More importantly (at least according to Ars Technica) is that ICANN approved Chinese internationalized domain names in this same update notification. What's the big deal with the XXX domain? Okay so now I know that the porn site I'm going to is actually a porn site... big deal. Ain't going to help filters all that much anyway unless it's required which would be really stupid and shortsighted. I think the changes for a billion Chinese speakers is bigger news.
For about an average of half the lines of code they might use in C, scientists...
Scientists?! You're probably joking but I've been over to accounting and they're using Excel and *shudder* Access for all their heavy data lifting. Sometimes they need help and if they're kind enough I don't lie about how much I know about those ancient products. Most importantly they're not scientists. They're accountants and business people... they don't care if they have to wait five minutes for Excel to open a worksheet containing the entire set of order histories of our company.
I don't think these packages are intended for NASA space mission flight certified calculations. Just something to really help you out if you want to comply with the SEC. Side bonus, I'll bet that when you submit this code, you're going to achieve compliance a lot faster when the SEC only has to check half the lines of code and not analyze your memory management...
Software development is about trade-offs. Why aren't you complaining that it's not in some targeted processor specific machine language?
The AFP also reported that 'Foreign firms wanting to provide mapping and surveying services in China are required to set up joint ventures or partnerships with local firms.'
I omitted my commentary on this particular clause as it's pretty much just speculation but I would claim that the government is encouraging/requiring/enabling corporate espionage. Not to mention the probably very sensitive close up data Google may or may not have of areal images of the United States. Now, it might just be that the government wants to foster local businesses but I would argue that it has more to do with strategy and espionage. I know I'd be uncomfortable.
(a) an idea of what journals publish on that subject and hence what researchers in that area read, (b) examples of published articles in that field to use as a stylistic template and (c) some idea of which academics are active in the area, which could be useful if you'd like to either recommend reviewers
This is really good advice as well. I would like to add one more thing to that list about researching your field before publishing. I used to troll the Computer Vision papers when I had more time on my hands in college. One annoying thing I found was that people would talk about the same concepts and methods but would call them their own little nickname. It can get annoying when I read one paper about Kernel Machines and then another about Support Vector Machines. The least you can do is put all the aliases you found at the beginning of your paper to get that out of the way. When sections tie into related work it creates a more coherent field for readers and -- at least by myself -- is much appreciated. Some people will opine that this is fluff and unnecessary and that you should stick to your message but I personally think it lends credence to your work. It also shows the reader that even though you're not tied to a big bucks research institution, you've done due diligence and you should be taken seriously instead of some confused quack.
Of course, research papers are not always page turners and the above is asking you to go through a lot of technical crap that, while ameliorating, is not everyone's idea of a fun weekend. Simply put, communication amounts to some work here. And it's that communication which furthers almost all scientific fields -- usually more than any single individual could.* If you're up to the challenge and want to see this thing through, this is heavily recommended. When all is said and done, you might find you're actually a part of the community.
* Yes, there are some people like Einstein that probably could have built a field by themselves but most of us are collaborators like Paul Erdos. No wonder the Chinese scholars said that losing Google groups and Google scholar would set back science in China.
I've no experience on those, not even read a complete one, so my first question is what resources do you recommend to learn how to write one?
The template will make you get the basics right. The most basic I've seen are Title, Abstract, Sections, Conclusion, References. It's easy (I taught myself in college) and the production value of LaTeX gives you an instant artificially inflated level of credibility.
And even after I write it I can't expect to be published by Science or other high-profile publications.
So where should I send it to make it known by people on the respective fields and be taken seriously?
Sounds like you should do some research on arxiv, a prepublication center where you can find some of the best stuff as well as absolute drivel. I would need to hear more about your method to ensure it's indeed an algorithm worthy of publication but I guess you would put that in Data Structures and Algorithms? But why stop there? Why don't you put it on arxiv and blog about it? Why don't you send out e-mails with the arxiv link to open source projects and commercial entities suggesting the use of your algorithm? I'd imagine the USGS would be interested in hearing from you. Sure that's all very wishful thinking but if you've got what you say you've got, why not? At the very least you'll learn why your idea isn't good enough to catch eyeballs.
I will caveat all this with the brutish reality of capital and give you a very unpopular option. Software algorithms are currently considered intellectual property by the United States government and several other countries. You could apply for a patent and then attempt to license your algorithm to companies like ESRI and Google or the USGS. You're on your own if this is what you're aiming for.
In college, a friend of mine had found AllOfMP3.com and diligently purchased hundreds of dollars worth of songs. When albums are ~ ten cents and legit, why not? He had assumed that because technology was so wonderful, someone had finally figured out how to eliminate all the middle men in the process of making digital music. So I investigated and showed him where the servers he downloaded from were located (Russia and Germany) and then pointed out how their local laws allow them to do this without rewarding the artists in anyway. He stopped using it but, like the article said, claimed it was worth the extra money to get the real thing with correct track labels and a perceived level of legitimacy. Like, he saw himself as not at fault legally... the seller is the one who should get punished.
Sure opened my eyes to the problem of global and local laws surrounding copyright that over reaching blankets like ACTA have tried to address. Basically people see file sharers being sued but they don't see these users being sued. So you get on newsbin or something where a service takes a small fee from you and basically makes itself the target for the lawsuit. You aren't buying a license for the media, you're buying insurance in case the RIAA/MPAA come down on the service you're using. If they do, you lose only the fractions of the cost you put in and the site owner takes the fall. That's raw capitalism for you!
After it challenged the Yuan, they did implement a tax. Although, who knows, if the tax collector comes knocking maybe he won't find anything wrong if the right amount of paper is left in his hand after you shake it?
"I don't want our troops overseas" that had say... 3 Million + members. Think that might send a message?
It might. But what I meant by cross section was that you're not sampling Canada, you're sampling Facebook. Are all the members Canadian? Does the group have a solid representative amount of Inuit? What about the elderly?
The problem with your proposed group of three million against the war is the simple fact that it is highly probable that users with internet connections heavily using Facebook and joining Facebook groups are biased towards liberal ideals. I'm not claiming that, I'm just stating the risk. The other risk is that that they were never given two options (pro/anti) they were only given anti-war. Facebook is not a voting mechanism. I can be a member of both a pro and anti group if I want to! You are not reaching the people who live in BFE Western Texas on a dude ranch. You are reaching technologically savvy citizens and not the elder generation. I don't need to cite my sources because this is a known common issue among marketing and surveys. It just blows my mind how often people forget this.
Again, when I joined your anti-war group, I might not have considered this a true endorsement and the implications. It's not even the equivalent of signing a petition nor is it a 1 citizen to 1 account guarantee. It's also almost always public who is in that group, affecting who joins and who doesn't! The problems are nearly endless in relying on this to "send clear messages."
The only 'short list' I could find referenced was simply which Facebook groups had the most members. If anyone else can find anything worth noting from this article other than the fact that Star Trek fans are more numerous on Facebook than Leonard Cohen fans... let me know. PROTIP: Facebook is not a cross section of the populace nor does that cross section necessarily think they are voting for William Shatner as Governor General when they click a tiny button to join that group. A flippant mouse click can be just as much a joke or laugh than it can be a true desire.
'Thanks Jammie, we've had all we can get out of you and caused you enough grief — pay us $1 and we'll forget about it.'
I'm not a lawyer but I would bet they would prefer to spend $2 million to get a $1 million settlement on the grounds that all future cases could be directed at the Jammie Thomas trial for precedent on how much should be awarded without all the hassle of a Special Master. Or am I missing something in that strategy?
A $1 settlement?! Hell, I'd start file sharing right now and keep that war chest of $1 in change on my desk close at hand.
Man, complaining about Intel's market dominance and not even one mention of AMD? If Intel was holding everyone back with your proposed CPU and Chipset conspiracy, don't you think that would just prime the market for AMD to pair up with VIA or someone and just wreck Intel?
I'm no market expert but I think the author of this opinion piece overlooked a lot of things. For example, when you make a chip or chipset that is sold to Dell or HP or whomever to be put into another device, you're not directly fleecing the customer. You get smaller margins that way than you would if you were the manufacturer, marketer and distributor simply because Dell takes a cut otherwise. There's more money to be had in making complete phones because not only are you fleecing the customer but the carrier is willing to subsidize you to get the customer into a juicy two year data plan deal to the tune of $70/mo (at least in the US). I would assume this money spurs more rapid development and innovation.
Quite frankly, I'm curious how Intel decides the "bundling" of my AM2+ motherboard running my cheaper quad core AMD chip? And if they don't, why isn't my AMD motherboard outpacing Intel and "keeping up" with mobile devices?
I think that there are two major groups of problems out there. Yes, some problems are in both categories and I'm sure there's problems in neither category but the majority of problems out there are either a restricted closed space or an open space. In the former, you have a problem with a facet that dictates there is a best way to do things. For example, say you are building a database meant to create millions of records daily with a demand for instant querying. You're not going to want three people to tackle that three different ways. There's just a more simpler way of analyzing existing products and comparing strategies like federated search versus directory storage. Or sharded versus RDB. Or a number of other things that can be planned out on paper ahead of time and should be.
In the open scenario -- like designing the UI or mashup of many different pre-existing services -- then I think the proposed idea is a great idea. Because a human interface is more open with many different variables that are related in some unknown way to each other. UI isn't the only place this is applicable but we have used this strategy to develop several UIs before milestone one and then all discuss, come to a collective agreement and kill two.
Because it is almost impossible in the current legal climate to build the power lines from rural areas into the cities where the power is needed and can be sold at a price high enough to finance the project.
Okay so apart from that Buffalo Wind farm project, there's another one by Geronimo whereby they built nine Suzlon turbine windmills next to my hometown (PDF) to produce enough electricity for 6,500 homes and that electricity goes to my hometown where there are ~9,500 residents.
That's nine windmills. Nine.
Let's say Minnesota is an ideal place and that you could maybe get that same energy from almost anywhere else in the country for 3 or 4 times the number of windmills. My question for you is simply whether or not you think small towns across the US would want nine to forty windmills next to their town so they could have cheap renewable power nearby? I know there are infrastructure concerns, I'm not suggesting you cut them off entirely from "the grid". I know there are startup costs. But if you're in the industry, you're telling me that's not a good business plan? I would imagine people would fall all over themselves to have something like that. And if it starts rolling on a large scale, you might have the larger cities considering setting aside nearby sections of land so that you don't have to have massive infrastructure put in for enough power to get through a forest, everglade or habitat.
It is terribly frustrating for those of us in this industry. We know what needs to be done and many ways that it can be done, but our hands are tied.
Oh, you don't have to tell me. In Minnesota, you have to go to a local specialist and get them to survey the area to verify there are no Native American burial mounds or potential artifact sites near where you are digging before you can even break the soil.
Does the Bible say something about windmills being evil? Not much going on in the southeast according to that GIF.
I can assure you the Bible has nothing literally against wind mills... no more than anything else that requires a lot of science to build. I will, however, point out that oftentimes wind farms require state government subsidization to get started. I don't think Minnesota is any different from Texas (wow, never thought I'd say that) in the respect that the state government is mighty interested in magic cheap electricity to prime the economy. In fact, I don't have the numbers on hand but I'd bet most of the states in that GIF were taxing citizens on the logic that tax you pay now will make your energy cheaper in the future... and also come up to snuff with regulations for renewable energy goals. You might agree with it, you might not. That's not what I'm trying to argue.
I will state, however, that the states in the Southeast are not particularly rich states, have a lower population to tax and their (predominantly Republican) governments tend to promise lower taxes. Well, you can write off wind subsidization then. Not to mention that Minnesota is hilariously flat and probably a better place to pour bases for wind mills than the everglades or Appalachians. Not too informed about the geography of those states but it helps that Minnesota is a carpenter's dream. I kinda gotta wonder what the hell South Dakota is doing but again, it's got a low population and probably has a slower economy. That's some prime prairie grassland I would imagine so if the federal government starts subsidizing alternative energy, I bet you'd see companies move in there and appeal to federal money.
It's not all perfect, either. The very wind farm I listed was installed by Kinitec out of California and their hydraulic lines froze last winter. Gotta prepare for tornados, ice and antarctic temps if you wanna play ball there.
Religion don't have much to do with it, look at Texas lead the way.
I'm just waiting for some Calamity to hit. I mean, Offshore drilling is an entirely different ballpark, but we've put a lot of research into that and we still mess it up.
I mean, how do these platforms cope with hurricanes? I've always wondered. I have a feeling that since a windmill will have most of its machinery above water level, it'll be more susceptible to high winds (which is the idea I know, but I mean twisting metal high winds)
Hurricanes could be a problem, so they decided to outfit their windmills with hydraulic lifts scavenged from oil-industry machinery; the system would lower the turbines in the event of a squall.
I think under the water is the safest place during a hurricane. Oh, and the timing is too perfect so I cannot omit this paragraph:
But first they needed to secure government approval. Their first stop was the state of Louisiana, but the bayou bureaucrats rejected the proposal. “They saw us as competing with oil and natural gas,” Schoeffler recalls.
Perhaps Schoeffler should ask Louisiana now if it's alright for them to compete with offshore oil?
There's over two hundred Z-750 windmills (the largest turbines made in the USA when they were put up in the 90s) on farmland in Minnesota along Buffalo Ridge, my father helped pour the foundations for them. As far as I know (and Wikipedia state):
Xcel has contracted an additional three hundred megawatts of wind energy by 2010 and must obtain ten percent of its own electricity from renewable sources by 2015. Xcel is expected to increase its wind power contracts from 302 megawatts to one 1125 megawatts by 2010.
If you're worried about avian species, Wikipedia quotes two studies that found in seven months a death of 1.1 to 1.4 birds killed per windmill. Bats are higher but it's lower than bat deaths related to lighthouses, communication towers, tall buildings, power lines, and fences. So while unfortunate, it could probably be viewed as acceptable.
The advancements in turbine technology and infrastructure will always be needed but to answer the DOE's "Annual installations need to increase more than threefold." Why don't they just buy up a bunch of (relatively) cheap farmland in Minnesota? I think you can get away with negotiating the small plot of land they use and service roads through fields while still letting the bulk of the land be used for farming. Farmers already maneuver around sloughs that rise and fall with the water table. I don't know how the rights to offshore wind farms work or what the costs to permits are but it seems like you'd just have a strip of them so why not just do a huge block out in the middle of nowhere instead?
You can see which states really took off with wind power, I don't know why you're highlighting coastal areas and the Great Lakes when Colorado and Texas have demonstrated an equally large potential.
Recently it was reported widely that “airport scanners, power lines, cell phones and microwaves” ain't got nothin' on medical scanning radiation. Now people are asking for tracking systems and calling them a threat.
I'm not really worried about cell phones as much as when I roll into my new dentist's, get 18+ x-rays of my entire mouth for their record. Find out I need two inlays on the lower left. Come back in two weeks and get two more xrays so they know where to drill. Come back in two weeks to get the inlays put in only to have them re x-ray the inlays after they were in to make sure they were in properly since they couldn't floss between them. What. the. hell? Can't you use regular light and your eyeballs to set those in there? I mean, I'm glad you did a good job, I just don't know what to do about this malignant jaw tumor now...
So I mean, yeah, its scary that they lost a case where essentially they incorrectly identified spam (an easy mistake)...
Who decided that they were incorrectly identified as spam? From the article:
e360 claimed that about 3 billion of the more than 6.6 billion emails it sent on behalf of clients
Please do tell me what kind of business (one that I've never heard of, mind you) sends out e-mails totaling the world's population and in what manner is that legitimate?
Curiously, nowhere does e360 have to defend this action. So, yeah, you can be on the fence if you think that any spammer should be able to sue Spamhaus (a free service) in any country on the globe and expect Spamhaus to front money for representation and whatnot in all those countries. Sounds like a pretty good strategy for spammers to take out Spamhaus since it's probably a growing thorn in their side.
As the submitter, that's where I stand on this issue.
A quarter of us admit to falling victim to e-fraudsters...
Okay so the population of the UK is what? Sixty million? So a quarter of that would be fifteen million. Fifteen million victims.
... with the average victim losing over GBP285.
Okay the details in the article are scant but I assume they are talking about the mean and not the median. If that's true then 285*(1.5*10^7) = over four billion quid? And that's about six billion USD.
My gut reaction is to question this survey or whatever means they used to collect the above information. I can't find anything but this news article on their site, anybody have a link to the original report so we can inspect their methods?
If you do a search there appears to be anywhere from half to two thirds of the data that are marked as proprietary data which their search help gives a brief explanation of:
Clicking on entries in this column will mark the entry for retrieval. To mark all entries, click one of the buttons labelled 'Mark All','Mark public', or 'Mark Proprietary'. (Unmarking all entries can be done the same way using the appropriate button.) For missions with proprietary data, the mark button element will have a yellow background and a '@' symbol to indicate data sets not yet public.
I think the majority of those that are unreleased are simply Q2 data or later since this data is just from the first 42 days of the mission. What's available as the tar file appears to be all Q0 and Q1 data so I'm not certain if the 400 that are 'censored' are included in that or not. If they are withheld it seems odd that the announcement, release notes and README file make no mention of this. Still, we're talking 12+ GB of compressed data here.
Overall and despite the reported censoring of the best candidates, I personally applaud their transparency here that surpasses anything another government related organization (or even scientific field for that matter) exhibits. Alright, maybe CERN or the LHC will be as transparent or more transparent but this is still pretty impressive.
Knuth's analysis is valid in the framework of his assumptions, and what is described in the linked article has been known as "cache oblivious b-tree" for not so short time.
Yeah, using this logic, once quantum computers get to the point of solving general problems there's going to be an awful lot of people who "got it wrong" because their algorithms do not apply in a quantum computer. Advancements in technology causing algorithms & data structures to be tweaked means the original person who thought them up "got it wrong"? Ridiculous.
"Oh, RSA was brilliant. But they got it wrong. You see, they failed to account for xanxinglydiumapping in 2056 computers. Poor stupid wrong bastards."
Einstein wrote of specific people and experiments. Gates does not.
Einstein warned of a horrible weapon. Gates is warning us that the most environmentally ravaged countries might be developing alternative energy (may god have mercy on our souls, lol).
Einstein acted alone and was not heavily invested in nuclear energy. Gates and his friends are heavily invested in alternative energy sources.
I'm no biographer of either but from what I know Einstein seemed to be motivated by things like the discovery of knowledge and genuine concern for mankind. Gates has (at least historically) seemed to be motivated by profit and money first above everything else with ideals similar to Einstein distantly following that primary motivator. Maybe he's changed but Einstein has always held a more altruistic image in my mind. That tends to happen to people long gone who made staggering advancements. Who knows, maybe revisionist history will see Gates alongside Einstein? But as it stands now, my personal opinion is that the two are not even close.
Bottom line: Einstein was a scientist who made great discoveries. Gates was a businessman who made great sales.
I'm not sold on Gates' motives. He sounds more like a lobbyist than a sage omen of caution like Einstein was.
I've found pages where content is omitted from the reader UI.
Yeah, that's how it's supposed to work. You see, we did some lengthy behavioral studies and it turns out that t
hich proves and brings me to the scientifically irrefutable conclusion that the average user actually doesn't use up to 90% of the content they view. After learning our lesson with AT&T, we're all about efficiently utilizing networks and battery power on mobile devices here at Apple. Actually it has saved so much time and resources, we're even eating our own dog food and Apple's networks have been optim
Me, personally, I think it's great and had to be done. Recently got a tiny DTV to USB tuner (~$20) for my computer and think it's fantastic. No doubt everyone's heard this viewpoint.
But let me relay the experiences of my grandmother who lives in the middle of nowhere mid-west. She didn't get new channels. She didn't get 24 hour movie channels. She didn't get better reception. What she got was yet another box for me to put in the chain between her television and the antenna attached to the pole shed. She now has another remote. Her checklist of things to go through when she wants to program a recording just got one longer as well as things to check when it's not working. And when she records it, she can only do one channel at a time as that's what the DTV box has to be set on since her VCR can't control digital signals. She was already getting analog distortion or static when she recorded her soap operas and I think she had learned to cope with this kind of distortion when viewing them intently. Last I checked up on her she complained that the digital distortion (specifically the audio distortion) was much harder to work through at times as opposed to fuzzy static. The clipping of the voices seems to ruin her enjoyment of a cookie cutter three quarter view emo meltdown between two hams.
So I think a lot of the views you're hearing are people who are connected to the internet and the unspoken voice of someone who has neither the internet nor a cell phone is actually a large consumer of the programs on air wave TV and products advertised on nationally broadcasted programs. Just something to consider, after helping her through this change I would be doubtful that she is alone or unique to her age group.
Is this really even a suprise? I thought it was well known that, in general, Apple will reject apps with nudity.
Yeah but illustrated nudity (and poorly at that)? What happens if I made an app that let you clothe South Park characters and you start with two peach colored circles with eyes and mouth on the top circle? What is that, child nudity?
I mean, uh, it's been ninety years or so since it was first banned in America and now here we are in 2010...
I mean, whats next, an article alleging that Google may, in fact, have ties to the advertising industry?
A better analogy, in my opinion, would be an article discussing Google's ties to advertising inside MMOs. Slight twists on commonly known things are sometimes interesting. I find it interesting that artistic interpretations of nudes are rejected. Could you even have the Venus de Milo or Vitruvian Man on an iDevice app? This definitely shows they err on the other side of the millennium.
Slashdot Mirror
More importantly (at least according to Ars Technica) is that ICANN approved Chinese internationalized domain names in this same update notification. What's the big deal with the XXX domain? Okay so now I know that the porn site I'm going to is actually a porn site ... big deal. Ain't going to help filters all that much anyway unless it's required which would be really stupid and shortsighted. I think the changes for a billion Chinese speakers is bigger news.
For about an average of half the lines of code they might use in C, scientists ...
Scientists?! You're probably joking but I've been over to accounting and they're using Excel and *shudder* Access for all their heavy data lifting. Sometimes they need help and if they're kind enough I don't lie about how much I know about those ancient products. Most importantly they're not scientists. They're accountants and business people ... they don't care if they have to wait five minutes for Excel to open a worksheet containing the entire set of order histories of our company.
...
I don't think these packages are intended for NASA space mission flight certified calculations. Just something to really help you out if you want to comply with the SEC. Side bonus, I'll bet that when you submit this code, you're going to achieve compliance a lot faster when the SEC only has to check half the lines of code and not analyze your memory management
Software development is about trade-offs. Why aren't you complaining that it's not in some targeted processor specific machine language?
The AFP also reported that 'Foreign firms wanting to provide mapping and surveying services in China are required to set up joint ventures or partnerships with local firms.'
I omitted my commentary on this particular clause as it's pretty much just speculation but I would claim that the government is encouraging/requiring/enabling corporate espionage. Not to mention the probably very sensitive close up data Google may or may not have of areal images of the United States. Now, it might just be that the government wants to foster local businesses but I would argue that it has more to do with strategy and espionage. I know I'd be uncomfortable.
(a) an idea of what journals publish on that subject and hence what researchers in that area read, (b) examples of published articles in that field to use as a stylistic template and (c) some idea of which academics are active in the area, which could be useful if you'd like to either recommend reviewers
This is really good advice as well. I would like to add one more thing to that list about researching your field before publishing. I used to troll the Computer Vision papers when I had more time on my hands in college. One annoying thing I found was that people would talk about the same concepts and methods but would call them their own little nickname. It can get annoying when I read one paper about Kernel Machines and then another about Support Vector Machines. The least you can do is put all the aliases you found at the beginning of your paper to get that out of the way. When sections tie into related work it creates a more coherent field for readers and -- at least by myself -- is much appreciated. Some people will opine that this is fluff and unnecessary and that you should stick to your message but I personally think it lends credence to your work. It also shows the reader that even though you're not tied to a big bucks research institution, you've done due diligence and you should be taken seriously instead of some confused quack.
Of course, research papers are not always page turners and the above is asking you to go through a lot of technical crap that, while ameliorating, is not everyone's idea of a fun weekend. Simply put, communication amounts to some work here. And it's that communication which furthers almost all scientific fields -- usually more than any single individual could.* If you're up to the challenge and want to see this thing through, this is heavily recommended. When all is said and done, you might find you're actually a part of the community.
* Yes, there are some people like Einstein that probably could have built a field by themselves but most of us are collaborators like Paul Erdos. No wonder the Chinese scholars said that losing Google groups and Google scholar would set back science in China.
I'm a developer ... I'm looking into something more formal like a research paper.
LaTeX. Here's a template (you wanted article.ltx). Some distributions of LaTeX come with templates as well. Here's a quick guide (PDF).
I've no experience on those, not even read a complete one, so my first question is what resources do you recommend to learn how to write one?
The template will make you get the basics right. The most basic I've seen are Title, Abstract, Sections, Conclusion, References. It's easy (I taught myself in college) and the production value of LaTeX gives you an instant artificially inflated level of credibility.
And even after I write it I can't expect to be published by Science or other high-profile publications.
Why the hell not? Just do it up and see what happens!
So where should I send it to make it known by people on the respective fields and be taken seriously?
Sounds like you should do some research on arxiv, a prepublication center where you can find some of the best stuff as well as absolute drivel. I would need to hear more about your method to ensure it's indeed an algorithm worthy of publication but I guess you would put that in Data Structures and Algorithms? But why stop there? Why don't you put it on arxiv and blog about it? Why don't you send out e-mails with the arxiv link to open source projects and commercial entities suggesting the use of your algorithm? I'd imagine the USGS would be interested in hearing from you. Sure that's all very wishful thinking but if you've got what you say you've got, why not? At the very least you'll learn why your idea isn't good enough to catch eyeballs.
I will caveat all this with the brutish reality of capital and give you a very unpopular option. Software algorithms are currently considered intellectual property by the United States government and several other countries. You could apply for a patent and then attempt to license your algorithm to companies like ESRI and Google or the USGS. You're on your own if this is what you're aiming for.
In college, a friend of mine had found AllOfMP3.com and diligently purchased hundreds of dollars worth of songs. When albums are ~ ten cents and legit, why not? He had assumed that because technology was so wonderful, someone had finally figured out how to eliminate all the middle men in the process of making digital music. So I investigated and showed him where the servers he downloaded from were located (Russia and Germany) and then pointed out how their local laws allow them to do this without rewarding the artists in anyway. He stopped using it but, like the article said, claimed it was worth the extra money to get the real thing with correct track labels and a perceived level of legitimacy. Like, he saw himself as not at fault legally ... the seller is the one who should get punished.
Sure opened my eyes to the problem of global and local laws surrounding copyright that over reaching blankets like ACTA have tried to address. Basically people see file sharers being sued but they don't see these users being sued. So you get on newsbin or something where a service takes a small fee from you and basically makes itself the target for the lawsuit. You aren't buying a license for the media, you're buying insurance in case the RIAA/MPAA come down on the service you're using. If they do, you lose only the fractions of the cost you put in and the site owner takes the fall. That's raw capitalism for you!
If they can't tax it then ban it!
After it challenged the Yuan, they did implement a tax. Although, who knows, if the tax collector comes knocking maybe he won't find anything wrong if the right amount of paper is left in his hand after you shake it?
"I don't want our troops overseas" that had say... 3 Million + members. Think that might send a message?
It might. But what I meant by cross section was that you're not sampling Canada, you're sampling Facebook. Are all the members Canadian? Does the group have a solid representative amount of Inuit? What about the elderly?
The problem with your proposed group of three million against the war is the simple fact that it is highly probable that users with internet connections heavily using Facebook and joining Facebook groups are biased towards liberal ideals. I'm not claiming that, I'm just stating the risk. The other risk is that that they were never given two options (pro/anti) they were only given anti-war. Facebook is not a voting mechanism. I can be a member of both a pro and anti group if I want to! You are not reaching the people who live in BFE Western Texas on a dude ranch. You are reaching technologically savvy citizens and not the elder generation. I don't need to cite my sources because this is a known common issue among marketing and surveys. It just blows my mind how often people forget this.
Again, when I joined your anti-war group, I might not have considered this a true endorsement and the implications. It's not even the equivalent of signing a petition nor is it a 1 citizen to 1 account guarantee. It's also almost always public who is in that group, affecting who joins and who doesn't! The problems are nearly endless in relying on this to "send clear messages."
Might Shatner Boldly Lead Canada As Governor?
The only 'short list' I could find referenced was simply which Facebook groups had the most members. If anyone else can find anything worth noting from this article other than the fact that Star Trek fans are more numerous on Facebook than Leonard Cohen fans ... let me know. PROTIP: Facebook is not a cross section of the populace nor does that cross section necessarily think they are voting for William Shatner as Governor General when they click a tiny button to join that group. A flippant mouse click can be just as much a joke or laugh than it can be a true desire.
'Thanks Jammie, we've had all we can get out of you and caused you enough grief — pay us $1 and we'll forget about it.'
I'm not a lawyer but I would bet they would prefer to spend $2 million to get a $1 million settlement on the grounds that all future cases could be directed at the Jammie Thomas trial for precedent on how much should be awarded without all the hassle of a Special Master. Or am I missing something in that strategy?
A $1 settlement?! Hell, I'd start file sharing right now and keep that war chest of $1 in change on my desk close at hand.
Man, complaining about Intel's market dominance and not even one mention of AMD? If Intel was holding everyone back with your proposed CPU and Chipset conspiracy, don't you think that would just prime the market for AMD to pair up with VIA or someone and just wreck Intel?
I'm no market expert but I think the author of this opinion piece overlooked a lot of things. For example, when you make a chip or chipset that is sold to Dell or HP or whomever to be put into another device, you're not directly fleecing the customer. You get smaller margins that way than you would if you were the manufacturer, marketer and distributor simply because Dell takes a cut otherwise. There's more money to be had in making complete phones because not only are you fleecing the customer but the carrier is willing to subsidize you to get the customer into a juicy two year data plan deal to the tune of $70/mo (at least in the US). I would assume this money spurs more rapid development and innovation.
Quite frankly, I'm curious how Intel decides the "bundling" of my AM2+ motherboard running my cheaper quad core AMD chip? And if they don't, why isn't my AMD motherboard outpacing Intel and "keeping up" with mobile devices?
I think that there are two major groups of problems out there. Yes, some problems are in both categories and I'm sure there's problems in neither category but the majority of problems out there are either a restricted closed space or an open space. In the former, you have a problem with a facet that dictates there is a best way to do things. For example, say you are building a database meant to create millions of records daily with a demand for instant querying. You're not going to want three people to tackle that three different ways. There's just a more simpler way of analyzing existing products and comparing strategies like federated search versus directory storage. Or sharded versus RDB. Or a number of other things that can be planned out on paper ahead of time and should be.
In the open scenario -- like designing the UI or mashup of many different pre-existing services -- then I think the proposed idea is a great idea. Because a human interface is more open with many different variables that are related in some unknown way to each other. UI isn't the only place this is applicable but we have used this strategy to develop several UIs before milestone one and then all discuss, come to a collective agreement and kill two.
Because it is almost impossible in the current legal climate to build the power lines from rural areas into the cities where the power is needed and can be sold at a price high enough to finance the project.
Okay so apart from that Buffalo Wind farm project, there's another one by Geronimo whereby they built nine Suzlon turbine windmills next to my hometown (PDF) to produce enough electricity for 6,500 homes and that electricity goes to my hometown where there are ~9,500 residents.
That's nine windmills. Nine.
Let's say Minnesota is an ideal place and that you could maybe get that same energy from almost anywhere else in the country for 3 or 4 times the number of windmills. My question for you is simply whether or not you think small towns across the US would want nine to forty windmills next to their town so they could have cheap renewable power nearby? I know there are infrastructure concerns, I'm not suggesting you cut them off entirely from "the grid". I know there are startup costs. But if you're in the industry, you're telling me that's not a good business plan? I would imagine people would fall all over themselves to have something like that. And if it starts rolling on a large scale, you might have the larger cities considering setting aside nearby sections of land so that you don't have to have massive infrastructure put in for enough power to get through a forest, everglade or habitat.
It is terribly frustrating for those of us in this industry. We know what needs to be done and many ways that it can be done, but our hands are tied.
Oh, you don't have to tell me. In Minnesota, you have to go to a local specialist and get them to survey the area to verify there are no Native American burial mounds or potential artifact sites near where you are digging before you can even break the soil.
Does the Bible say something about windmills being evil? Not much going on in the southeast according to that GIF.
I can assure you the Bible has nothing literally against wind mills ... no more than anything else that requires a lot of science to build. I will, however, point out that oftentimes wind farms require state government subsidization to get started. I don't think Minnesota is any different from Texas (wow, never thought I'd say that) in the respect that the state government is mighty interested in magic cheap electricity to prime the economy. In fact, I don't have the numbers on hand but I'd bet most of the states in that GIF were taxing citizens on the logic that tax you pay now will make your energy cheaper in the future ... and also come up to snuff with regulations for renewable energy goals. You might agree with it, you might not. That's not what I'm trying to argue.
I will state, however, that the states in the Southeast are not particularly rich states, have a lower population to tax and their (predominantly Republican) governments tend to promise lower taxes. Well, you can write off wind subsidization then. Not to mention that Minnesota is hilariously flat and probably a better place to pour bases for wind mills than the everglades or Appalachians. Not too informed about the geography of those states but it helps that Minnesota is a carpenter's dream. I kinda gotta wonder what the hell South Dakota is doing but again, it's got a low population and probably has a slower economy. That's some prime prairie grassland I would imagine so if the federal government starts subsidizing alternative energy, I bet you'd see companies move in there and appeal to federal money.
It's not all perfect, either. The very wind farm I listed was installed by Kinitec out of California and their hydraulic lines froze last winter. Gotta prepare for tornados, ice and antarctic temps if you wanna play ball there.
Religion don't have much to do with it, look at Texas lead the way.
I'm just waiting for some Calamity to hit. I mean, Offshore drilling is an entirely different ballpark, but we've put a lot of research into that and we still mess it up.
I mean, how do these platforms cope with hurricanes? I've always wondered. I have a feeling that since a windmill will have most of its machinery above water level, it'll be more susceptible to high winds (which is the idea I know, but I mean twisting metal high winds)
Might seem counter intuitive but a 2007 article in Wired said:
Hurricanes could be a problem, so they decided to outfit their windmills with hydraulic lifts scavenged from oil-industry machinery; the system would lower the turbines in the event of a squall.
I think under the water is the safest place during a hurricane. Oh, and the timing is too perfect so I cannot omit this paragraph:
But first they needed to secure government approval. Their first stop was the state of Louisiana, but the bayou bureaucrats rejected the proposal. “They saw us as competing with oil and natural gas,” Schoeffler recalls.
Perhaps Schoeffler should ask Louisiana now if it's alright for them to compete with offshore oil?
Xcel has contracted an additional three hundred megawatts of wind energy by 2010 and must obtain ten percent of its own electricity from renewable sources by 2015. Xcel is expected to increase its wind power contracts from 302 megawatts to one 1125 megawatts by 2010.
If you're worried about avian species, Wikipedia quotes two studies that found in seven months a death of 1.1 to 1.4 birds killed per windmill. Bats are higher but it's lower than bat deaths related to lighthouses, communication towers, tall buildings, power lines, and fences. So while unfortunate, it could probably be viewed as acceptable.
The advancements in turbine technology and infrastructure will always be needed but to answer the DOE's "Annual installations need to increase more than threefold." Why don't they just buy up a bunch of (relatively) cheap farmland in Minnesota? I think you can get away with negotiating the small plot of land they use and service roads through fields while still letting the bulk of the land be used for farming. Farmers already maneuver around sloughs that rise and fall with the water table. I don't know how the rights to offshore wind farms work or what the costs to permits are but it seems like you'd just have a strip of them so why not just do a huge block out in the middle of nowhere instead?
You can see which states really took off with wind power, I don't know why you're highlighting coastal areas and the Great Lakes when Colorado and Texas have demonstrated an equally large potential.
Recently it was reported widely that “airport scanners, power lines, cell phones and microwaves” ain't got nothin' on medical scanning radiation. Now people are asking for tracking systems and calling them a threat.
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I'm not really worried about cell phones as much as when I roll into my new dentist's, get 18+ x-rays of my entire mouth for their record. Find out I need two inlays on the lower left. Come back in two weeks and get two more xrays so they know where to drill. Come back in two weeks to get the inlays put in only to have them re x-ray the inlays after they were in to make sure they were in properly since they couldn't floss between them. What. the. hell? Can't you use regular light and your eyeballs to set those in there? I mean, I'm glad you did a good job, I just don't know what to do about this malignant jaw tumor now
So I mean, yeah, its scary that they lost a case where essentially they incorrectly identified spam (an easy mistake) ...
Who decided that they were incorrectly identified as spam? From the article:
e360 claimed that about 3 billion of the more than 6.6 billion emails it sent on behalf of clients
Please do tell me what kind of business (one that I've never heard of, mind you) sends out e-mails totaling the world's population and in what manner is that legitimate?
Curiously, nowhere does e360 have to defend this action. So, yeah, you can be on the fence if you think that any spammer should be able to sue Spamhaus (a free service) in any country on the globe and expect Spamhaus to front money for representation and whatnot in all those countries. Sounds like a pretty good strategy for spammers to take out Spamhaus since it's probably a growing thorn in their side.
As the submitter, that's where I stand on this issue.
A quarter of us admit to falling victim to e-fraudsters ...
Okay so the population of the UK is what? Sixty million? So a quarter of that would be fifteen million. Fifteen million victims.
... with the average victim losing over GBP285.
Okay the details in the article are scant but I assume they are talking about the mean and not the median. If that's true then 285*(1.5*10^7) = over four billion quid? And that's about six billion USD.
My gut reaction is to question this survey or whatever means they used to collect the above information. I can't find anything but this news article on their site, anybody have a link to the original report so we can inspect their methods?
If you do a search there appears to be anywhere from half to two thirds of the data that are marked as proprietary data which their search help gives a brief explanation of:
Clicking on entries in this column will mark the entry for retrieval. To mark all entries, click one of the buttons labelled 'Mark All','Mark public', or 'Mark Proprietary'. (Unmarking all entries can be done the same way using the appropriate button.) For missions with proprietary data, the mark button element will have a yellow background and a '@' symbol to indicate data sets not yet public.
I think the majority of those that are unreleased are simply Q2 data or later since this data is just from the first 42 days of the mission. What's available as the tar file appears to be all Q0 and Q1 data so I'm not certain if the 400 that are 'censored' are included in that or not. If they are withheld it seems odd that the announcement, release notes and README file make no mention of this. Still, we're talking 12+ GB of compressed data here.
Overall and despite the reported censoring of the best candidates, I personally applaud their transparency here that surpasses anything another government related organization (or even scientific field for that matter) exhibits. Alright, maybe CERN or the LHC will be as transparent or more transparent but this is still pretty impressive.
Knuth's analysis is valid in the framework of his assumptions, and what is described in the linked article has been known as "cache oblivious b-tree" for not so short time.
Yeah, using this logic, once quantum computers get to the point of solving general problems there's going to be an awful lot of people who "got it wrong" because their algorithms do not apply in a quantum computer. Advancements in technology causing algorithms & data structures to be tweaked means the original person who thought them up "got it wrong"? Ridiculous.
"Oh, RSA was brilliant. But they got it wrong. You see, they failed to account for xanxinglydiumapping in 2056 computers. Poor stupid wrong bastards."
Einstein wrote of specific people and experiments. Gates does not.
Einstein warned of a horrible weapon. Gates is warning us that the most environmentally ravaged countries might be developing alternative energy (may god have mercy on our souls, lol).
Einstein acted alone and was not heavily invested in nuclear energy. Gates and his friends are heavily invested in alternative energy sources.
I'm no biographer of either but from what I know Einstein seemed to be motivated by things like the discovery of knowledge and genuine concern for mankind. Gates has (at least historically) seemed to be motivated by profit and money first above everything else with ideals similar to Einstein distantly following that primary motivator. Maybe he's changed but Einstein has always held a more altruistic image in my mind. That tends to happen to people long gone who made staggering advancements. Who knows, maybe revisionist history will see Gates alongside Einstein? But as it stands now, my personal opinion is that the two are not even close.
Bottom line: Einstein was a scientist who made great discoveries. Gates was a businessman who made great sales.
I'm not sold on Gates' motives. He sounds more like a lobbyist than a sage omen of caution like Einstein was.
I've found pages where content is omitted from the reader UI.
Yeah, that's how it's supposed to work. You see, we did some lengthy behavioral studies and it turns out that t
hich proves and brings me to the scientifically irrefutable conclusion that the average user actually doesn't use up to 90% of the content they view. After learning our lesson with AT&T, we're all about efficiently utilizing networks and battery power on mobile devices here at Apple. Actually it has saved so much time and resources, we're even eating our own dog food and Apple's networks have been optim
Me, personally, I think it's great and had to be done. Recently got a tiny DTV to USB tuner (~$20) for my computer and think it's fantastic. No doubt everyone's heard this viewpoint.
But let me relay the experiences of my grandmother who lives in the middle of nowhere mid-west. She didn't get new channels. She didn't get 24 hour movie channels. She didn't get better reception. What she got was yet another box for me to put in the chain between her television and the antenna attached to the pole shed. She now has another remote. Her checklist of things to go through when she wants to program a recording just got one longer as well as things to check when it's not working. And when she records it, she can only do one channel at a time as that's what the DTV box has to be set on since her VCR can't control digital signals. She was already getting analog distortion or static when she recorded her soap operas and I think she had learned to cope with this kind of distortion when viewing them intently. Last I checked up on her she complained that the digital distortion (specifically the audio distortion) was much harder to work through at times as opposed to fuzzy static. The clipping of the voices seems to ruin her enjoyment of a cookie cutter three quarter view emo meltdown between two hams.
So I think a lot of the views you're hearing are people who are connected to the internet and the unspoken voice of someone who has neither the internet nor a cell phone is actually a large consumer of the programs on air wave TV and products advertised on nationally broadcasted programs. Just something to consider, after helping her through this change I would be doubtful that she is alone or unique to her age group.
Is this really even a suprise? I thought it was well known that, in general, Apple will reject apps with nudity.
Yeah but illustrated nudity (and poorly at that)? What happens if I made an app that let you clothe South Park characters and you start with two peach colored circles with eyes and mouth on the top circle? What is that, child nudity?
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I mean, uh, it's been ninety years or so since it was first banned in America and now here we are in 2010
I mean, whats next, an article alleging that Google may, in fact, have ties to the advertising industry?
A better analogy, in my opinion, would be an article discussing Google's ties to advertising inside MMOs. Slight twists on commonly known things are sometimes interesting. I find it interesting that artistic interpretations of nudes are rejected. Could you even have the Venus de Milo or Vitruvian Man on an iDevice app? This definitely shows they err on the other side of the millennium.