The moon mole people--though defenseless and inviting--were no match for our rail guns and bunker busting missiles. After denying hailing frequency after hailing frequency of cultural exchange, I fearlessly and heroically protected the Earth by sitting at rest in a fully armored spaceship at the Earth/Moon L1 position. In a very sensual valour snuggie I drank the hot cocoa of the gods as wave after wave of our warriors bounced around the moon exterminating the moon mole people with golf clubs, the very same fearsome weapon used by the first of our warriors to set foot on the moon decades ago.
President Nixon, I present to you a new settlement and planet completely safe and devoid of the once furry stubby armed moon mole people!
United States Government Accountability Office?
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Top Secret America
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· Score: 3, Interesting
How can we judge the success of these programs, when much of it will never be known by the general public?
I thought the effectiveness of intelligence and homeland security spending were periodically reported on and covered by the GAO? Then you'd get congressional hearings on bad years and large contracts like the FBI's Virtual Case File System (complete failure)?
Seems to be a lot of hype. Yeah, we know the contractors soak up a lot of your tax dollars. Yeah, I know you can use black and white footage to make it look evil and interview your own reporters to sell newspapers and ads. You might be correct saying that there has been too much spending since 9/11 on this stuff but how does revealing contracts and small businesses associated with the government help this situation?
Also, I'd like to point out that this appears to be a three part story running Mon-Tues-Wed with a PBS Frontline one hour special on it. Evidently, PBS and the WP think the little stuff you know about national security is going to aid you in your decision to determine whether or not your tax dollars are being appropriately spent. Good luck.
It's amazing how much it relies stress too, so it's a win-win for both me and the company.
I would be afraid that whatever technology you select to stay connected with the source of all your income would suffer from outages too often. I think in this case it would increase stress if anything.
However, it would be great way to start a day by waking up in the morning and take a swim in the sea in middle of nowhere.
Middle of the ocean? Why would such a featureless landscape seem any different from another featureless landscape? I would think it would be amazing to go to the Maldives or another resort-y area and take a swim there. But the middle of nowhere... why?
what about getting sex
Please, I'm in the middle of DC and I'm probably getting as much as I'd get in the middle of the ocean. I am posting on Slashdot after all... I do enjoy how you commoditize it though. "Sir, may I take your order?" "One hot steamy cup of sex, please!"
Twist it how you want to, but the fact remains that both countries act like assholes and US is in the same level.
Oh my. There differences are many. For starters, the quantity blocked in China versus what could be considered blocked in the United States. In the United States, this sort of thing happens in isolated cases for criminal reasons and the end result is that the website might be vindicated. Point me to one case in China that ended up where the government was wrong. I'm waiting. At least YouTube was vindicated by the government against Viacom. There's some semblance of justice in the United States with regards to blocking websites. In China, it's a bizarre "unharmonious" label or anti-PRC speech that gets you blocked (and oftentimes worse than that).
I could not disagree more with your analogy.
I'm guessing users were trading child porn or the owner wasn't handling his taxes correctly. His user name in the forums is a marketing site between the US and Canada. I'm guessing he could have been pulling down big ad money and not reporting it correctly between the two countries. Hosting websites is a business and businesses always get into trouble. When there's money involved, there's lawyers. And with lawyers come lawsuits and with lawsuits come temporary injunctions.
Even Baking Ads Into Their Analogies
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Recomputing the Sky
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· Score: 5, Interesting
It's like going from Super Mario Brothers on 1985-era Nintendo consoles to Halo 2 on Xbox 360s
Oh, I see what you did there. Here, let me try:
It's like going from gaming on Windows 1.0 in 1985 to 1985-era Nintendo consoles
Or what about
It's like going from a red ring of death on an XBox console to Gran Turismo 3 on a Playstation 2
Oh and I also enjoy that you used your Space Act Agreement with NASA to "make planetary images and data available via the Internet to the public" and also promote the download and installation of silvercrap. Can't do something for the public without advertising and pushing proprietary software on people, can we? I hope Google gets the chance to do this with HTML5.
Up until high school, I spent my entire life locked into an ideal Norman Rockwell painting. No cares, no worries and just high on life. Things took a turn for the worse one day when I picked up an 288 tuning fork and a 320 tuning fork. I struck them both against my leg and held one up near either ear.
It was pure bliss. Like Jesus was just 32 hertz away from me. I wish I could describe the feeling. Like half of all the blades of grass in the universe were hummingbirds and the other half were bumble bees.
Let's see--I was a freshman at that time. Yeah, things just went downhill from there. I had earrings made with a tuning fork hanging from each one. The left side was A440 and the right side was a custom 444. I could raise my fingers to either lobe and flick it for instant gratification. The other kids called it ear basing. I called it god. And he was just nineteen dollars and eighty cents on Amazon. By my sophomore year I was already pretty hard into Fourier transforms. Everyone's tympanic membrane had a bifurcation sweet spot that could be exploited with the right theoretical frequencies. Yeah, we would rent middle of nowhere motel rooms to smelt hematite down into custom tuning forks and poor them into clay molds in the bathtub. We paid in cash and by the time the cleaning made hit the room it was slag burns in the carpet and clay all over the place. You probably remember the 20/20 investigations following all the reports.
Shit got real heavy real quick and one day we found Scrye (nickname for the metallurgist) hemorrhaging blood out of his ears in a coma from strapping two subwoofers to either side of his head with duct tape. I knew I had to get out, but how?
We gathered up all our text books on math, audio & music theory, physics, chemistry, electronics and metalworking and burned them in the parking lot of the hospital we brought Scrye to. I would never read about science again.
Parents, heed the images of those children getting 'innocent' highs from sounds and make sure they don't make the same mistake I did. This is just a gateway to bigger and badder things. If you find literature on Fourier Analysis, Electronics or Calculus in your child's bedroom, please get your child to Oklahoma and get them help from the nearest minister. I don't care if you have to lock them up in the basement against their will. Just make sure you save them from the same fate as I... COMPLETE EAR DESTRUCTION!
It's not only that cost. In 3 days Apple's stock has gone down a huge 5%...
We must have a different definition of huge when applying that adjective to percentages. Let's see it's 10:15 EST on Wednesday morning. Stock is currently at 252.11. Three stock market days ago would have been Friday morning at 10:15 EST and the price was 257.04. Okay so that comes out to be 4.93/257.04 = 1.9%. If you meant to say it's down a "huge five dollars" then maybe. Yes, they opened and plummeted down to $247 on Tuesday so if you compare that to their seven day high of $261 you get five percent. I don't think that's anything to be concerned over. A five percent fluctuation really isn't that big of a deal. If you look at Microsoft from Friday morning at 10 AM to now they've jumped five percent... it's just the stock market game. I can find arbitrary percentage numbers bigger than this in many technology stocks all day long.
Found the complaint on Scribd and man, judging by the complaints, that sounds like one entertaining contract:
Under Paragraph 3 of the contract, the Seller and Purchaser agreed that for each day after January 1, 2004, the Purchaser would acquire an additional 1% interest in the business, per day, until the website was completed... Upon information and belief, the website, thefacebook.com, was
completed and operational on February 4th, 2004.
Zuckerberg appears to be the Seller and Ceglia appears to be the Purchaser. I know this all happened before "thefacebook.com" had a massive user base but from what I can tell Ceglia dropped a grand to Zuckerberg under some agreement that if the website wasn't finished on a certain date then Ceglia would accrue a point of that business per late day? Is that a standard clause or was this some sort of loan shark that the Z-man found on campus after he stole the ConnectU code?
And then, Ceglia waited past the six year mark for the statute of limitations to run out on a breach of contract in New York? He watched Facebook's rise to popularity past MySpace?
Seriously, what kind of contracts do fledgling websites write? And where do they find people to borrow money from that apparently live under a rock in the Appalachians of New York state? Sure is entertaining one way or the other.
Hey, buddy, sorry about getting my piece of the pie in the mobile phone market from under your feet but daddy's gotta eat. Right? Really though, I've been meaning to send you over some complementary hookers and blow but you know how things get busy what with the release of my new baby.
Speaking of which, it's called the iPad--maybe you've heard of it? I don't know, seems the other CEOs spend half the time with their heads up their asses so you coulda missed it.
Anyway, I wanted to take this time to send you a message, loud and clear:
It's okay. You can release a tablet device now.
I know, I know, you're probably pitching a tent under your desk as you read this. This has been tried -- what -- like fifty times before? And everybody's failed. But now your sugar daddy has warmed up the masses and anybody can stick their meat in. Even you! Of course you gotta hit below my price point when you offer them your aborted fetus of a tablet but come on let's be happy about this.
I mean, there's the three mil that have already bought the iPad--you know the people whose time is worth more than watching a goddamn blackberry shit itself. And there's everyone else (your customers).
And now that I've said it's "okay", it's "okay" to own a tablet. Did you see how that worked? Let me spell it out for you. Before it wasn't okay. Companies couldn't sell it, people couldn't buy it. And then Steve Titty Fucking Jobs showed up and said it was okay. Suddenly three million people have iPads. That's how it works. On July 12, 2010 your stock shares will jump a little bit because I told you it was okay to turn a profit.
Now someone else gets the dregs, offer up a knockoff and cash out. The Courier fell flat on the pavement like a bead of sweat sliding off of Steve Ballmer's bald head so I guess that comes down to you. But really, when is the last time that guy did anything right?
And you know what? After the iPhone took any non-corporate user you might have had maybe you deserve this. Maybe you are good enough to have Apple's sloppy seconds this time around.
Consider us even. I bet you're upset right now and that's because you're just reading this memo wrong. Don't read it that way.
The Texas study listed these numbers for sample sizes:
Three groups or cohorts of students were included in this study, with Cohort 1 followed for four years, Cohort 2 for three years, and Cohort 3 for two years (Table 2.2). Cohort 1 (ninth graders) included a total of 5,217 students, with 2,469 treatment students enrolled at high schools and 2,748 control students enrolled at high schools; Cohort 2 (eighth graders) included 5,436 students, with 2,578 at treatment middle schools and 2,858 at control middle schools; and Cohort 3 (seventh graders) included 5,392 students, with 2,547 students at treatment middle schools and 2,845 at control middle schools.
The Romanian study apparently successfully interviewed 858 families in two Romanian counties (Valcea and Covasna). With 1,100 children interviewed and some 1,800 survey sets. Just to put some perspective on how comprehensive each of these reports are. Couldn't get access to the other reports.
Personally I think we're still in a transition period and now that those homes have computers starting when the child is born (and whose parents had computers) we will start to see better parenting skills and regulation with computer usage. It could become just another carrot for the kid or even a method to teach the child proper time management (similar to the classic homework before TV law).
If this means the android market is gonna be filled up with apps made by toddlers and high-school girls.
The market is already filled up with piece of crap apps. It's just that you never see them until they become popular on the marketplace. If the majority is only using the top 1% of applications on both Android Market and Apple App Store, does it matter that at the very bottom there are spam apps made by high-school girls or not?
i just hope this doesnt result in milions upon milions of fart-apps and such, their largely unmoderated app-store is one of the reasons i want an android phone instead of an iphone, but this might become a tad painfull is left unchecked
If some people want the fart apps, let them have their fart apps. Just don't spend money on fart apps and you'll be okay. Android Market has reviews and popularity... how in the hell is that "unmoderated"?
Claimed On Paid Apps, Paid Content
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The End of Free
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· Score: 3, Informative
Eh? I thought the entire drive behind the iphone and the appstore is young people... without them apple wouldnt be making money hand over fist, and not everyone and their grandma would be building apps to 'get rich quick'TM
If young people didnt care about apps, no one would make them, since there wouldnt be any benefit to doing so at all.
You must have just skimmed the paragraph preceding your quote. The author says
They are operating on the largely correct assumption that people will be more likely to pay for consumer-friendly apps via the iPad, and a multitude of competing devices due out this year, than they are to subscribe to the same old kludgy Web site they have been using freely for years.
The author is making the distinct assumption that anyone under 30 years of age enjoyed or enjoys free content and therefore sees no reason to use Netflix or pay for an iPhone app. I don't know what the actual numbers are and I wish the author had included a lot more citations but the assumption is that young people pay less for applications in the mobile environment. I think that's a safe assumption just based on how much income they usually have compared to people over 30. The other assumption is that once young people enjoy free media via filesharing, they are unwilling to pay for that content via Netflix, Amazon or iTunes. I don't think that's universally true although there may be a small percentage that hold that mentality -- whether it be through an idealism or just lack of money to spend.
I Disagree with Some Parts of This Article
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The End of Free
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I found it interesting that the piece went to such great lengths to talk about the original spirit of openness on the internet yet then says:
The open-source mentality, in theory if not always in practice, proved useful for the tech and Internet worlds. Facebook and Twitter achieved massive scale quickly by creating an open system accessible to outside developers, though that openness is at times more about branding than anything else—as Twitter’s fellow travelers are now finding out.
As Diaspora and a number of other projects are illustrating, Facebook is far from openness. The API, in my opinion, is little more than a glimpse of what actually goes on inside the behemoth that knows all.
This article seems to be spot on at times and just completely at odds with how I see things at others like:
Even so, Google still needs for the Web, however it’s accessed, to remain central—because without contextual search advertising, Google ceases to matter. Smart phones in general, and the iPad more pointedly, are not driven by search.
(emphasis mine) How incredibly shortsighted. During the World Cup game yesterday, I used my smart phone to search for no less than five pieces of information. And what are iAds? Nothing more than a contextual advertising model based on what you've downloaded as I see it. Sounds awfully similar to Google's model.
Now, instead of farmers versus ranchers, we have Apple versus Google. In retrospect, for all the talk of an unencumbered sphere, of a unified planetary soul, the colonization and exploitation of the Web was a foregone conclusion. The only question now is who will own it.
That's not the only question, it's merely the most monetarily important. I can think of tons of questions to go with your analogy. Who are the Native Americans now? Will one "owner" arise or can multiple coexist like the farmers and ranchers? How much will the government intervene and when? After this is all hashed out will there ever be peace? When it's all said and done, what's the next frontier that will be fought over for profit or will there ever be another one?
I could believe the 90% number. There is plenty of data sitting around in case it is needed. Some of it will be needed. Much of won't be. How do you predict which is which ?
Yeah, as someone who has implemented a few auditing solutions where I work, I must confess that it seems to be 99% of the data we archive is never looked at again. A lot of it is due to policies and is only used after something goes dreadfully wrong. If they are well thought out, the metrics can be collected as the data is written instead of needing to search across the data.
I think their "90% dead-weight rule" is really a misnomer as you could probably claim that 90% of Google's indexing is never read but we all know that it's the potential that data holds that makes it so valuable and necessary. If Google knew every future possible search then they could delete the data they will never use... but how do they know they will never use it? How do I know that the auditing data will never have a use--by new metric or incident investigation? The truth is simply that you don't.
It was just about then that one of my favourite bargain-hunting websites turned up a device called the CORAID EtherDrive. Take a look at the product range at CORAID, but don’t spend too long on it.
That's the same device from a story I submitted yesterday. I hope they don't plan on getting a Z-Series running ZFS.
I'm no insider, I don't use the forums all that much but I did play WoW for two years. But you know there were some real jerks in WoW. And it's pretty simple to imagine that you have some really active jerks on the forums that are truly only maybe a few percentage points of the gaming population. It's well known that a pseudonym enables people to be complete assholes. Complete. And I'd bet that the moderators of these forums were sick and tired of seeing cases where this happened. Either someone said something really inflammatory or got under the skin of a beginner -- turning them off to the game. Some people are sensitive and even Mr. Rogers won't undo what a bully can do.
So Blizzard probably estimated that 90% of those jerks would stop being jerks if their name appeared by their asshole posts. So what if 1% of the population complains about RealID? But in doing so, Blizzard totally ignored the other 98% of the populations enjoyment of privacy. And in doing so once they decided this would be mandatory for the betterment of the community, the rest of the community interjected and seemed to prefer the assholes and their privacy to the converse where the assholes now know who you are. To many of us, this isn't really a surprise.
Not that this doesn't leave room for them to re-implement this at a later date, but that's a pretty definite 'no.'
I disagree. I see Blizzard still chasing this dream of moderation through identity and drastically reducing their moderation. I would bet we shortly see a scheme where RealID is opt in with the catch being that if you aren't using RealID then each of your posts has to be read by a moderator before it is approved as viewable by anyone else. Community regulation can be a difficult and touchy subject with gamers and I suspect this is only the beginning of a very long trial run where Blizzard tries to find the happy medium between anonymity and self regulation.
Peter Jackson had to sue New Line Cinema to get paid for LotR. New Line claimed they lost money on the trilogy.
Indeed, on top of that I recall the Tolkein Trust suing New Line for hundreds of millions after New Line only paid them $62,000 for the rights to the movies. New Line apparently claimed that was 7.5 percent of the gross of the films. Isn't that the standard these days? (as the article notes)
What I'm saying in short is this. If China was serious about maintaining an iron fist, Google would have been kicked out long ago!
Google had initially agreed to filtered search results inside China. It wasn't until they vocally said they were planning to stop filtering that China threatened to kick them out. Google has played ball up to this point and that's why they haven't been kicked out. Your reasoning makes no sense.
In fact, China is trying to tell the world "read between the lines". We want freedom, but we're sure as hell not going to make it obvious.
So subtle a difference, really, from a practical point of view. Yet this is acceptable where the other approach wasn't.
Yeah since it's not really buying China much I see it more as a demonstration that at any point in time China can force Google China to do whatever it wants. Google.hk is (NSFW) unfiltered so now the Chinese government has made the user take an extra click to get to the search box that produces unfiltered results. I bet it has more to do with a display of dominance and control than any real effective censorship concerns. Baidu remains ahead of the curve and actively pleases the government to maintain a facade of faux independence but is really just kowtowing in advance. Either way they're both obeying. If you are a Chinese National and are loyal to the current Chinese government, your selection of search engine is perhaps influenced by these two distinct images.
We have some tables that have million of rows, and I'd like to know the best method of designing these tables.
I'm a developer, not a database expert. But it seems that every now and then I have to get my hands dirty with data modeling. "The best method" is probably a really vague concept. If you have serious hardware constraints than the best method changes from an easily maintainable system to something more complex. There's give and take in database design and I guess a million rows is really something that a traditional relational database should be able to handle. So I'd suggest any book that teaches data modeling will suit you here. I happened to learn on Data Modeling Essentials which was decent but not great. I have heard good things about Len Silverston's growing series that concentrates more on patterns. But really what you're going to want is a book on data modeling or analysis that teaches you the orders of normal form, when to use cross reference tables, etc so you can get a better idea of good modeling standards. At a million rows, you might not find the need to refactor if you read about the new best practices but perhaps you could make a business case to eventually migrate.
Now there are other topics that require entirely separate books because they are such a diverging path from relational databases. It's not common but your database can be based on something other than an object or table. If you consider the internals of Google, perhaps BigTable is the most prolific database implementation out there and while interesting, it is sort of a very specific proprietary database implementation. You could take this approach to tailor your company's database to be precisely what you need but this would clearly be overkill in your case. You don't talk about any bottlenecks or impending loads that need to be carefully considered so instead of treading down this path, I suggest you first take a course on MySQL or get the de facto book on whatever database you use and play around with fine tuning on a test system. A lot of DBs out there allow you to tune them through a configuration file so that your particular needs are met more closely. If you're looking for this sort of continuing education just out of curiosity, pick up a book on database design and start to tinker. But it requires a lot of knowledge and effort to start a database technology from scratch and compete with vanilla out of the box technologies like MySQL and PostgreSQL.
I love this country as much as the next patriotic guy...and love means being able to view things honestly.
Er, I don't think this is an issue of whether or not you're "patriotic enough." I think you're overlooking that a lot of other countries also through stuff out, like Great Britain. And in China, they throw it out, it just gets thrown out in their country next to their cities. When you snidely comment "It's the American way" you kind of omit that it's also the way of many other countries.
So one of the big problems is that we try to treat garbage and pollution from a capitalistic perspective. We may give countries or pay to have countries take our garbage under the understanding that it's being recycled. But more often than not it is just dumped or the precious metals are harvested in very environmentally damaging ways. And this is a problem with a world wide capitalism similar to how the mafia ruined parts of New Jersey with illegal dumping of NYC's garbage. It's corruption. China shows that a corrupt socialist system exhibits the same environmental problems on their local level. And when we feed that corruption and turn a blind eye then, yes, it is also our problem.
Face it: as a country, we throw out a MASSIVE amount of stuff.
This is true. It's also true that stuff we buy (from both inside our country and from the outside) are designed to be disposable. Your toaster breaks. Do you A) bring it to the repairman down the street and pay $50 to get it repaired by a skilled technician or B) go to Wal-Mart and buy your next $12 toaster? If we do A we're stupid and cannot manage our money. If we do B then you're criticizing us and calling it the American way. So what's an average citizen to do?
Come on, mods: if you can't be honest about yourself, what can you be honest about? Shut off Olbermann and Beck, accept what our country is, and just deal with it. Seriously.
Do you think it's the moderators that desire this situation? That want this situation? Do you think it's Olbermann and Beck that promote this situation? The entire world is part of the problem. The fact that everyone on Earth consumes products and produces waste that will be around longer than their flesh is a potential problem as our population increases. This happens in every country, not just the United States. Your criticisms are strangely specific. Jon Stewart supports this just as much as Glenn Beck. It is a universal problem of pollution and disposal yet you turn it into an American responsibility. Why is that?
Do you really think that if Americans stopped doing it, the problem would magically disappear because the disposal of the electronics in Japan goes through some magical Fern Gully process?
Sorry to go to such an offtopic response but I cannot understand why this blame is placed on Americans. As to the topic of HTML 5 affecting this pollution, attacking some standard far down the chain does not make nearly as much sense as instituting government regulations to make computers more recyclable without hindering them too much. If you perceive what you say to be "the American way" to be a problem than it's obvious our current system has not adapted to regulate itself.
Wouldn't it be a better idea for people to walk those short distances, given how fat people are these days?
I don't know if this is sound logic. If I were to believe your reasoning, I would assume that we would see a lower average of obesity in a city like New York City where walking is a large part of transportation but it turns out to be similar to other places:
New York City's adult obesity rate was 20% in 2003, compared to 23% nationwide in 2004. The national average has nearly doubled from 12% in 1993.
I could just as presumptuously argue that people will only walk a certain amount -- no more, no less. And that if you put in these sidewalks it would only increase their range of desired travel that is acceptable to them (usually on a time based limit). So if I'm only will to walk 10 blocks and suddenly these sidewalks put me twenty blocks one way or the other, I've greatly increased my distances. And if you look at the history of the interstate and roads, it is evident than increasing a populace's means of transportation and freedom will increase your economy.
And what caused it to double since 1993? Not a revolution in transportation, I'll assure you that. Maybe a revolution in how we do business over the internet and a number of other factors more important than new transportation technologies.
I don't think the introduction and mass spread of automobiles in the early 1900s caused obesity. I personally think that what we eat and how we are raised to be sedentary are bigger problems than not walking everywhere. There's a number of contributing factors and deciding not to investigate new modes of public transportation for high concentrations of citizens is just not a sound decision.
It might be tempting to blame technology for our laziness but let's face it: we've been pacified and are perfectly content to sit around to get fat--moving sidewalk or no moving sidewalk.
Slashdot Mirror
The moon mole people--though defenseless and inviting--were no match for our rail guns and bunker busting missiles. After denying hailing frequency after hailing frequency of cultural exchange, I fearlessly and heroically protected the Earth by sitting at rest in a fully armored spaceship at the Earth/Moon L1 position. In a very sensual valour snuggie I drank the hot cocoa of the gods as wave after wave of our warriors bounced around the moon exterminating the moon mole people with golf clubs, the very same fearsome weapon used by the first of our warriors to set foot on the moon decades ago.
President Nixon, I present to you a new settlement and planet completely safe and devoid of the once furry stubby armed moon mole people!
How can we judge the success of these programs, when much of it will never be known by the general public?
I thought the effectiveness of intelligence and homeland security spending were periodically reported on and covered by the GAO? Then you'd get congressional hearings on bad years and large contracts like the FBI's Virtual Case File System (complete failure)?
Seems to be a lot of hype. Yeah, we know the contractors soak up a lot of your tax dollars. Yeah, I know you can use black and white footage to make it look evil and interview your own reporters to sell newspapers and ads. You might be correct saying that there has been too much spending since 9/11 on this stuff but how does revealing contracts and small businesses associated with the government help this situation?
Also, I'd like to point out that this appears to be a three part story running Mon-Tues-Wed with a PBS Frontline one hour special on it. Evidently, PBS and the WP think the little stuff you know about national security is going to aid you in your decision to determine whether or not your tax dollars are being appropriately spent. Good luck.
It's amazing how much it relies stress too, so it's a win-win for both me and the company.
I would be afraid that whatever technology you select to stay connected with the source of all your income would suffer from outages too often. I think in this case it would increase stress if anything.
However, it would be great way to start a day by waking up in the morning and take a swim in the sea in middle of nowhere.
Middle of the ocean? Why would such a featureless landscape seem any different from another featureless landscape? I would think it would be amazing to go to the Maldives or another resort-y area and take a swim there. But the middle of nowhere ... why?
what about getting sex
Please, I'm in the middle of DC and I'm probably getting as much as I'd get in the middle of the ocean. I am posting on Slashdot after all ... I do enjoy how you commoditize it though. "Sir, may I take your order?" "One hot steamy cup of sex, please!"
Twist it how you want to, but the fact remains that both countries act like assholes and US is in the same level.
Oh my. There differences are many. For starters, the quantity blocked in China versus what could be considered blocked in the United States. In the United States, this sort of thing happens in isolated cases for criminal reasons and the end result is that the website might be vindicated. Point me to one case in China that ended up where the government was wrong. I'm waiting. At least YouTube was vindicated by the government against Viacom. There's some semblance of justice in the United States with regards to blocking websites. In China, it's a bizarre "unharmonious" label or anti-PRC speech that gets you blocked (and oftentimes worse than that).
I could not disagree more with your analogy.
I'm guessing users were trading child porn or the owner wasn't handling his taxes correctly. His user name in the forums is a marketing site between the US and Canada. I'm guessing he could have been pulling down big ad money and not reporting it correctly between the two countries. Hosting websites is a business and businesses always get into trouble. When there's money involved, there's lawyers. And with lawyers come lawsuits and with lawsuits come temporary injunctions.
I'm a D Cell battery!
It's like going from Super Mario Brothers on 1985-era Nintendo consoles to Halo 2 on Xbox 360s
Oh, I see what you did there. Here, let me try:
It's like going from gaming on Windows 1.0 in 1985 to 1985-era Nintendo consoles
Or what about
It's like going from a red ring of death on an XBox console to Gran Turismo 3 on a Playstation 2
Oh and I also enjoy that you used your Space Act Agreement with NASA to "make planetary images and data available via the Internet to the public" and also promote the download and installation of silvercrap. Can't do something for the public without advertising and pushing proprietary software on people, can we? I hope Google gets the chance to do this with HTML5.
Up until high school, I spent my entire life locked into an ideal Norman Rockwell painting. No cares, no worries and just high on life. Things took a turn for the worse one day when I picked up an 288 tuning fork and a 320 tuning fork. I struck them both against my leg and held one up near either ear.
... COMPLETE EAR DESTRUCTION!
It was pure bliss. Like Jesus was just 32 hertz away from me. I wish I could describe the feeling. Like half of all the blades of grass in the universe were hummingbirds and the other half were bumble bees.
Let's see--I was a freshman at that time. Yeah, things just went downhill from there. I had earrings made with a tuning fork hanging from each one. The left side was A440 and the right side was a custom 444. I could raise my fingers to either lobe and flick it for instant gratification. The other kids called it ear basing. I called it god. And he was just nineteen dollars and eighty cents on Amazon. By my sophomore year I was already pretty hard into Fourier transforms. Everyone's tympanic membrane had a bifurcation sweet spot that could be exploited with the right theoretical frequencies. Yeah, we would rent middle of nowhere motel rooms to smelt hematite down into custom tuning forks and poor them into clay molds in the bathtub. We paid in cash and by the time the cleaning made hit the room it was slag burns in the carpet and clay all over the place. You probably remember the 20/20 investigations following all the reports.
Shit got real heavy real quick and one day we found Scrye (nickname for the metallurgist) hemorrhaging blood out of his ears in a coma from strapping two subwoofers to either side of his head with duct tape. I knew I had to get out, but how?
We gathered up all our text books on math, audio & music theory, physics, chemistry, electronics and metalworking and burned them in the parking lot of the hospital we brought Scrye to. I would never read about science again.
Parents, heed the images of those children getting 'innocent' highs from sounds and make sure they don't make the same mistake I did. This is just a gateway to bigger and badder things. If you find literature on Fourier Analysis, Electronics or Calculus in your child's bedroom, please get your child to Oklahoma and get them help from the nearest minister. I don't care if you have to lock them up in the basement against their will. Just make sure you save them from the same fate as I
Privacy Flaws In Chatroulette Expose Users
Trust me, on Chatroulette it's the users that have been exposing themselves.
It's not only that cost. In 3 days Apple's stock has gone down a huge 5% ...
We must have a different definition of huge when applying that adjective to percentages. Let's see it's 10:15 EST on Wednesday morning. Stock is currently at 252.11. Three stock market days ago would have been Friday morning at 10:15 EST and the price was 257.04. Okay so that comes out to be 4.93/257.04 = 1.9%. If you meant to say it's down a "huge five dollars" then maybe. Yes, they opened and plummeted down to $247 on Tuesday so if you compare that to their seven day high of $261 you get five percent. I don't think that's anything to be concerned over. A five percent fluctuation really isn't that big of a deal. If you look at Microsoft from Friday morning at 10 AM to now they've jumped five percent ... it's just the stock market game. I can find arbitrary percentage numbers bigger than this in many technology stocks all day long.
Under Paragraph 3 of the contract, the Seller and Purchaser agreed that for each day after January 1, 2004, the Purchaser would acquire an additional 1% interest in the business, per day, until the website was completed ... Upon information and belief, the website, thefacebook.com, was
completed and operational on February 4th, 2004.
Zuckerberg appears to be the Seller and Ceglia appears to be the Purchaser. I know this all happened before "thefacebook.com" had a massive user base but from what I can tell Ceglia dropped a grand to Zuckerberg under some agreement that if the website wasn't finished on a certain date then Ceglia would accrue a point of that business per late day? Is that a standard clause or was this some sort of loan shark that the Z-man found on campus after he stole the ConnectU code?
And then, Ceglia waited past the six year mark for the statute of limitations to run out on a breach of contract in New York? He watched Facebook's rise to popularity past MySpace?
Seriously, what kind of contracts do fledgling websites write? And where do they find people to borrow money from that apparently live under a rock in the Appalachians of New York state? Sure is entertaining one way or the other.
If it happened once, maybe you'd say it was a glitch. But what if it happened twice? Three times? Four times, five, six?
Keep it up until your 32,768th post when they'll regret using a signed short int for the NUM_POSTS_CENSORED value in your forum profile.
July 12, 2010
From: Steve Jobs
To: Jim Balsillie
Jim,
Hey, buddy, sorry about getting my piece of the pie in the mobile phone market from under your feet but daddy's gotta eat. Right? Really though, I've been meaning to send you over some complementary hookers and blow but you know how things get busy what with the release of my new baby.
Speaking of which, it's called the iPad--maybe you've heard of it? I don't know, seems the other CEOs spend half the time with their heads up their asses so you coulda missed it.
Anyway, I wanted to take this time to send you a message, loud and clear:
It's okay. You can release a tablet device now.
I know, I know, you're probably pitching a tent under your desk as you read this. This has been tried -- what -- like fifty times before? And everybody's failed. But now your sugar daddy has warmed up the masses and anybody can stick their meat in. Even you! Of course you gotta hit below my price point when you offer them your aborted fetus of a tablet but come on let's be happy about this.
I mean, there's the three mil that have already bought the iPad--you know the people whose time is worth more than watching a goddamn blackberry shit itself. And there's everyone else (your customers).
And now that I've said it's "okay", it's "okay" to own a tablet. Did you see how that worked? Let me spell it out for you. Before it wasn't okay. Companies couldn't sell it, people couldn't buy it. And then Steve Titty Fucking Jobs showed up and said it was okay. Suddenly three million people have iPads. That's how it works. On July 12, 2010 your stock shares will jump a little bit because I told you it was okay to turn a profit.
Now someone else gets the dregs, offer up a knockoff and cash out. The Courier fell flat on the pavement like a bead of sweat sliding off of Steve Ballmer's bald head so I guess that comes down to you. But really, when is the last time that guy did anything right?
And you know what? After the iPhone took any non-corporate user you might have had maybe you deserve this. Maybe you are good enough to have Apple's sloppy seconds this time around.
Consider us even. I bet you're upset right now and that's because you're just reading this memo wrong. Don't read it that way.
Steve Jobs
Three groups or cohorts of students were included in this study, with Cohort 1 followed for four years, Cohort 2 for three years, and Cohort 3 for two years (Table 2.2). Cohort 1 (ninth graders) included a total of 5,217 students, with 2,469 treatment students enrolled at high schools and 2,748 control students enrolled at high schools; Cohort 2 (eighth graders) included 5,436 students, with 2,578 at treatment middle schools and 2,858 at control middle schools; and Cohort 3 (seventh graders) included 5,392 students, with 2,547 students at treatment middle schools and 2,845 at control middle schools.
The Romanian study apparently successfully interviewed 858 families in two Romanian counties (Valcea and Covasna). With 1,100 children interviewed and some 1,800 survey sets. Just to put some perspective on how comprehensive each of these reports are. Couldn't get access to the other reports.
Personally I think we're still in a transition period and now that those homes have computers starting when the child is born (and whose parents had computers) we will start to see better parenting skills and regulation with computer usage. It could become just another carrot for the kid or even a method to teach the child proper time management (similar to the classic homework before TV law).
If this means the android market is gonna be filled up with apps made by toddlers and high-school girls.
The market is already filled up with piece of crap apps. It's just that you never see them until they become popular on the marketplace. If the majority is only using the top 1% of applications on both Android Market and Apple App Store, does it matter that at the very bottom there are spam apps made by high-school girls or not?
i just hope this doesnt result in milions upon milions of fart-apps and such, their largely unmoderated app-store is one of the reasons i want an android phone instead of an iphone, but this might become a tad painfull is left unchecked
If some people want the fart apps, let them have their fart apps. Just don't spend money on fart apps and you'll be okay. Android Market has reviews and popularity ... how in the hell is that "unmoderated"?
Eh? I thought the entire drive behind the iphone and the appstore is young people... without them apple wouldnt be making money hand over fist, and not everyone and their grandma would be building apps to 'get rich quick'TM
If young people didnt care about apps, no one would make them, since there wouldnt be any benefit to doing so at all.
You must have just skimmed the paragraph preceding your quote. The author says
They are operating on the largely correct assumption that people will be more likely to pay for consumer-friendly apps via the iPad, and a multitude of competing devices due out this year, than they are to subscribe to the same old kludgy Web site they have been using freely for years.
The author is making the distinct assumption that anyone under 30 years of age enjoyed or enjoys free content and therefore sees no reason to use Netflix or pay for an iPhone app. I don't know what the actual numbers are and I wish the author had included a lot more citations but the assumption is that young people pay less for applications in the mobile environment. I think that's a safe assumption just based on how much income they usually have compared to people over 30. The other assumption is that once young people enjoy free media via filesharing, they are unwilling to pay for that content via Netflix, Amazon or iTunes. I don't think that's universally true although there may be a small percentage that hold that mentality -- whether it be through an idealism or just lack of money to spend.
The open-source mentality, in theory if not always in practice, proved useful for the tech and Internet worlds. Facebook and Twitter achieved massive scale quickly by creating an open system accessible to outside developers, though that openness is at times more about branding than anything else—as Twitter’s fellow travelers are now finding out.
As Diaspora and a number of other projects are illustrating, Facebook is far from openness. The API, in my opinion, is little more than a glimpse of what actually goes on inside the behemoth that knows all.
This article seems to be spot on at times and just completely at odds with how I see things at others like:
Even so, Google still needs for the Web, however it’s accessed, to remain central—because without contextual search advertising, Google ceases to matter. Smart phones in general, and the iPad more pointedly, are not driven by search.
(emphasis mine) How incredibly shortsighted. During the World Cup game yesterday, I used my smart phone to search for no less than five pieces of information. And what are iAds? Nothing more than a contextual advertising model based on what you've downloaded as I see it. Sounds awfully similar to Google's model.
Now, instead of farmers versus ranchers, we have Apple versus Google. In retrospect, for all the talk of an unencumbered sphere, of a unified planetary soul, the colonization and exploitation of the Web was a foregone conclusion. The only question now is who will own it.
That's not the only question, it's merely the most monetarily important. I can think of tons of questions to go with your analogy. Who are the Native Americans now? Will one "owner" arise or can multiple coexist like the farmers and ranchers? How much will the government intervene and when? After this is all hashed out will there ever be peace? When it's all said and done, what's the next frontier that will be fought over for profit or will there ever be another one?
I could believe the 90% number. There is plenty of data sitting around in case it is needed. Some of it will be needed. Much of won't be. How do you predict which is which ?
Yeah, as someone who has implemented a few auditing solutions where I work, I must confess that it seems to be 99% of the data we archive is never looked at again. A lot of it is due to policies and is only used after something goes dreadfully wrong. If they are well thought out, the metrics can be collected as the data is written instead of needing to search across the data.
... but how do they know they will never use it? How do I know that the auditing data will never have a use--by new metric or incident investigation? The truth is simply that you don't.
I think their "90% dead-weight rule" is really a misnomer as you could probably claim that 90% of Google's indexing is never read but we all know that it's the potential that data holds that makes it so valuable and necessary. If Google knew every future possible search then they could delete the data they will never use
Opportunity too good to pass up
It was just about then that one of my favourite bargain-hunting websites turned up a device called the CORAID EtherDrive. Take a look at the product range at CORAID, but don’t spend too long on it.
That's the same device from a story I submitted yesterday. I hope they don't plan on getting a Z-Series running ZFS.
So Blizzard probably estimated that 90% of those jerks would stop being jerks if their name appeared by their asshole posts. So what if 1% of the population complains about RealID? But in doing so, Blizzard totally ignored the other 98% of the populations enjoyment of privacy. And in doing so once they decided this would be mandatory for the betterment of the community, the rest of the community interjected and seemed to prefer the assholes and their privacy to the converse where the assholes now know who you are. To many of us, this isn't really a surprise.
Not that this doesn't leave room for them to re-implement this at a later date, but that's a pretty definite 'no.'
I disagree. I see Blizzard still chasing this dream of moderation through identity and drastically reducing their moderation. I would bet we shortly see a scheme where RealID is opt in with the catch being that if you aren't using RealID then each of your posts has to be read by a moderator before it is approved as viewable by anyone else. Community regulation can be a difficult and touchy subject with gamers and I suspect this is only the beginning of a very long trial run where Blizzard tries to find the happy medium between anonymity and self regulation.
Peter Jackson had to sue New Line Cinema to get paid for LotR. New Line claimed they lost money on the trilogy.
Indeed, on top of that I recall the Tolkein Trust suing New Line for hundreds of millions after New Line only paid them $62,000 for the rights to the movies. New Line apparently claimed that was 7.5 percent of the gross of the films. Isn't that the standard these days? (as the article notes)
What I'm saying in short is this. If China was serious about maintaining an iron fist, Google would have been kicked out long ago!
Google had initially agreed to filtered search results inside China. It wasn't until they vocally said they were planning to stop filtering that China threatened to kick them out. Google has played ball up to this point and that's why they haven't been kicked out. Your reasoning makes no sense.
In fact, China is trying to tell the world "read between the lines". We want freedom, but we're sure as hell not going to make it obvious.
Judging by the near constant stream of news from Reporters without Borders I'd have to disagree with you.
So subtle a difference, really, from a practical point of view. Yet this is acceptable where the other approach wasn't.
Yeah since it's not really buying China much I see it more as a demonstration that at any point in time China can force Google China to do whatever it wants. Google.hk is (NSFW) unfiltered so now the Chinese government has made the user take an extra click to get to the search box that produces unfiltered results. I bet it has more to do with a display of dominance and control than any real effective censorship concerns. Baidu remains ahead of the curve and actively pleases the government to maintain a facade of faux independence but is really just kowtowing in advance. Either way they're both obeying. If you are a Chinese National and are loyal to the current Chinese government, your selection of search engine is perhaps influenced by these two distinct images.
We have some tables that have million of rows, and I'd like to know the best method of designing these tables.
I'm a developer, not a database expert. But it seems that every now and then I have to get my hands dirty with data modeling. "The best method" is probably a really vague concept. If you have serious hardware constraints than the best method changes from an easily maintainable system to something more complex. There's give and take in database design and I guess a million rows is really something that a traditional relational database should be able to handle. So I'd suggest any book that teaches data modeling will suit you here. I happened to learn on Data Modeling Essentials which was decent but not great. I have heard good things about Len Silverston's growing series that concentrates more on patterns. But really what you're going to want is a book on data modeling or analysis that teaches you the orders of normal form, when to use cross reference tables, etc so you can get a better idea of good modeling standards. At a million rows, you might not find the need to refactor if you read about the new best practices but perhaps you could make a business case to eventually migrate.
Now there are other topics that require entirely separate books because they are such a diverging path from relational databases. It's not common but your database can be based on something other than an object or table. If you consider the internals of Google, perhaps BigTable is the most prolific database implementation out there and while interesting, it is sort of a very specific proprietary database implementation. You could take this approach to tailor your company's database to be precisely what you need but this would clearly be overkill in your case. You don't talk about any bottlenecks or impending loads that need to be carefully considered so instead of treading down this path, I suggest you first take a course on MySQL or get the de facto book on whatever database you use and play around with fine tuning on a test system. A lot of DBs out there allow you to tune them through a configuration file so that your particular needs are met more closely. If you're looking for this sort of continuing education just out of curiosity, pick up a book on database design and start to tinker. But it requires a lot of knowledge and effort to start a database technology from scratch and compete with vanilla out of the box technologies like MySQL and PostgreSQL.
From what information you provide in your question, I'd suggest this book to help you understand database designs more via industry proven patterns. That assumes you have all the basic database design practices covered.
I love this country as much as the next patriotic guy...and love means being able to view things honestly.
Er, I don't think this is an issue of whether or not you're "patriotic enough." I think you're overlooking that a lot of other countries also through stuff out, like Great Britain. And in China, they throw it out, it just gets thrown out in their country next to their cities. When you snidely comment "It's the American way" you kind of omit that it's also the way of many other countries.
So one of the big problems is that we try to treat garbage and pollution from a capitalistic perspective. We may give countries or pay to have countries take our garbage under the understanding that it's being recycled. But more often than not it is just dumped or the precious metals are harvested in very environmentally damaging ways. And this is a problem with a world wide capitalism similar to how the mafia ruined parts of New Jersey with illegal dumping of NYC's garbage. It's corruption. China shows that a corrupt socialist system exhibits the same environmental problems on their local level. And when we feed that corruption and turn a blind eye then, yes, it is also our problem.
Face it: as a country, we throw out a MASSIVE amount of stuff.
This is true. It's also true that stuff we buy (from both inside our country and from the outside) are designed to be disposable. Your toaster breaks. Do you A) bring it to the repairman down the street and pay $50 to get it repaired by a skilled technician or B) go to Wal-Mart and buy your next $12 toaster? If we do A we're stupid and cannot manage our money. If we do B then you're criticizing us and calling it the American way. So what's an average citizen to do?
Come on, mods: if you can't be honest about yourself, what can you be honest about? Shut off Olbermann and Beck, accept what our country is, and just deal with it. Seriously.
Do you think it's the moderators that desire this situation? That want this situation? Do you think it's Olbermann and Beck that promote this situation? The entire world is part of the problem. The fact that everyone on Earth consumes products and produces waste that will be around longer than their flesh is a potential problem as our population increases. This happens in every country, not just the United States. Your criticisms are strangely specific. Jon Stewart supports this just as much as Glenn Beck. It is a universal problem of pollution and disposal yet you turn it into an American responsibility. Why is that?
Do you really think that if Americans stopped doing it, the problem would magically disappear because the disposal of the electronics in Japan goes through some magical Fern Gully process?
Sorry to go to such an offtopic response but I cannot understand why this blame is placed on Americans. As to the topic of HTML 5 affecting this pollution, attacking some standard far down the chain does not make nearly as much sense as instituting government regulations to make computers more recyclable without hindering them too much. If you perceive what you say to be "the American way" to be a problem than it's obvious our current system has not adapted to regulate itself.
Wouldn't it be a better idea for people to walk those short distances, given how fat people are these days?
I don't know if this is sound logic. If I were to believe your reasoning, I would assume that we would see a lower average of obesity in a city like New York City where walking is a large part of transportation but it turns out to be similar to other places:
New York City's adult obesity rate was 20% in 2003, compared to 23% nationwide in 2004. The national average has nearly doubled from 12% in 1993.
I could just as presumptuously argue that people will only walk a certain amount -- no more, no less. And that if you put in these sidewalks it would only increase their range of desired travel that is acceptable to them (usually on a time based limit). So if I'm only will to walk 10 blocks and suddenly these sidewalks put me twenty blocks one way or the other, I've greatly increased my distances. And if you look at the history of the interstate and roads, it is evident than increasing a populace's means of transportation and freedom will increase your economy.
And what caused it to double since 1993? Not a revolution in transportation, I'll assure you that. Maybe a revolution in how we do business over the internet and a number of other factors more important than new transportation technologies.
I don't think the introduction and mass spread of automobiles in the early 1900s caused obesity. I personally think that what we eat and how we are raised to be sedentary are bigger problems than not walking everywhere. There's a number of contributing factors and deciding not to investigate new modes of public transportation for high concentrations of citizens is just not a sound decision.
It might be tempting to blame technology for our laziness but let's face it: we've been pacified and are perfectly content to sit around to get fat--moving sidewalk or no moving sidewalk.