he graduated from the local college at age 15. And she constantly pushed him and prodded him relentlessly to do better.
And he kind of burned out. He lives with his brother (my good friend) now and hasn't ever really had a real job. After he completed college, he decided to independently pursue his own interests and sort of realized that the whole educational path he had taken was really him just quickly absorbing other people's works. Striking out on new ground was far too uncomfortable for him. What was worse was that this totally destroyed his confidence. He's never been unhappy with his life but outside of his mother's reach, he's really just kicked back and played video games. I think the greatest work of the last five years of his life has been editing TVTropes -- a site that he became obsessed with after he discovered he could spend all day watching television with no consequence. Jay has never had peers really aside from his brothers. I'm no child psychologist but I think it has had a devastating effect on his understanding on society and also his work ethic.
The other person was a coworker, Tom, who was a very talented software developer. I met him when he was 40 and one time he told me at lunchtime about his childhood. Tom had burned out as well but in a more problematic way. Tom also completed college (Physics) at a very young age but upon having difficulty his senior year, he became depressed and had suicidal thoughts. So his parents flipped out and brought him to a psychologist who diagnosed him with Asperger's Syndrome (which he clearly did not have when I met him) and gave him a bunch of drugs. He discovered he was great at programming software and decided to make a career out of it. He still said his mother's disappointment that he didn't "cure cancer" or discover a universal filed theory was probably the most regrettable thing in his life and it was ever present in their interactions.
"He'll probably find a cure for cancer," Sleight said. "Or something bigger."
I think a more positive statement would be something along the lines of "He has accomplished so much and already done such great research that even if he stopped studying now he would be an accomplished academic." Not to suggest that he should stop studying but to relieve a bit of the pressure. What if he doesn't cure cancer or something bigger? What will this news do to Gabriel the person then? Haunt him?
I would advocate trying to keep him involved in school as much as he desires with external stimulation to help his specialties. Why must geniuses be removed from society? Was Einstein removed from interacting with children his age? What exactly is the hurry? Is Gabriel asking for more time to study -- time that regular schooling is interfering with? Does he have a network of friends to rely on? Is he expected to live a short life like Ramanujan?
My opinion is to let him excel at school and take a more normal path than complete removal and its unavoidable isolation.
I do recall he was great at mixing in humor and entertainment into an otherwise dry and toilsome subject matter so may I say that I sincerely hope he hasn't given up on technical aspirations. At the time that book was one of the best general resources out there for HTML5. I'm sad that his github repo for the book may only exist at mirrors now.
I'm sorry if I lead anyone to imply my childhood was rough. That was merely an anecdote about how people "with faith" often see a given event or action. Then after the event or action is prescribed to be "good" or "bad" (often subjective in and of themselves) they will say that it was "God" or the "Individual" at work. This often perplexed me as a child and, like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, its place in the toolbox of control became very clear to me later in life around age 16. I do not call this abuse of any kind, I see this as a method of control that was particularly effective with me.
Please, don't attribute that kind of harsh upbringing to a religion.
Good sir, there was nothing harsh about it. It is, however, a core concept of (nearly all) religions. An eye in the sky that can magically be anywhere and everywhere at once? That knows everything? That is free to judge me without fear of judgment of itself? A being I cannot communicate with? A being of somehow infinite goodness that is so powerful and unknowable that it's okay to let children in Africa starve to death -- children who have never had the opportunity of knowing Jesus? I have often mused that Roman Catholics would rather you believe in Satan (or Shai'tan or whatever) than God as fear will keep you in line. As a child, I definitely feared God more than anything else. And I assume you're a god-fearin' man.
Now that, my friend, will keep a young boy in lock step. It did for me and I'm not opposed to rear my children the same way until they are 16 and the same books that fell into my hands start falling into theirs.
Rebels mad cuz I used iPhone to tell you Steve Jobs is in hell.God created iPhone for that purpose!:)
She's just confirming what Apple fans already knew: God works at Apple.
That's a bittersweet reminder of my Roman Catholic upbringing. Whenever I did something good like played the trombone well or scored well on a test, I was instructed to pray to Jesus for working through me to do something so good. Whenever I screwed up, well, all those powerful forces like God and the Devil were suspiciously absent and the fault was solely mine.
Professor Rossi is already independently wealthy, money is not his motivation.
If his motive is pure and he does not want money, why must his nickel based catalyst remain so secret?
From the article:
The catalyst is secret, but Rossi says it can be produced at low cost.
Why doesn't he just file for an international patent and release a paper to a journal like all other scientists who are financially interested do? Hell, if he's "independently wealthy" he can screw the patent or anything and go down as one of the greatest men of all time. Think about how many wars, death and resource contention this could alleviate. Right now I view this as either a hoax or a person so filled with greed he's willing to let the world fester while he makes sure his cash and unimaginable wealth is secured. He certainly has a right to do the latter but talk about being an asshat.
Parts of it, yes. But I think the article does an okay job of keeping cautious. Maybe you read only the sentences you want to? Allow me to cherry pick a few:
Rossi's heavyweight supporters include 1973 physics Nobel prize winner Brian Josephson. Josephson also supports telepathy research.
Skeptics point to the lack of published science, and the way that Rossi keeps details of his special catalyst secret. They also point to his past involvement in Petroldragon, a company involved in converting organic waste into fuel, which collapsed in the 1990's amidst allegations of dumping toxic waste. (Rossi maintains that he was the victim in this complex case).
Until August of this year, Rossi was planning his big launch in Greece, and an E-Cat factory was being built in Xanthi. But the deal has somehow fallen through for unexplained reasons, vaguely blamed on pressure from "international energy interests" who may be threatened by the invention.
"According to my analysis, his claim has no scientific credibility," Krivit told Wired.co.uk. The device he claimed to heat a factory in Bondeno seems to exist only on paper."
At this point, I'm calling it 'tabloid science journalism.' This guy is looking to get rich quick not contribute to human knowledge so I'm not paying attention to him just yet. Hopefully I get to backpedal in a couple months when he starts shipping but... well, I'm betting there will be some 'delay' imposed by 'ominous forces' as Rossi's wallet fattens.
“I think it’s worthwhile to document it like this, to see what will happen with the next event,” Kanamori says, “but I can’t be completely convinced.”
I can't seem to access the paper but can anyone tell me how long of a time range was surveyed and how many times the electron counts spiked when there wasn't a massive earthquake?
Granted, it still could be useful to use as a percentage or forecast if intersecting this statistic with othermetrics.
Normally, the country can count on conservatives to deal in facts.
News flash: neither party can be counted on to deal in facts. I will also say with utter confidence that your party line (of which there are only two) will not determine how factual you are. There are goddamn liars among all the ranks of any party.
We base policies on science, not sentiment, we insist on people being accountable for their actions, and we maintain that markets, not mandates, are the path to prosperity.
If you based your policies on science, then why isn't it a completely open process? Anonymize the names (if any) and release the numbers (especially who pays what in taxes from which areas) behind your policy making. Of course you don't and on top of that, paltry though it may be, we have to wait until Obama to get that ball started rolling.
You would expect conservatives to stand with 95 percent of the scientific community and to grow the 13 percent into a working majority.
Oh, wait a minute, I see what's going on here. You're not really a conservative. You're like Zell Miller who is a Democrat only by label and paperwork.
Your proposal, though noble, is a fool's errand. I believe this has been tackled before and the real problem is that you can always find more and more ties to pollution or non-renewable resources being used to make your product and get it to the consumer and then even after that you have the whole usage of it followed by proper disposal and returning the resources. That cheap Dell computer your secretary is playing Bejeweled on? Yeah, that's a nightmare.
What if we attached all of the costs -- especially the hidden costs -- to all fuels?
Once you lay out a comprehensive and complete list of what the costs are -- especially the hidden costs -- then I'll hop on board. For now you're basically scratching the surface of a very deep and complicated rabbit hole that is hard to trace backward for many reasons. Some of them supply line problems, some of them scientific problems, some of them statistical problems and some even privacy problems for the users.
Companies already try to regulate themselves by paying a so called 'carbon tax' by being 'carbon neutral' or by planting just an assload of trees so they can say X trees for Y products sold. But you know, that's all really neither exact nor assuredly truly undoing all that is done in their dealings. And while they might tell the public one thing, I don't think they believe it.
Could someone please enumerate every true cost of getting one gallon of gasoline into my car tank? What about what happens as I use it? What about what happens after I've used it?
And the best part is that at some point, as you noted, loss of life is going to be on that list of true costs. Whether you're buying an Apple iPhone that some worker committed suicide while making at the Foxconn plant or BP's little explosion killing 11 oil well workers, you're going to have to say at some point that 1 human life = X million dollars in cost. And that makes people really uncomfortable. It gets even more uncomfortable when whoever deciding that cost considers nationality in influencing that ratio.
What is the most rewarding thing to you personally from the 30 years of being a band? A particular fan letter? A particular performance? Just being able to do what you love?
In 1992 you guys were sending out news updates to your fans via Usenet Newsgroup, what are the next big things you want to try to do with the internet to connect with your fans? Are you working on anything crazy and innovative right now that you can talk about that sort of transcends the basic music to vendor to fan experience? Almost all bands send out updates now and allow samples of songs to be heard online, where do you see these methods heading in the future?
Assuming you still listen to other bands and acts in your free time, by what method do you acquire new music? I've seen your albums in vinyl and I know you were the first major label artist to release an entire album exclusively in MP3. My preferred method is buying vinyl that gives me an MP3 download on the side. So what is your collection mostly of CD, iTunes, MP3s (lossless?) or do you personally enjoy the slight comeback of vinyl?
Because when I read the articles, I found this instead of hard numbers:
Q. Are these results scalable?
The capabilities of automated face recognition *today* are still limited - but keep improving. Although our studies were completed in the "wild" (that is, with real social networks profiles data, and webcam shots taken in public, and so forth), they are nevertheless the output of a controlled (set of) experiment(s). The results of a controlled experiment do not necessarily translate to reality with the same level of accuracy. However, considering the technological trends in cloud computing, face recognition accuracy, and online self-disclosures, it is hard not to conclude that what today we presented as a proof-of-concept in our study, tomorrow may become as common as everyday's text-based search engine queries.
How you want to decide Google passed on continuing down this road is up to you. Frankly, I would surmise that the type I and type II errors become woefully problematic when applied to an entire population. Facial recognition is not there yet, not until I see some hard numbers that convince me the error rate is low enough. Right now I bet if you were to snap pictures of 10,000 people, you would incorrectly classify at least 100 of them leading to wasted time, violated rights and wasted opportunity (depending on the misclassification).
The problem with software in academia is that it is often devoted to a sole purpose. It is not a generalized solution -- conversely -- it's often a demonstration of a solution so specific that it's never been done. Hence the awarding of a title to the creator. On top of that the teams are usually small and time is usually tight. It's also usually a side effect of the greater thing, the thesis. It will always take a backseat to the theory.
When software is widely adopted, it is because it has been widely supported and is a more generalized solution to a problem. If it uses hardware, it supports all kinds. If it reads or writes files, it covers all formats. This leads to widespread adoption but also takes a lot of time and a lot of contributions. If you're also working on your thesis, this is a daunting task to work on the side.
Nobody gets their PhD by making a predecessor's implementation support more file formats or hardware. So this is left to the licensing of the originator and the community -- who are often recognized as the real workhorses that go from prototype to actual usable software. That's why you don't find many PhD projects turned instant open source hit.
In bioinformatics , a relatively young field, most consumers of the software work in a lab and the input is fairly simple. But even with simple input they first had to agree on a format (those are just a few of what used to be many). BLAST and FASTA go back to the 1990s and 1980s respectively... if it had depended on hardware or the constant change of text files like PDF and DOC, I think you can understand how hard it would be for academia -- let alone the originating researcher(s) -- to maintain and support for the community. An open source effort could pick up that slack but then who deserves credit for that work?
Groupon is going to find itself in serious trouble soon due to an unsustainable business model and will be folding within the next 12-18 months?
I guess that's only if you find them to be disingenuous enough not to chase their adjusted revenues of US$312.9 million with an investment. What the article seems to be ignoring is that Groupon is still turning a profit. While it's not insane, it's still money. Investors aren't stupid when it comes to money and they'll simply adjust their plans for the IPO. I wager they'll cut the IPO planning in half and then a little extra for misleading people. But come on, this is Wall Street! Is anyone completely honest in that business? Investors might even like the cut of that move.
I hate defending Groupon but I've been suckered by them once. I bought two tickets to a movie theater for 1/2 price only to realize the only theaters were in a different state and they then expired. Lame.
I think the article goes a little over the top on Groupon hate though:
Assuming that's true, how dysfunctional is a company when the CEO goes around the No. 2 person?
Are you kidding me? He's the CEO! Do you think every single call by him has to go through the COO? Isn't that the definition of overly heavy management?
A lot of consumer grade machines have begun focusing on multicore chips with a lower frequency to provide the same or better perceived computing performance than a high frequency single core chip. What happens when a technology like this subverts our craving for higher transistor density? Can you argue that your "law" is immune to researchers focusing on some hot new technology like a thousand core processor or a beefed up system on a chip in order to improve end user experience over pure algorithm crunching speed?
Advising clients on EULAs, Terms of Use, and related contract issues;
What do you tell your clients (who apparently include Blizzard Entertainment, Square Enix, Disney and Zynga) when that "thing" I agree to before playing their game is unreadable and painfully lengthy? Are you providing them more legalese or are you saying, "Look, no gamer is going to 1) sit down and read all of this and 2) have the background to comprehend some of these terms." Because right now, in the software world, those EULAs are a complete joke. Is your firm making any positive headway on shoring up that gap between the understandings of both company lawyer and end user? If so, how?
Your history of protecting the right to unlock phones seems mildly at odds with something from your firm's site:
Bringing suit or taking creative non-traditional enforcement actions against hackers, cheats, in-game spammers, RMT sellers, and others who disrupt the game experience;
I like the creative non-traditional enforcement route but I have to question why would you bring suit against this group of users? You might not agree but the way I see it is that I paid for my phone, I'll now do what I want with it. What do you care if I'm running different software on it? Similarly, I paid for this game and what do you care that I'm selling items for real money on the side? Or writing a bot to farm gold? It seems like users that derive an alternative means to enjoy something they buy outside of the intended usage get targeted and locked out when it happens. They're both cat and mouse games between user and corporation, why is one a legal right to do whatever you want with something you paid for and the other is prosecuted by your firm?
So I used to play an online game with some friends called Star Wars Galaxies (SWG). Which is now seemingly forever dead. And so the fans decided to work on building their own servers with the given clients. You seem to know a lot about reverse engineering so my question -- when applied more broadly -- is simply this: how come I shelled out $50 for a piece of software back in the day, now that software can no longer be used and that's completely legal? I realize I probably agreed to a ToS that forfeited my right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness but I thought consumer protection groups were supposed to prevent this exact sort of thing from happening. Last part of this question is simply do you ever foresee SWG becoming public domain? Of course, it's mired in Lucas' copyrights as well as Sony's but at some point in the distant future, all that copyrighted stuff (including server code and artwork) is supposed to be public domain, right? What then? Is that even going to happen? Is Sony legally required to hang on to that server source code so that I can finally once again play SWG while watching Matlock in the nursing home? Why are consumer rights non-existent when it comes to software? Will the Library of Congress open up all that source? Source control history included? I know I'll probably be dead but I'm curious.
Could this have anything to do with dodging anti-science policies of the American far right?
I know it's fun to jump on the scientifically inept politicians but I might also cite general concern for what a stem cell treatment entails. Several medical professionals have explained to me that just randomly injecting stem cells into your body has unknown effects depending on the stem cells and the localization of the injection. This causes a variance of anything from magically cured to cancer-like growths. Stem cells aren't very well understood yet... and some of that is to blame on halting embryonic stem cell research but even the Republicans are okay with non-embryonic stem cells. As we develop more ways to get stem cells, their hobbling of the US medical field becomes moot (assuming adult stem cells are just as awesome as embryonic stem cells -- something I don't know).
So, yeah, you know the FDA and other regulators are pretty slow moving to approve all this in the United States until that becomes more science than "Let's see, you take the syringe here and inject this shit there and... are you cured yet? Oh, you died? Well, send in the next medical tourist!" Why doesn't the article explain what "procedure" or "treatment" Tonya Winchester was administered in Russia?
However, the framework changes incredibly quickly. It will be outdated soon.
While this is true, the book shows you how to use help and how to search for new modules or existing ones. I think a lot of the basic stuff like LHOST/RHOST and basic setup. How Metasploit uses a database to store, how other scanners store stuff and a lot of the basic stuff will remain. I mean, a lot of these exploits that I explored required you to just set the variables to tell it where to hit... those are pretty static I think.
Sure, they delve pretty deeply into a few exploits as they have you use them but it was really easy to write my own scanner, exploit, payload, etc. Well, I should say it was as easy as it was going to get. I admit the payload part took me a fair amount of time. I've been busy using this book to point this sucker at my own code... heh, let's just say Metasploit works more often than you'd like it to:)
There's a lot of basic stuff in this book that isn't going to change and the fact is that if you're not taking the Penetration Testing training, I would get this book and dive into it.
Like I said in the review, I would love to see them take this book further and deeper -- maybe expand on the basics that I had to find in other resources they cited?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm waiting to find out that I paid more than Google in taxes.
It's not just Google, here's a place to start. The problem is larger than that as some of the largest companies (Boeing, Ebay, GE) spend more money lobbying politicians than paying taxes.
Google's probably got nothing to worry about. They've been doing this for a while. So has Microsoft. And Facebook. And probably most other large companies. Most of this falls under something called transfer pricing. Which is a global problem that you will find anywhere from China to Britain to Argentina.
... oh, right, I'm poor. We pay taxes. Corporations and people rich enough to afford shifty accountants don't. And, really, what motivation do my representatives have to change this situation? Their soft money doesn't come from me and my fellow citizens are too stupid, too easily misled and too illiterate to vote someone who would change this into office.
It's not quite right for this article to make it sound like a solely Google problem. It's far far larger than that. In the end, Google's got enough of the highest paid lawyers and accountants that this audit should turn up just about nothing.
Hmmm, maybe I'll just transfer all my profits to Bermuda
And he kind of burned out. He lives with his brother (my good friend) now and hasn't ever really had a real job. After he completed college, he decided to independently pursue his own interests and sort of realized that the whole educational path he had taken was really him just quickly absorbing other people's works. Striking out on new ground was far too uncomfortable for him. What was worse was that this totally destroyed his confidence. He's never been unhappy with his life but outside of his mother's reach, he's really just kicked back and played video games. I think the greatest work of the last five years of his life has been editing TVTropes -- a site that he became obsessed with after he discovered he could spend all day watching television with no consequence. Jay has never had peers really aside from his brothers. I'm no child psychologist but I think it has had a devastating effect on his understanding on society and also his work ethic.
The other person was a coworker, Tom, who was a very talented software developer. I met him when he was 40 and one time he told me at lunchtime about his childhood. Tom had burned out as well but in a more problematic way. Tom also completed college (Physics) at a very young age but upon having difficulty his senior year, he became depressed and had suicidal thoughts. So his parents flipped out and brought him to a psychologist who diagnosed him with Asperger's Syndrome (which he clearly did not have when I met him) and gave him a bunch of drugs. He discovered he was great at programming software and decided to make a career out of it. He still said his mother's disappointment that he didn't "cure cancer" or discover a universal filed theory was probably the most regrettable thing in his life and it was ever present in their interactions.
"He'll probably find a cure for cancer," Sleight said. "Or something bigger."
I think a more positive statement would be something along the lines of "He has accomplished so much and already done such great research that even if he stopped studying now he would be an accomplished academic." Not to suggest that he should stop studying but to relieve a bit of the pressure. What if he doesn't cure cancer or something bigger? What will this news do to Gabriel the person then? Haunt him?
I would advocate trying to keep him involved in school as much as he desires with external stimulation to help his specialties. Why must geniuses be removed from society? Was Einstein removed from interacting with children his age? What exactly is the hurry? Is Gabriel asking for more time to study -- time that regular schooling is interfering with? Does he have a network of friends to rely on? Is he expected to live a short life like Ramanujan?
My opinion is to let him excel at school and take a more normal path than complete removal and its unavoidable isolation.
I do recall he was great at mixing in humor and entertainment into an otherwise dry and toilsome subject matter so may I say that I sincerely hope he hasn't given up on technical aspirations. At the time that book was one of the best general resources out there for HTML5. I'm sad that his github repo for the book may only exist at mirrors now.
From a comment on the article:
His GitHub projects have been mirrored:
https://github.com/diveintomark
Dive Into Python 3
Online: http://diveintopython3.ep.io/
GitHub: https://github.com/diveintomark/diveintopython3
Dive Into HTML5
Online: http://diveintohtml5.ep.io/
GitHub: https://github.com/diveintomark/diveintohtml5
I'm sorry your childhood was rough.
I'm sorry if I lead anyone to imply my childhood was rough. That was merely an anecdote about how people "with faith" often see a given event or action. Then after the event or action is prescribed to be "good" or "bad" (often subjective in and of themselves) they will say that it was "God" or the "Individual" at work. This often perplexed me as a child and, like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, its place in the toolbox of control became very clear to me later in life around age 16. I do not call this abuse of any kind, I see this as a method of control that was particularly effective with me.
Please, don't attribute that kind of harsh upbringing to a religion.
Good sir, there was nothing harsh about it. It is, however, a core concept of (nearly all) religions. An eye in the sky that can magically be anywhere and everywhere at once? That knows everything? That is free to judge me without fear of judgment of itself? A being I cannot communicate with? A being of somehow infinite goodness that is so powerful and unknowable that it's okay to let children in Africa starve to death -- children who have never had the opportunity of knowing Jesus? I have often mused that Roman Catholics would rather you believe in Satan (or Shai'tan or whatever) than God as fear will keep you in line. As a child, I definitely feared God more than anything else. And I assume you're a god-fearin' man.
Now that, my friend, will keep a young boy in lock step. It did for me and I'm not opposed to rear my children the same way until they are 16 and the same books that fell into my hands start falling into theirs.
Rebels mad cuz I used iPhone to tell you Steve Jobs is in hell.God created iPhone for that purpose! :)
She's just confirming what Apple fans already knew: God works at Apple.
That's a bittersweet reminder of my Roman Catholic upbringing. Whenever I did something good like played the trombone well or scored well on a test, I was instructed to pray to Jesus for working through me to do something so good. Whenever I screwed up, well, all those powerful forces like God and the Devil were suspiciously absent and the fault was solely mine.
Professor Rossi is already independently wealthy, money is not his motivation.
If his motive is pure and he does not want money, why must his nickel based catalyst remain so secret?
From the article:
The catalyst is secret, but Rossi says it can be produced at low cost.
Why doesn't he just file for an international patent and release a paper to a journal like all other scientists who are financially interested do? Hell, if he's "independently wealthy" he can screw the patent or anything and go down as one of the greatest men of all time. Think about how many wars, death and resource contention this could alleviate. Right now I view this as either a hoax or a person so filled with greed he's willing to let the world fester while he makes sure his cash and unimaginable wealth is secured. He certainly has a right to do the latter but talk about being an asshat.
Wired's article is remarkably optimistic.
Parts of it, yes. But I think the article does an okay job of keeping cautious. Maybe you read only the sentences you want to? Allow me to cherry pick a few:
Rossi's heavyweight supporters include 1973 physics Nobel prize winner Brian Josephson. Josephson also supports telepathy research.
Skeptics point to the lack of published science, and the way that Rossi keeps details of his special catalyst secret. They also point to his past involvement in Petroldragon, a company involved in converting organic waste into fuel, which collapsed in the 1990's amidst allegations of dumping toxic waste. (Rossi maintains that he was the victim in this complex case).
Until August of this year, Rossi was planning his big launch in Greece, and an E-Cat factory was being built in Xanthi. But the deal has somehow fallen through for unexplained reasons, vaguely blamed on pressure from "international energy interests" who may be threatened by the invention.
"According to my analysis, his claim has no scientific credibility," Krivit told Wired.co.uk. The device he claimed to heat a factory in Bondeno seems to exist only on paper."
At this point, I'm calling it 'tabloid science journalism.' This guy is looking to get rich quick not contribute to human knowledge so I'm not paying attention to him just yet. Hopefully I get to backpedal in a couple months when he starts shipping but ... well, I'm betting there will be some 'delay' imposed by 'ominous forces' as Rossi's wallet fattens.
“I think it’s worthwhile to document it like this, to see what will happen with the next event,” Kanamori says, “but I can’t be completely convinced.”
I can't seem to access the paper but can anyone tell me how long of a time range was surveyed and how many times the electron counts spiked when there wasn't a massive earthquake?
Granted, it still could be useful to use as a percentage or forecast if intersecting this statistic with other metrics.
Normally, the country can count on conservatives to deal in facts.
News flash: neither party can be counted on to deal in facts. I will also say with utter confidence that your party line (of which there are only two) will not determine how factual you are. There are goddamn liars among all the ranks of any party.
We base policies on science, not sentiment, we insist on people being accountable for their actions, and we maintain that markets, not mandates, are the path to prosperity.
If you based your policies on science, then why isn't it a completely open process? Anonymize the names (if any) and release the numbers (especially who pays what in taxes from which areas) behind your policy making. Of course you don't and on top of that, paltry though it may be, we have to wait until Obama to get that ball started rolling.
Oh, yeah, accountable of their actions? Yeah, you rich bastards love to hold each other accountable for your actions -- especially your financiers.
You would expect conservatives to stand with 95 percent of the scientific community and to grow the 13 percent into a working majority.
Oh, wait a minute, I see what's going on here. You're not really a conservative. You're like Zell Miller who is a Democrat only by label and paperwork.
Your proposal, though noble, is a fool's errand. I believe this has been tackled before and the real problem is that you can always find more and more ties to pollution or non-renewable resources being used to make your product and get it to the consumer and then even after that you have the whole usage of it followed by proper disposal and returning the resources. That cheap Dell computer your secretary is playing Bejeweled on? Yeah, that's a nightmare.
What if we attached all of the costs -- especially the hidden costs -- to all fuels?
Once you lay out a comprehensive and complete list of what the costs are -- especially the hidden costs -- then I'll hop on board. For now you're basically scratching the surface of a very deep and complicated rabbit hole that is hard to trace backward for many reasons. Some of them supply line problems, some of them scientific problems, some of them statistical problems and some even privacy problems for the users.
Companies already try to regulate themselves by paying a so called 'carbon tax' by being 'carbon neutral' or by planting just an assload of trees so they can say X trees for Y products sold. But you know, that's all really neither exact nor assuredly truly undoing all that is done in their dealings. And while they might tell the public one thing, I don't think they believe it.
Could someone please enumerate every true cost of getting one gallon of gasoline into my car tank? What about what happens as I use it? What about what happens after I've used it?
And the best part is that at some point, as you noted, loss of life is going to be on that list of true costs. Whether you're buying an Apple iPhone that some worker committed suicide while making at the Foxconn plant or BP's little explosion killing 11 oil well workers, you're going to have to say at some point that 1 human life = X million dollars in cost. And that makes people really uncomfortable. It gets even more uncomfortable when whoever deciding that cost considers nationality in influencing that ratio.
What is the most rewarding thing to you personally from the 30 years of being a band? A particular fan letter? A particular performance? Just being able to do what you love?
In 1992 you guys were sending out news updates to your fans via Usenet Newsgroup, what are the next big things you want to try to do with the internet to connect with your fans? Are you working on anything crazy and innovative right now that you can talk about that sort of transcends the basic music to vendor to fan experience? Almost all bands send out updates now and allow samples of songs to be heard online, where do you see these methods heading in the future?
Assuming you still listen to other bands and acts in your free time, by what method do you acquire new music? I've seen your albums in vinyl and I know you were the first major label artist to release an entire album exclusively in MP3. My preferred method is buying vinyl that gives me an MP3 download on the side. So what is your collection mostly of CD, iTunes, MP3s (lossless?) or do you personally enjoy the slight comeback of vinyl?
This is why Google shelved their version of this tech. The implications were too big.
Having studied this in college and witnessed many failed implementations of it I casually ask: Where are the recall rates (see also sensitivity and specificity) of these experiments?
Because when I read the articles, I found this instead of hard numbers:
Q. Are these results scalable?
The capabilities of automated face recognition *today* are still limited - but keep improving. Although our studies were completed in the "wild" (that is, with real social networks profiles data, and webcam shots taken in public, and so forth), they are nevertheless the output of a controlled (set of) experiment(s). The results of a controlled experiment do not necessarily translate to reality with the same level of accuracy. However, considering the technological trends in cloud computing, face recognition accuracy, and online self-disclosures, it is hard not to conclude that what today we presented as a proof-of-concept in our study, tomorrow may become as common as everyday's text-based search engine queries.
How you want to decide Google passed on continuing down this road is up to you. Frankly, I would surmise that the type I and type II errors become woefully problematic when applied to an entire population. Facial recognition is not there yet, not until I see some hard numbers that convince me the error rate is low enough. Right now I bet if you were to snap pictures of 10,000 people, you would incorrectly classify at least 100 of them leading to wasted time, violated rights and wasted opportunity (depending on the misclassification).
The problem with software in academia is that it is often devoted to a sole purpose. It is not a generalized solution -- conversely -- it's often a demonstration of a solution so specific that it's never been done. Hence the awarding of a title to the creator. On top of that the teams are usually small and time is usually tight. It's also usually a side effect of the greater thing, the thesis. It will always take a backseat to the theory.
... if it had depended on hardware or the constant change of text files like PDF and DOC, I think you can understand how hard it would be for academia -- let alone the originating researcher(s) -- to maintain and support for the community. An open source effort could pick up that slack but then who deserves credit for that work?
When software is widely adopted, it is because it has been widely supported and is a more generalized solution to a problem. If it uses hardware, it supports all kinds. If it reads or writes files, it covers all formats. This leads to widespread adoption but also takes a lot of time and a lot of contributions. If you're also working on your thesis, this is a daunting task to work on the side.
Nobody gets their PhD by making a predecessor's implementation support more file formats or hardware. So this is left to the licensing of the originator and the community -- who are often recognized as the real workhorses that go from prototype to actual usable software. That's why you don't find many PhD projects turned instant open source hit.
In bioinformatics , a relatively young field, most consumers of the software work in a lab and the input is fairly simple. But even with simple input they first had to agree on a format (those are just a few of what used to be many). BLAST and FASTA go back to the 1990s and 1980s respectively
Groupon is going to find itself in serious trouble soon due to an unsustainable business model and will be folding within the next 12-18 months?
I guess that's only if you find them to be disingenuous enough not to chase their adjusted revenues of US$312.9 million with an investment. What the article seems to be ignoring is that Groupon is still turning a profit. While it's not insane, it's still money. Investors aren't stupid when it comes to money and they'll simply adjust their plans for the IPO. I wager they'll cut the IPO planning in half and then a little extra for misleading people. But come on, this is Wall Street! Is anyone completely honest in that business? Investors might even like the cut of that move.
I hate defending Groupon but I've been suckered by them once. I bought two tickets to a movie theater for 1/2 price only to realize the only theaters were in a different state and they then expired. Lame.
I think the article goes a little over the top on Groupon hate though:
Assuming that's true, how dysfunctional is a company when the CEO goes around the No. 2 person?
Are you kidding me? He's the CEO! Do you think every single call by him has to go through the COO? Isn't that the definition of overly heavy management?
A lot of consumer grade machines have begun focusing on multicore chips with a lower frequency to provide the same or better perceived computing performance than a high frequency single core chip. What happens when a technology like this subverts our craving for higher transistor density? Can you argue that your "law" is immune to researchers focusing on some hot new technology like a thousand core processor or a beefed up system on a chip in order to improve end user experience over pure algorithm crunching speed?
What is your take on the interpretation of Futurists -- like Raymond Kurzweil -- in regards to extrapolating these 'laws' out to extreme distances?
Overrated/Flamebait? Someone else can waste their time writing questions.
Advising clients on EULAs, Terms of Use, and related contract issues;
What do you tell your clients (who apparently include Blizzard Entertainment, Square Enix, Disney and Zynga) when that "thing" I agree to before playing their game is unreadable and painfully lengthy? Are you providing them more legalese or are you saying, "Look, no gamer is going to 1) sit down and read all of this and 2) have the background to comprehend some of these terms." Because right now, in the software world, those EULAs are a complete joke. Is your firm making any positive headway on shoring up that gap between the understandings of both company lawyer and end user? If so, how?
Bringing suit or taking creative non-traditional enforcement actions against hackers, cheats, in-game spammers, RMT sellers, and others who disrupt the game experience;
I like the creative non-traditional enforcement route but I have to question why would you bring suit against this group of users? You might not agree but the way I see it is that I paid for my phone, I'll now do what I want with it. What do you care if I'm running different software on it? Similarly, I paid for this game and what do you care that I'm selling items for real money on the side? Or writing a bot to farm gold? It seems like users that derive an alternative means to enjoy something they buy outside of the intended usage get targeted and locked out when it happens. They're both cat and mouse games between user and corporation, why is one a legal right to do whatever you want with something you paid for and the other is prosecuted by your firm?
So I used to play an online game with some friends called Star Wars Galaxies (SWG). Which is now seemingly forever dead. And so the fans decided to work on building their own servers with the given clients. You seem to know a lot about reverse engineering so my question -- when applied more broadly -- is simply this: how come I shelled out $50 for a piece of software back in the day, now that software can no longer be used and that's completely legal? I realize I probably agreed to a ToS that forfeited my right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness but I thought consumer protection groups were supposed to prevent this exact sort of thing from happening. Last part of this question is simply do you ever foresee SWG becoming public domain? Of course, it's mired in Lucas' copyrights as well as Sony's but at some point in the distant future, all that copyrighted stuff (including server code and artwork) is supposed to be public domain, right? What then? Is that even going to happen? Is Sony legally required to hang on to that server source code so that I can finally once again play SWG while watching Matlock in the nursing home? Why are consumer rights non-existent when it comes to software? Will the Library of Congress open up all that source? Source control history included? I know I'll probably be dead but I'm curious.
Star Wars is too.. main-stream action.
Yeah. But then this happened.
Could this have anything to do with dodging anti-science policies of the American far right?
I know it's fun to jump on the scientifically inept politicians but I might also cite general concern for what a stem cell treatment entails. Several medical professionals have explained to me that just randomly injecting stem cells into your body has unknown effects depending on the stem cells and the localization of the injection. This causes a variance of anything from magically cured to cancer-like growths. Stem cells aren't very well understood yet ... and some of that is to blame on halting embryonic stem cell research but even the Republicans are okay with non-embryonic stem cells. As we develop more ways to get stem cells, their hobbling of the US medical field becomes moot (assuming adult stem cells are just as awesome as embryonic stem cells -- something I don't know).
... are you cured yet? Oh, you died? Well, send in the next medical tourist!" Why doesn't the article explain what "procedure" or "treatment" Tonya Winchester was administered in Russia?
So, yeah, you know the FDA and other regulators are pretty slow moving to approve all this in the United States until that becomes more science than "Let's see, you take the syringe here and inject this shit there and
However, the framework changes incredibly quickly. It will be outdated soon.
While this is true, the book shows you how to use help and how to search for new modules or existing ones. I think a lot of the basic stuff like LHOST/RHOST and basic setup. How Metasploit uses a database to store, how other scanners store stuff and a lot of the basic stuff will remain. I mean, a lot of these exploits that I explored required you to just set the variables to tell it where to hit ... those are pretty static I think.
... heh, let's just say Metasploit works more often than you'd like it to :)
Sure, they delve pretty deeply into a few exploits as they have you use them but it was really easy to write my own scanner, exploit, payload, etc. Well, I should say it was as easy as it was going to get. I admit the payload part took me a fair amount of time. I've been busy using this book to point this sucker at my own code
There's a lot of basic stuff in this book that isn't going to change and the fact is that if you're not taking the Penetration Testing training, I would get this book and dive into it.
Like I said in the review, I would love to see them take this book further and deeper -- maybe expand on the basics that I had to find in other resources they cited?