There's a whole Slashdot article with people ripping apart Google for "double Irish" and "dutch sandwich" styles of tax evasion.
The only reason that it should hurt your karma is that you confusingly singled out Google when your own article lists Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, etc. Why pick on Google when everybody plays the same screw-the-taxpayer game? They're all crooks avoiding taxes in ways that a single individual like myself that makes very small fractions can't enjoy.
You'll lose karma when you spin it like this: "Apple Hurts Schoolchildren by Avoiding Taxes" and "Google Welcomes World Peace by Denying War Machine Its Pound of Flesh." See what I did wrong there?
Despite their exotic reputation, the vast majority of accounts were held by fairly ordinary folk (there seemed to be an inordinate number of german dentists). So while this may sound like a blow at the rich and powerful, there's going to be a lot of very unextraordinary middle class folk whose financial details are laid bare by this. Having a Swiss bank account is not illegal in itself.
A former Swiss bank executive said on Monday that he had given the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, details of more than 2,000 prominent individuals and companies that he contends engaged in tax evasion and other possible criminal activity.
Emphasis mine. Elmer is doing this because he feels the list he has compiled is a list of unjust individuals and right now Wikileaks is doing all in their power to verify that these individuals are, in fact, tax dodgers. He says the list has 40 politicians and “pillars of society” worldwide among those two thousand.
You might want consider whether you'd like your finances laid bare before you acclaim this as another win for david over goliath.
Precisely why I ended the summary with "at the expense of privacy." And it's not just tax evasion. You do realize that if Julius Baer is associated with heinous criminals worldwide that it could get ugly on an international level, right?
It is indeed a better link and was one I found in my Google Reader this morning. However, I also have noticed continuously that New York Times links provide me headaches and disappointment when used in Slashdot's submission process. Here's a recent example, earlier this morning I submitted a story about video games and mental health problems. Now in that submission I referred to a well written New York Times article an used this URL:
What is going on? I've written to CmdrTaco about this and I thought he said they'd look at it... like their system prefetches URLs or something? Makes adjustments to avoid TinyURL in the submission? Avoids redirects that might go to goatse? I don't know. What I do know is that if you go to the firehose and type in 'nytimes' as your search term you will find submission after submission with login/paywalled URLs exactly like the one above. Here's one and another and another ad infinitum.
So when you do this, people get upset they can't read the article and I heavily sympathize with them and generally consider my submission a failed attempt when that happens. So the solution? Don't link to the New York Times in submissions! I'll find some other site to send a billion Slashdot eyes at if they don't want their page views. It really is a shame because I love the New York Times and think they have some great writers but from the above it's evident the affection is asymmetrical.
So what *are* the ramifications of releasing a large pocket of oxygen into our current atmosphere, both for us and for the lake which has been sitting isolated for 14 million years?
Your fears are unfounded, from the article:
Now, the team has satisfied the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat, which safeguards the continent's environment, that it's come up with a technique to sample the lake without contaminating it. Valery Lukin told New Scientist: "Once the lake is reached, the water pressure will push the working body and the drilling fluid upwards in the borehole, and then freeze again." The next season, the team will bore into that frozen water to recover a sample whose contents can then be analysed.
So they're taking the appropriate precautions there...
Not so much being snarky as not being a scientist and am curious. It's great that we can go anywhere that's locked away and hidden, but should we?
The moon was "locked away" but we went there, didn't we?
Everyone needs to relax, there's an expedition to explore Lake Ellsworth and we've already explored an ultra-oligotrophic lake named Hodgson Lake and the results:
They found... nothing. The analyses show that the Hodgson Lake water 'is one of the clearest water lakes I have ever worked on, clearer than the distilled water we use in our lab, with almost nothing in it,' says Hodgson. The samples have virtually no nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, and very low measurements of other chemical elements.
So they're going to take necessary precautions approved by a governing body and the odds are high that their results will just turn up some of the purest water we've ever seen. Of course the article notes that if they find extremophiles, it'll be a boon for studying the many protective enzymes the organisms need to live.
I fail to see the need to drill to this lake so far below the surface. For one thing I would be worried about bringing back up who knows what with organisms and bacteria that we have not seen before that could be dangerous, also don't you think they would be contaminating this lake by drilling into it?
From the article:
Now, the team has satisfied the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat, which safeguards the continent's environment, that it's come up with a technique to sample the lake without contaminating it. Valery Lukin told New Scientist: "Once the lake is reached, the water pressure will push the working body and the drilling fluid upwards in the borehole, and then freeze again." The next season, the team will bore into that frozen water to recover a sample whose contents can then be analysed.
I only counted five homeless in the article. I guess the other one represents the hidden homeless around all of us.
That website is not laid out very well, there's a second page that talks about James Montgomery.
Personally, I'm not sure about Adrian Lamo. Text of #4:
Adrian Lamo, Homeless Hacker Genius
It's always the smart people who get caught. In this case, it's Adrian Lamo, who was arrested in September 2004 by the FBI for computer fraud.
He was charged with breaking into the private network of the New York Times Company and running a bill upwards $300,000 on the pay-per-use search tool Lexis-Nexis and a possible 15-year prison sentence.
This wouldn't be too surprising if Lamo was a Ivy-League graduate with a rebellious streak (we've all seen Social Network three times by now to get the picture), but Lamo, one of the best-known hackers in the country, was homeless.
Given the name "The Homeless Hacker" by some, Lamo traveled around with just his eight-year-old Toshiba, blanket, change of clothes and Taser stun gun which he used to shock vending machines to see if they'd drop any food or spare change. He did most of his virtual exploring from the internet connections of Kinko's copy shops, which if you wear the right stuff, is actually pretty smart if you're a hacker (assuming you're paying in cash.)
Aside from the blatent idiocy of "It's always the smart people who get caught." how was this man 'saved' by the internet. I know he got interviews and a job as a grey hat... but not sure what he's up to now other than working as an informant.
Facebook has five hundred million users. Is each user really worth a hundred dollars?
I'm not a businessman but I'm not so sure this is the correct way to think about this.
Everything depends on how much the market is penetrated for social in two ways: users and advertisers. Can they grow that revenue/profit? And if so, to what point? If Zuckerberg sneaks it into China then I think you're looking at a potential to increase that significantly. Facebook hosts its statistics so you can guess if it's got a half billion in revenue yearly at half a billion users and it scales perfectly, that's a dollar per year per user. Can it get up to a billion users? It's probably clear that in the long run as the younger generation matures, that penetration will slowly expand... but there's no guarantee that Facebook remains the de facto standard that far out. You need to consider future growth.
The other factor, advertisers and game publishers, could also be troublesome. Is this a "Honeymoon Period" for advertisers where they're paying an unsustainable amount to Facebook for the time being just to gain exposure? Could the above assumptions about scaling with userbase actually be false if advertisers aren't willing to spend more than they are now once more users join?
Consider that these numbers put Facebook's Net Profit Margin at almost 30%. That's very high for the industry. They're in the same region as Google and Microsoft but as I stated above can it scale?
One last thing, you seem to think that Facebook's worth is only its users. They are also a large company with almost two thousand employees and are building infrastructure. Include that on your assets sheet.
Facebook is going public soon. What are the chances that this 'leaked' report is designed to pump up the stock, and therefore Goldman's profit?
Fifth time I've paid for a license to three of these movies.
If I'm going to respect copyright, tell me why I don't deserve to have these movies on my Nintendo DS, Netbook HDD, PS3, etc in whatever the latest resolution is. I've cumulatively shelled out hundreds of dollars (with inflation adjustments) for these three movies and yet I'm continually paying for them in the latest format. I bet if they figured out a way to approve lifetime licenses to this media, a lot more people would feel okay buying a copyright. Right now, I'm 28 years old and I've been nickel and dimed since age 12. Also, for those who didn't like the sequels, there appears to be a cheaper subset for $45 of the original three.
I'm sad that there isn't BD-Live for these in the Amazon description, I'd love to listen to fan commentary and possibly add my own. Has anyone had good/bad experiences with BD-Live commentaries? I was hoping that'd be used to do MST3K versions of popular movies or add insight to movies like Donnie Darko or Lost maybe. Unfortunately, having only received my PS3 this last holiday I've discovered that very very few movies are BD-Live.
I think we would be a lot better off with "But we've never done this, we've always been better than that!" than with "We'll, here we go yet again."
I respectfully disagree.
If I may liken it to a more concrete example of the history of mathematics, I don't think we ever would have made it to integration without remembering mistakes or basic concepts like addition.
We have stood on the shoulders of the works of very brilliant philosophers and thinkers to get where we are today. Fascism has slowly been phased out in favor of more liberal and democratic governments. And we all know that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the ones we already tried (thank you, Churchill).
Our knowledge of our nasty history hasn't stopped us from repeating ourselves again and again
It's not a perfect process, no. But you don't see a Pol Pot rise to power so easily today and you don't see a new Stalin sending millions to the gulags. Because we remember those things and we remember how they were accepted at the time but are clearly wrong now. On top of that, we remember what Imperialism did to the poor nations and how it made some nations poor and more powerful nations richer. We're not going to get away with colonizing a weaker nation and taking all their resources anymore. Because we remember what that results in. Of all the bad things you listed in your post, I implore you to look back to the situations and causes that set up those problems -- like the redrawing of boundaries of countries following World War II. And remember that so we can catch it next time. The list of these things are endless but you can find example after example in any history book worth its salt (I was most impressed with Hobsbawm's "Age of..." series).
When a child picks up the text of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and reads the word "nigger" I want them to take offense. Not to take offense at Mark Twain but more so to take offense to and own up to this great country's tortured past and to vow that this will never happen again. This use of a word as a marker of hate and denigration simply because of the color of a person's skin -- and the widespread cultural acceptance of it! If your child never learns the horrible results of that scenario than your child may one day find themselves as a part of that scenario.
Here's Brian Deer's publication at the British Medical Journal. Although lengthy (and apparently the first of a series to come), it has a lot of critical details about how this was fixed. It also has 124 citations through the article -- now that's journalism!
This guy tracked down subjects all the way over in the United States:
Child 11 was among the eight whose parents apparently blamed MMR. The interval between his vaccination and the first "behavioural symptom" was reported as 1 week. This symptom was said to have appeared at age 15 months. But his father, whom I had tracked down, said this was wrong.
"From the information you provided me on our son, who I was shocked to hear had been included in their published study," he wrote to me, after we met again in California, "the data clearly appeared to be distorted."
He backed his concerns with medical records, including a Royal Free discharge summary. Although the family lived 5000 miles from the hospital, in February 1997 the boy (then aged 5) had been flown to London and admitted for Wakefield’s project, the undisclosed goal of which was to help sue the vaccine's manufacturers.
Sadly, CNN couldn't even bother to have a single citation to the actual source text that is uncovering this. Of course they have all sorts of links internal to their site... gotta keep those page clicks up, don't want eyeballs over at the BMJ.
Why settle for just 1M? Play the lottery for a few weeks and you don't even have to bother writing an article to be rich.
So I realize a lot of people aren't going to read the article but here's the meaty parts for you statistics snobs (and really, the Bayes folks are going to be all over this one):
Across all 100 sessions, participants correctly identified the future position of the erotic pictures significantly more frequently than the 50% hit rate expected by chance: 53.1%, t(99) = 2.51, p =.01, d = 0.25.3 In contrast, their hit rate on the nonerotic pictures did not differ significantly from chance: 49.8%, t(99) = -0.15, p =.56. This was true across all types of nonerotic pictures: neutral pictures, 49.6%; negative pictures, 51.3%; positive pictures, 49.4%; and romantic but nonerotic pictures, 50.2%. (All t values < 1.) The difference between erotic and nonerotic trials was itself significant, tdiff(99) = 1.85, p =.031, d = 0.19.
There's a lot more about eliminating random number generators (by using this little guy) leading to prediction as well as running more tests where they are asked to pick a preference of two identical images. The most interesting part is that these results seemed to hinge on pornography. The individuals only exhibited this "precognition or premonition" when they were picking erotic images or rewarded with erotic images (albeit from the International Affective Picture System).
The skeptic in me is very pleased and excited about this part of the paper:
Accordingly, the experiments have been designed to be as simple and
transparent as possible, drawing participants from the general population, requiring no
instrumentation beyond a desktop computer, taking fewer than 30 minutes per session, and
requiring statistical analyses no more complex than a t test across sessions or participants.
Grad students across the country: get to work!
But you would have to have the lottery involve some sort of erotic pictures containing the known numbers in order for this edge to be garnered. Which would be impossible unless the lotteries changed how they worked. Maybe play blackjack with a set of playboy cards?:-)
on precognition (the Times erroneously calls it ESP).
Why is that erroneous? Precognition and premonition are two facets of Extrasensory Perception. From its wikipedia article:
Extrasensory perception (ESP) involves reception of information not gained through the recognized physical senses but sensed with the mind. The term was coined by Sir Richard Burton,[citation needed] and adopted by Duke University psychologist J. B. Rhine to denote psychic abilities such as telepathy and clairvoyance, and their trans-temporal operation as precognition or retrocognition.
So if you were dealing with anything of the above or anything external to our normal senses, I think that qualifies as ESP and calling it ESP. Sure that acronym has a lot of baggage but from the study itself:
... this is an experiment that tests for ESP (Extrasensory Perception).
That's what the tests subjects were told and I don't think the article is erroneous.
What is happening instead is that consumer choices are EXPANDING.
I liken it to Facebook's many privacy debacles. First let me explain how Facebook -- and I really think this is all Zuckerberg -- works. They want to increase information flow on Facebook. Even private information. But they realize that if they give the user a choice nobody's going to 'take the plunge' and the feature will largely be left as opt-in but never used. So they make it automatic and they deal with the privacy issue after it's been activated across the board. They put on a show about how they hear the users and now you have an option to disable that but it's not disabled because people have been living with it for a couple weeks and by and large nothing seriously bad has happened -- yet. A good example is the news feed debacle that caused users outrage and protests. But now everyone uses it. How did that happen? More importantly: could it have happened at all had not Zuckerberg stood up and made a decision for hundreds of millions of users? I think that answer is "no."
When I see the Windows commercial, I don't see an option. I see a feature. I see a feature like Facebook's News Feed. It's being marketed as a feature of Windows 7. The woman is using Windows 7 and then she says "To the cloud" real James Bond like and suddenly we're "in the cloud." And that's Windows 7. People then want that. There's no "I just need to upload my photo to Google's Picassa" or any sort of steps warning the user what exactly is happening in the background. No, it's all streamlined feature rich marketing crap. Are they explaining this can be disabled? No, we'll do that later. Where's my data? Who cares? You're in the cloud, you're sexy, you're hip -- privacy is old school for the squares!
On the Mac, soon, you'll have a choice to get applications from anywhere - or to get them from a central source that is somewhat vetted, and furthermore ends the hodge-podge of software update mechanisms to one where you get updates when they arrive without fuss. That's a huge boon to most people.
Okay but this isn't the cloud, this is just a really streamlined distribution service. Am I the only person that wants to have two columns for the Pros and Cons of using a cloud based service as the basis of your home operating system!?
Commentators believe the patent could allow Apple to create a subscription-based cloud OS that gives it more control over its users.
More control over its users.
On top of that, this whole cloud privacy relationship concept needs to be addressed -- especially when people see commercials advocating it without fully explaining that your photo, data, computations, whatever are being moved to and performed on other machine external to yours. That single Microsoft commercial has further muddied up how people understand what the cloud is.
I applaud Apple for their foresight and innovation in this but I see it in line with Tim Wu's fears of Apple further controlling your data and information. I'd have the same fears with Chrome OS and Windows utilizing a cloud of computers just the same. This ideal of executing what you want on your hardware in your property seems to be dying. And with it, privacy or any desire thereof.
One of the key pieces to this argument is fallacious:
The news for the traditional developers is not good:
Chopper 2 — iOS price: $4.99. Mac price: $4.99.
Air Hockey — iOS price: $0.99. Mac price: $0.99.
ReMovem — iOS price: $2.99. Mac price: $2.99.
Compression — iOS price: $2.99. Mac price: $3.99.
These are all games and one did have a price difference between iOS and Mac, but it was a buck.
Compare that with Mac games listed on Amazon today. $38.99 $19.99 $27.54 $29.35 $54.99 $24.38. These are traditional PC prices.
As of tomorrow, games priced at $20-60 will be competing against games priced at 99 cents to $4.99. The most expensive iOS games are around ten bucks. In effect, game pricing will drop by 90-95% -- on average -- overnight.
Question: Why didn't you list out those titles that you found at $20-$55 like you did with the iPhone titles? Oh, I know, it's because they're so far from similar it would be embarrassing to reveal that the heart of your argument is on shaky ground at best.
I don't own a Mac. I don't own an iPhone. But I've seen people play games on both. From your suggestion of Amazon's bestselling Mac game titles let's look at the top page without duplicates: The Sims 3, Bejeweled 3, World of Warcraft, Civilization V, Nancy Drew, and Spore. With the exception of Bejeweled (and the other Pop Cap titles), I think you are comparing apples to oranges when you say that World of Warcraft is now going to have to compete with Air Hockey and that Blizzard should tuck its tail between its legs and run because the $40 price point versus $1 price point means they're going to die. And in the only applicable case (Pop Cap Games), they will be the ones moving their apps to the Mac Store. So they should be afraid of themselves?
Here's how I see it: gaming on Mac has always been sort of unsupported. It's gotten a lot better recently but not all publishers see a value to it. Now, with this Mac Store, you're going to see the same publishers sell at their price point but gaming could explode on the Mac given this opportunity to transcend iOS and target OSX as well. I don't think that the applications and games that exist in the iPhone sphere are going to do much to the revenues of desktop counterparts because they're simply beefier applications. Furthermore, if they do modify those price points to compete, I'm of the opinion that the Steam Effect will take place and instead of selling 10k copies at $20 they're going to sell 100k copies at $4. The bottom line is that this software store will do little to traditional Mac sales and instead expand the subscriptions of the mobile games a bit.
Your friends are also going to have to figure out how the input on a mac with a single mouse is going to handle those times when they were sensing two or more touch points on the device screen. So even if you're right, Armageddon is not tomorrow.
Apple wins. Many of their very loyal developers will lose.
The Rapture is upon us, repent now before it is too late. Steve Jobs is a ruthless and uncaring god! Seriously man, you're blowing this up into something it's not.
Look at Samsung's Galaxy S browser. GPU accelerated and tile-based. I’m told it’s a result of Samsung’s PowerVR GPU optimizations.
Doesn't that require that the device have a PowerVR GPU on board? What about devices without PowerVR like the NexusOne, does it run on that?
When you optimize to GPUs, you have to optimize to all GPUs. I realize there are common instruction sets but the main selling point of Android is its versatility. If I start coding for only Snapdragon processors with PowerVR GPUs because it has a better UX, then it sort of destroys any benefit I get from Android and I might as well code for iOS because I know what that hardware will always be. A lot of the benefits of Android applications being Java byte code completely independent of the hardware are overlooked in this proposition.
The developers don't know what future devices are going to use for GPUs or their instruction sets. From one of the links Romain says:
New devices might allow us to overcome the past limitations that made GPU support a not-so-good solution.
Doesn't optimization for particular hardware exacerbate their issues with fragmentation?
Well, it's open source, there's always the smug answer that Charles Ying can go fork Android himself and add this and watch all the handset manufacturers flock to his side. If you think it's best, get a team together and do it.
How this helps us must be over my head. I can't see $20 or $30 per PC price difference even filtering down to us.
Well, for those of us that are savvy enough to build our own or upgrade existing, there sure has been evidence in pricing. Every memory I look at shows a pretty steady decline in price. Compare that to something like SSDs and you'll see the charts for SSDs fluctuate up and down more wildly. DDR3 especially seems to have an overall downward trend over the past couple months.
DRAM began losing value most recently in December as the Western holiday shopping season wound down, Lin said. But major manufacturers such as Elpida Memory, Powerchip Semiconductor and Samsung Electronics kept pumping out chips to stay competitive, he said.
Really? They actually employed that strategy? "The market is saturated so we need to make more DRAM to raise profits." I don't understand, were they uninformed about demand being satisfied?
I mean, are they incapable of curbing production for a quarter? I understand these are huge plants that can't be turned on and off with the flip of a switch but if they're not careful they can hurt themselves indefinitely. I'm glad to be getting dirt cheap DDR3 sticks of memory but I don't want to see those companies compete each other into the red over it. I hope they're right when they say it's seasonal because it sounds like they're in for some tough times all the way through March. Farmers will tell you that flooding the market is a surefire way to destroy your competition as well as yourself... unless of course you're subsidized but that's a whole other rant.
The reasons this is a great move are pretty obvious but there's some articles floating around out there that point out this might be a gamble. Reasons include:
We have no real idea if Facebook revenues are actually near $2 billion. The company is private and doesn't have to report numbers to anyone.
Groupon and its clones buy lots of Facebook ads, and we don't know if group-buying is a sustainable advertising model. Some local merchants say it kills their margins.
Zynga and the other social game companies are desperate to find a way to live off Facebook. Google is supposedly building an alternative.
Regardless, it sounds like more of these privately traded shares in auctions from Sharespost will be conducted in the near future. Expect to see Facebook get a serious cash infusion if they all go as well as this one.
Wouldn't surprise me to see Wikipedia go this way.
This is fine reasoning, even the opinion article linked to advocates this. But there is an important issue that needs to be addressed first and that is how ads are handled for each particular page. Google's highest bidder model is what I am most afraid of. These don't even have to be selling advertisements. For example if I went to the page on Anti-lock Braking Systems I would suspect automakers would pay large amounts of money to be the ad banner for that page with the simple statement of '<highest bidding automaker> provides the #1 ABS with a safety rating surpassing all others.'
And, though insanely lucrative, a part of me fears that this would really disrupt or even destroy the concept of a peer reviewed encyclopedia. When I edit a page and look at it, I don't want to see some banner ad with lies or half-truths at the top of it and you know as well as I that that is exactly what advertising degrades to. The problem is that online advertising has become so savvy that these pages would specifically be targeted en mass by manufacturers and bid on through whoever provides the advertising for Wikipedia. And I will make the statement that giving them the ability to put advertising would be severely detrimental to the integrity for Wikipedia... if not for no one else than at least to a high degree for me.
Sure enough, the initial server directed me to 72.215.224.16 with this partial tracert:
4 12 ms 10 ms 10 ms mrfddsrj02gex070002.rd.dc.cox.net [68.100.0.145] 5 17 ms 14 ms 12 ms ashbbprj01-ae0.0.rd.as.cox.net [68.1.0.220] 6 12 ms 15 ms 12 ms 72.215.224.16
Firefox told me this would take 3 Minutes and 35 Seconds.
Then, I set my DNS to the 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 addresses and tried it again. This time I was sent to 72.246.30.19 with this partial tracert:
4 11 ms 12 ms 14 ms mrfddsrj02gex070002.rd.dc.cox.net [68.100.0.145] 5 13 ms 11 ms 13 ms ashbbprj01-ae0.0.rd.as.cox.net [68.1.0.220] 6 17 ms 17 ms 13 ms ge13-1.br01.ash01.pccwbtn.net [63.218.44.125] 7 21 ms 18 ms 12 ms akamai.ge13-4.br02.ash01.pccwbtn.net [63.218.94.142] 8 17 ms 18 ms 13 ms a72-246-30-19.deploy.akamaitechnologies.com [72.246.30.19]
Surprisingly, this second server that I was directed to using Google DNS only took 10 seconds to download the same file. I did it a second time and it took 30 seconds.
Now after restoring my default DNS resolution that URL continually directs me to 72.215.224.40 and the download is as speedy as the Google DNS. If I switch back to Google DNS it now continually directs me to 72.246.30.32 so you can see that there's some load balancing going here that apparently can be divvied up by geographic location for some of their customers. Apparently Apple needs to investigate the same solution that Adobe is using from Akamai. Which doesn't consider everything from Google DNS being fulfilled from a west coast replication server?
Well, there's a lot of details from the actual source of the study that are left out of the Fox News report. Like the fact that they used a taxonomic knowledge in a rulebase to reduce the set of unique plants. While fascinating, one must wonder how well an automated system could perform such a feat. Note: The part about putting "discovered" in double quotes is not found in the original source article but arises in the Fox News article. You might want to be careful as you could be insinuating gross incompetence in the field of botany across its entire history. It's also possible that this algorithm for reducing the list needs to be worked on.
Really? The summary doesn't even get around to explaining what the alleged "breakthrough" was. It's just trumpeting the awesomeness of race-track memory. From the article:
"We discovered that domain walls don't hit peak acceleration as soon as the current is turned on, and that it takes them exactly the same time and distance to hit peak acceleration as it does to decelerate and eventually come to a stop," commented Dr. Stuart Parkin, an IBM Fellow at IBM Research. "This was previously undiscovered in part because it was not clear whether the domain walls actually had mass, and how the effects of acceleration and deceleration could exactly compensate one another. Now we know domain walls can be positioned precisely along the racetracks simply by varying the length of the current pulses even though the walls have mass."
Don't get me wrong, race track memory is some pretty exciting stuff but I think we're dealing with an observation that means they can now proceed along a certain strategy for storing and retrieving bits. I don't think I would call this a breakthrough, it sounds like they set out to investigate domain walls and learned something. How is that a breakthrough? We're still in the ten to fifteen years away period which is that magic flying car period that, in many instances of exciting new technology, never seems to shrink.
"Breakthrough" no longer means anything to me. I don't know what you would have to put in the title to get me genuinely excited about a real breakthrough... probably something like "Researchers Shitting Themselves Over New Discovery."
Slashdot Mirror
There's a whole Slashdot article with people ripping apart Google for "double Irish" and "dutch sandwich" styles of tax evasion.
The only reason that it should hurt your karma is that you confusingly singled out Google when your own article lists Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, etc. Why pick on Google when everybody plays the same screw-the-taxpayer game? They're all crooks avoiding taxes in ways that a single individual like myself that makes very small fractions can't enjoy.
You'll lose karma when you spin it like this: "Apple Hurts Schoolchildren by Avoiding Taxes" and "Google Welcomes World Peace by Denying War Machine Its Pound of Flesh." See what I did wrong there?
Despite their exotic reputation, the vast majority of accounts were held by fairly ordinary folk (there seemed to be an inordinate number of german dentists). So while this may sound like a blow at the rich and powerful, there's going to be a lot of very unextraordinary middle class folk whose financial details are laid bare by this. Having a Swiss bank account is not illegal in itself.
From the New York Times coverage:
A former Swiss bank executive said on Monday that he had given the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, details of more than 2,000 prominent individuals and companies that he contends engaged in tax evasion and other possible criminal activity.
Emphasis mine. Elmer is doing this because he feels the list he has compiled is a list of unjust individuals and right now Wikileaks is doing all in their power to verify that these individuals are, in fact, tax dodgers. He says the list has 40 politicians and “pillars of society” worldwide among those two thousand.
You might want consider whether you'd like your finances laid bare before you acclaim this as another win for david over goliath.
Precisely why I ended the summary with "at the expense of privacy." And it's not just tax evasion. You do realize that if Julius Baer is associated with heinous criminals worldwide that it could get ugly on an international level, right?
There are more details here.
It is indeed a better link and was one I found in my Google Reader this morning. However, I also have noticed continuously that New York Times links provide me headaches and disappointment when used in Slashdot's submission process. Here's a recent example, earlier this morning I submitted a story about video games and mental health problems. Now in that submission I referred to a well written New York Times article an used this URL:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/17/us/17gaming.html
Every time I previewed it or edited it, it came out like that. But when I hit submit, it magically changed to this URL:
http://www.nytimes.com/glogin?URI=http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/17/us/17gaming.html&OQ=_rQ3D4&OP=70b1f348Q2FQ5D-2yQ5DgoksPooZQ27Q5DQ27W33Q5DW3Q5D3VQ5DisQ5D3VdQ241Q26rdQ25OZ14
What is going on? I've written to CmdrTaco about this and I thought he said they'd look at it ... like their system prefetches URLs or something? Makes adjustments to avoid TinyURL in the submission? Avoids redirects that might go to goatse? I don't know. What I do know is that if you go to the firehose and type in 'nytimes' as your search term you will find submission after submission with login/paywalled URLs exactly like the one above. Here's one and another and another ad infinitum.
So when you do this, people get upset they can't read the article and I heavily sympathize with them and generally consider my submission a failed attempt when that happens. So the solution? Don't link to the New York Times in submissions! I'll find some other site to send a billion Slashdot eyes at if they don't want their page views. It really is a shame because I love the New York Times and think they have some great writers but from the above it's evident the affection is asymmetrical.
So what *are* the ramifications of releasing a large pocket of oxygen into our current atmosphere, both for us and for the lake which has been sitting isolated for 14 million years?
Your fears are unfounded, from the article:
Now, the team has satisfied the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat, which safeguards the continent's environment, that it's come up with a technique to sample the lake without contaminating it. Valery Lukin told New Scientist: "Once the lake is reached, the water pressure will push the working body and the drilling fluid upwards in the borehole, and then freeze again." The next season, the team will bore into that frozen water to recover a sample whose contents can then be analysed.
So they're taking the appropriate precautions there ...
Not so much being snarky as not being a scientist and am curious. It's great that we can go anywhere that's locked away and hidden, but should we?
The moon was "locked away" but we went there, didn't we?
Everyone needs to relax, there's an expedition to explore Lake Ellsworth and we've already explored an ultra-oligotrophic lake named Hodgson Lake and the results:
They found... nothing. The analyses show that the Hodgson Lake water 'is one of the clearest water lakes I have ever worked on, clearer than the distilled water we use in our lab, with almost nothing in it,' says Hodgson. The samples have virtually no nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, and very low measurements of other chemical elements.
So they're going to take necessary precautions approved by a governing body and the odds are high that their results will just turn up some of the purest water we've ever seen. Of course the article notes that if they find extremophiles, it'll be a boon for studying the many protective enzymes the organisms need to live.
I fail to see the need to drill to this lake so far below the surface. For one thing I would be worried about bringing back up who knows what with organisms and bacteria that we have not seen before that could be dangerous, also don't you think they would be contaminating this lake by drilling into it?
From the article:
Now, the team has satisfied the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat, which safeguards the continent's environment, that it's come up with a technique to sample the lake without contaminating it. Valery Lukin told New Scientist: "Once the lake is reached, the water pressure will push the working body and the drilling fluid upwards in the borehole, and then freeze again." The next season, the team will bore into that frozen water to recover a sample whose contents can then be analysed.
I think it's similar to this mission at Lake Ellsworth.
I only counted five homeless in the article. I guess the other one represents the hidden homeless around all of us.
That website is not laid out very well, there's a second page that talks about James Montgomery.
Personally, I'm not sure about Adrian Lamo. Text of #4:
Adrian Lamo, Homeless Hacker Genius
It's always the smart people who get caught. In this case, it's Adrian Lamo, who was arrested in September 2004 by the FBI for computer fraud.
He was charged with breaking into the private network of the New York Times Company and running a bill upwards $300,000 on the pay-per-use search tool Lexis-Nexis and a possible 15-year prison sentence.
This wouldn't be too surprising if Lamo was a Ivy-League graduate with a rebellious streak (we've all seen Social Network three times by now to get the picture), but Lamo, one of the best-known hackers in the country, was homeless.
Given the name "The Homeless Hacker" by some, Lamo traveled around with just his eight-year-old Toshiba, blanket, change of clothes and Taser stun gun which he used to shock vending machines to see if they'd drop any food or spare change. He did most of his virtual exploring from the internet connections of Kinko's copy shops, which if you wear the right stuff, is actually pretty smart if you're a hacker (assuming you're paying in cash.)
Aside from the blatent idiocy of "It's always the smart people who get caught." how was this man 'saved' by the internet. I know he got interviews and a job as a grey hat ... but not sure what he's up to now other than working as an informant.
Facebook has five hundred million users. Is each user really worth a hundred dollars?
I'm not a businessman but I'm not so sure this is the correct way to think about this.
... but there's no guarantee that Facebook remains the de facto standard that far out. You need to consider future growth.
Everything depends on how much the market is penetrated for social in two ways: users and advertisers. Can they grow that revenue/profit? And if so, to what point? If Zuckerberg sneaks it into China then I think you're looking at a potential to increase that significantly. Facebook hosts its statistics so you can guess if it's got a half billion in revenue yearly at half a billion users and it scales perfectly, that's a dollar per year per user. Can it get up to a billion users? It's probably clear that in the long run as the younger generation matures, that penetration will slowly expand
The other factor, advertisers and game publishers, could also be troublesome. Is this a "Honeymoon Period" for advertisers where they're paying an unsustainable amount to Facebook for the time being just to gain exposure? Could the above assumptions about scaling with userbase actually be false if advertisers aren't willing to spend more than they are now once more users join?
Consider that these numbers put Facebook's Net Profit Margin at almost 30%. That's very high for the industry. They're in the same region as Google and Microsoft but as I stated above can it scale?
One last thing, you seem to think that Facebook's worth is only its users. They are also a large company with almost two thousand employees and are building infrastructure. Include that on your assets sheet.
Facebook is going public soon. What are the chances that this 'leaked' report is designed to pump up the stock, and therefore Goldman's profit?
I think the SEC would come down pretty hard on GS if they did that -- they have before for less. Misleading investors is very serious.
Fifth time I've paid for a license to three of these movies.
If I'm going to respect copyright, tell me why I don't deserve to have these movies on my Nintendo DS, Netbook HDD, PS3, etc in whatever the latest resolution is. I've cumulatively shelled out hundreds of dollars (with inflation adjustments) for these three movies and yet I'm continually paying for them in the latest format. I bet if they figured out a way to approve lifetime licenses to this media, a lot more people would feel okay buying a copyright. Right now, I'm 28 years old and I've been nickel and dimed since age 12. Also, for those who didn't like the sequels, there appears to be a cheaper subset for $45 of the original three.
I'm sad that there isn't BD-Live for these in the Amazon description, I'd love to listen to fan commentary and possibly add my own. Has anyone had good/bad experiences with BD-Live commentaries? I was hoping that'd be used to do MST3K versions of popular movies or add insight to movies like Donnie Darko or Lost maybe. Unfortunately, having only received my PS3 this last holiday I've discovered that very very few movies are BD-Live.
I think we would be a lot better off with "But we've never done this, we've always been better than that!" than with "We'll, here we go yet again."
I respectfully disagree.
If I may liken it to a more concrete example of the history of mathematics, I don't think we ever would have made it to integration without remembering mistakes or basic concepts like addition.
We have stood on the shoulders of the works of very brilliant philosophers and thinkers to get where we are today. Fascism has slowly been phased out in favor of more liberal and democratic governments. And we all know that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the ones we already tried (thank you, Churchill).
Our knowledge of our nasty history hasn't stopped us from repeating ourselves again and again
It's not a perfect process, no. But you don't see a Pol Pot rise to power so easily today and you don't see a new Stalin sending millions to the gulags. Because we remember those things and we remember how they were accepted at the time but are clearly wrong now. On top of that, we remember what Imperialism did to the poor nations and how it made some nations poor and more powerful nations richer. We're not going to get away with colonizing a weaker nation and taking all their resources anymore. Because we remember what that results in. Of all the bad things you listed in your post, I implore you to look back to the situations and causes that set up those problems -- like the redrawing of boundaries of countries following World War II. And remember that so we can catch it next time. The list of these things are endless but you can find example after example in any history book worth its salt (I was most impressed with Hobsbawm's "Age of ..." series).
When a child picks up the text of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and reads the word "nigger" I want them to take offense. Not to take offense at Mark Twain but more so to take offense to and own up to this great country's tortured past and to vow that this will never happen again. This use of a word as a marker of hate and denigration simply because of the color of a person's skin -- and the widespread cultural acceptance of it! If your child never learns the horrible results of that scenario than your child may one day find themselves as a part of that scenario.
I'm not being a troll here, I'm asking a serious question. Wouldn't we be better off for it?
And also doomed to repeat it all?
This guy tracked down subjects all the way over in the United States:
Child 11 was among the eight whose parents apparently blamed MMR. The interval between his vaccination and the first "behavioural symptom" was reported as 1 week. This symptom was said to have appeared at age 15 months. But his father, whom I had tracked down, said this was wrong.
"From the information you provided me on our son, who I was shocked to hear had been included in their published study," he wrote to me, after we met again in California, "the data clearly appeared to be distorted."
He backed his concerns with medical records, including a Royal Free discharge summary. Although the family lived 5000 miles from the hospital, in February 1997 the boy (then aged 5) had been flown to London and admitted for Wakefield’s project, the undisclosed goal of which was to help sue the vaccine's manufacturers.
Sadly, CNN couldn't even bother to have a single citation to the actual source text that is uncovering this. Of course they have all sorts of links internal to their site ... gotta keep those page clicks up, don't want eyeballs over at the BMJ.
Why settle for just 1M? Play the lottery for a few weeks and you don't even have to bother writing an article to be rich.
So I realize a lot of people aren't going to read the article but here's the meaty parts for you statistics snobs (and really, the Bayes folks are going to be all over this one):
Across all 100 sessions, participants correctly identified the future position of the erotic pictures significantly more frequently than the 50% hit rate expected by chance: 53.1%, t(99) = 2.51, p = .01, d = 0.25.3 In contrast, their hit rate on the nonerotic pictures did not differ significantly from chance: 49.8%, t(99) = -0.15, p = .56. This was true across all types of nonerotic pictures: neutral pictures, 49.6%; negative pictures, 51.3%; positive pictures, 49.4%; and romantic but nonerotic pictures, 50.2%. (All t values < 1.) The difference between erotic and nonerotic trials was itself significant, tdiff(99) = 1.85, p = .031, d = 0.19.
There's a lot more about eliminating random number generators (by using this little guy) leading to prediction as well as running more tests where they are asked to pick a preference of two identical images. The most interesting part is that these results seemed to hinge on pornography. The individuals only exhibited this "precognition or premonition" when they were picking erotic images or rewarded with erotic images (albeit from the International Affective Picture System).
The skeptic in me is very pleased and excited about this part of the paper:
Accordingly, the experiments have been designed to be as simple and transparent as possible, drawing participants from the general population, requiring no instrumentation beyond a desktop computer, taking fewer than 30 minutes per session, and requiring statistical analyses no more complex than a t test across sessions or participants.
Grad students across the country: get to work!
:-)
But you would have to have the lottery involve some sort of erotic pictures containing the known numbers in order for this edge to be garnered. Which would be impossible unless the lotteries changed how they worked. Maybe play blackjack with a set of playboy cards?
on precognition (the Times erroneously calls it ESP).
Why is that erroneous? Precognition and premonition are two facets of Extrasensory Perception. From its wikipedia article:
Extrasensory perception (ESP) involves reception of information not gained through the recognized physical senses but sensed with the mind. The term was coined by Sir Richard Burton,[citation needed] and adopted by Duke University psychologist J. B. Rhine to denote psychic abilities such as telepathy and clairvoyance, and their trans-temporal operation as precognition or retrocognition.
So if you were dealing with anything of the above or anything external to our normal senses, I think that qualifies as ESP and calling it ESP. Sure that acronym has a lot of baggage but from the study itself:
... this is an experiment that tests for ESP (Extrasensory Perception).
That's what the tests subjects were told and I don't think the article is erroneous.
What is happening instead is that consumer choices are EXPANDING.
I liken it to Facebook's many privacy debacles. First let me explain how Facebook -- and I really think this is all Zuckerberg -- works. They want to increase information flow on Facebook. Even private information. But they realize that if they give the user a choice nobody's going to 'take the plunge' and the feature will largely be left as opt-in but never used. So they make it automatic and they deal with the privacy issue after it's been activated across the board. They put on a show about how they hear the users and now you have an option to disable that but it's not disabled because people have been living with it for a couple weeks and by and large nothing seriously bad has happened -- yet. A good example is the news feed debacle that caused users outrage and protests. But now everyone uses it. How did that happen? More importantly: could it have happened at all had not Zuckerberg stood up and made a decision for hundreds of millions of users? I think that answer is "no."
When I see the Windows commercial, I don't see an option. I see a feature. I see a feature like Facebook's News Feed. It's being marketed as a feature of Windows 7. The woman is using Windows 7 and then she says "To the cloud" real James Bond like and suddenly we're "in the cloud." And that's Windows 7. People then want that. There's no "I just need to upload my photo to Google's Picassa" or any sort of steps warning the user what exactly is happening in the background. No, it's all streamlined feature rich marketing crap. Are they explaining this can be disabled? No, we'll do that later. Where's my data? Who cares? You're in the cloud, you're sexy, you're hip -- privacy is old school for the squares!
On the Mac, soon, you'll have a choice to get applications from anywhere - or to get them from a central source that is somewhat vetted, and furthermore ends the hodge-podge of software update mechanisms to one where you get updates when they arrive without fuss. That's a huge boon to most people.
Okay but this isn't the cloud, this is just a really streamlined distribution service. Am I the only person that wants to have two columns for the Pros and Cons of using a cloud based service as the basis of your home operating system!?
Commentators believe the patent could allow Apple to create a subscription-based cloud OS that gives it more control over its users.
More control over its users.
On top of that, this whole cloud privacy relationship concept needs to be addressed -- especially when people see commercials advocating it without fully explaining that your photo, data, computations, whatever are being moved to and performed on other machine external to yours. That single Microsoft commercial has further muddied up how people understand what the cloud is.
I applaud Apple for their foresight and innovation in this but I see it in line with Tim Wu's fears of Apple further controlling your data and information. I'd have the same fears with Chrome OS and Windows utilizing a cloud of computers just the same. This ideal of executing what you want on your hardware in your property seems to be dying. And with it, privacy or any desire thereof.
The news for the traditional developers is not good:
These are all games and one did have a price difference between iOS and Mac, but it was a buck.
Compare that with Mac games listed on Amazon today. $38.99 $19.99 $27.54 $29.35 $54.99 $24.38. These are traditional PC prices.
As of tomorrow, games priced at $20-60 will be competing against games priced at 99 cents to $4.99. The most expensive iOS games are around ten bucks. In effect, game pricing will drop by 90-95% -- on average -- overnight.
Question: Why didn't you list out those titles that you found at $20-$55 like you did with the iPhone titles? Oh, I know, it's because they're so far from similar it would be embarrassing to reveal that the heart of your argument is on shaky ground at best.
I don't own a Mac. I don't own an iPhone. But I've seen people play games on both. From your suggestion of Amazon's bestselling Mac game titles let's look at the top page without duplicates: The Sims 3, Bejeweled 3, World of Warcraft, Civilization V, Nancy Drew, and Spore. With the exception of Bejeweled (and the other Pop Cap titles), I think you are comparing apples to oranges when you say that World of Warcraft is now going to have to compete with Air Hockey and that Blizzard should tuck its tail between its legs and run because the $40 price point versus $1 price point means they're going to die. And in the only applicable case (Pop Cap Games), they will be the ones moving their apps to the Mac Store. So they should be afraid of themselves?
Here's how I see it: gaming on Mac has always been sort of unsupported. It's gotten a lot better recently but not all publishers see a value to it. Now, with this Mac Store, you're going to see the same publishers sell at their price point but gaming could explode on the Mac given this opportunity to transcend iOS and target OSX as well. I don't think that the applications and games that exist in the iPhone sphere are going to do much to the revenues of desktop counterparts because they're simply beefier applications. Furthermore, if they do modify those price points to compete, I'm of the opinion that the Steam Effect will take place and instead of selling 10k copies at $20 they're going to sell 100k copies at $4. The bottom line is that this software store will do little to traditional Mac sales and instead expand the subscriptions of the mobile games a bit.
Your friends are also going to have to figure out how the input on a mac with a single mouse is going to handle those times when they were sensing two or more touch points on the device screen. So even if you're right, Armageddon is not tomorrow.
Apple wins. Many of their very loyal developers will lose.
The Rapture is upon us, repent now before it is too late. Steve Jobs is a ruthless and uncaring god! Seriously man, you're blowing this up into something it's not.
Look at Samsung's Galaxy S browser. GPU accelerated and tile-based. I’m told it’s a result of Samsung’s PowerVR GPU optimizations.
Doesn't that require that the device have a PowerVR GPU on board? What about devices without PowerVR like the NexusOne, does it run on that?
When you optimize to GPUs, you have to optimize to all GPUs. I realize there are common instruction sets but the main selling point of Android is its versatility. If I start coding for only Snapdragon processors with PowerVR GPUs because it has a better UX, then it sort of destroys any benefit I get from Android and I might as well code for iOS because I know what that hardware will always be. A lot of the benefits of Android applications being Java byte code completely independent of the hardware are overlooked in this proposition.
The developers don't know what future devices are going to use for GPUs or their instruction sets. From one of the links Romain says:
New devices might allow us to overcome the past limitations that made GPU support a not-so-good solution.
Doesn't optimization for particular hardware exacerbate their issues with fragmentation?
Well, it's open source, there's always the smug answer that Charles Ying can go fork Android himself and add this and watch all the handset manufacturers flock to his side. If you think it's best, get a team together and do it.
From Ying's article:
Wake up, Android team. Windows Phone 7 just lapped you.
Can anyone tell me why that AnandTech article from March is evidence that Windows Phone 7 has lapped Android? And why it just happened?
How this helps us must be over my head. I can't see $20 or $30 per PC price difference even filtering down to us.
Well, for those of us that are savvy enough to build our own or upgrade existing, there sure has been evidence in pricing. Every memory I look at shows a pretty steady decline in price. Compare that to something like SSDs and you'll see the charts for SSDs fluctuate up and down more wildly. DDR3 especially seems to have an overall downward trend over the past couple months.
DRAM began losing value most recently in December as the Western holiday shopping season wound down, Lin said. But major manufacturers such as Elpida Memory, Powerchip Semiconductor and Samsung Electronics kept pumping out chips to stay competitive, he said.
Really? They actually employed that strategy? "The market is saturated so we need to make more DRAM to raise profits." I don't understand, were they uninformed about demand being satisfied?
... unless of course you're subsidized but that's a whole other rant.
I mean, are they incapable of curbing production for a quarter? I understand these are huge plants that can't be turned on and off with the flip of a switch but if they're not careful they can hurt themselves indefinitely. I'm glad to be getting dirt cheap DDR3 sticks of memory but I don't want to see those companies compete each other into the red over it. I hope they're right when they say it's seasonal because it sounds like they're in for some tough times all the way through March. Farmers will tell you that flooding the market is a surefire way to destroy your competition as well as yourself
Regardless, it sounds like more of these privately traded shares in auctions from Sharespost will be conducted in the near future. Expect to see Facebook get a serious cash infusion if they all go as well as this one.
Wouldn't surprise me to see Wikipedia go this way.
This is fine reasoning, even the opinion article linked to advocates this. But there is an important issue that needs to be addressed first and that is how ads are handled for each particular page. Google's highest bidder model is what I am most afraid of. These don't even have to be selling advertisements. For example if I went to the page on Anti-lock Braking Systems I would suspect automakers would pay large amounts of money to be the ad banner for that page with the simple statement of '<highest bidding automaker> provides the #1 ABS with a safety rating surpassing all others.'
... if not for no one else than at least to a high degree for me.
And, though insanely lucrative, a part of me fears that this would really disrupt or even destroy the concept of a peer reviewed encyclopedia. When I edit a page and look at it, I don't want to see some banner ad with lies or half-truths at the top of it and you know as well as I that that is exactly what advertising degrades to. The problem is that online advertising has become so savvy that these pages would specifically be targeted en mass by manufacturers and bid on through whoever provides the advertising for Wikipedia. And I will make the statement that giving them the ability to put advertising would be severely detrimental to the integrity for Wikipedia
But I just tested this on my own by using a different source that uses Akamai: Adobe.
So I picked a file at this URL: http://ardownload.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/unix/9.x/9.4.0/enu/AdbeRdr9.4-1_i486linux_enu.bin
Sure enough, the initial server directed me to 72.215.224.16 with this partial tracert:
Firefox told me this would take 3 Minutes and 35 Seconds.
Then, I set my DNS to the 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 addresses and tried it again. This time I was sent to 72.246.30.19 with this partial tracert:
Surprisingly, this second server that I was directed to using Google DNS only took 10 seconds to download the same file. I did it a second time and it took 30 seconds.
Now after restoring my default DNS resolution that URL continually directs me to 72.215.224.40 and the download is as speedy as the Google DNS. If I switch back to Google DNS it now continually directs me to 72.246.30.32 so you can see that there's some load balancing going here that apparently can be divvied up by geographic location for some of their customers. Apparently Apple needs to investigate the same solution that Adobe is using from Akamai. Which doesn't consider everything from Google DNS being fulfilled from a west coast replication server?
Well, there's a lot of details from the actual source of the study that are left out of the Fox News report. Like the fact that they used a taxonomic knowledge in a rulebase to reduce the set of unique plants. While fascinating, one must wonder how well an automated system could perform such a feat. Note: The part about putting "discovered" in double quotes is not found in the original source article but arises in the Fox News article. You might want to be careful as you could be insinuating gross incompetence in the field of botany across its entire history. It's also possible that this algorithm for reducing the list needs to be worked on.
"We discovered that domain walls don't hit peak acceleration as soon as the current is turned on, and that it takes them exactly the same time and distance to hit peak acceleration as it does to decelerate and eventually come to a stop," commented Dr. Stuart Parkin, an IBM Fellow at IBM Research. "This was previously undiscovered in part because it was not clear whether the domain walls actually had mass, and how the effects of acceleration and deceleration could exactly compensate one another. Now we know domain walls can be positioned precisely along the racetracks simply by varying the length of the current pulses even though the walls have mass."
Don't get me wrong, race track memory is some pretty exciting stuff but I think we're dealing with an observation that means they can now proceed along a certain strategy for storing and retrieving bits. I don't think I would call this a breakthrough, it sounds like they set out to investigate domain walls and learned something. How is that a breakthrough? We're still in the ten to fifteen years away period which is that magic flying car period that, in many instances of exciting new technology, never seems to shrink.
... probably something like "Researchers Shitting Themselves Over New Discovery."
"Breakthrough" no longer means anything to me. I don't know what you would have to put in the title to get me genuinely excited about a real breakthrough
To the US and Japan. And I've heard all sorts of speculation why but I'll leave that up to the reader.