AFAIK, iTunes doesn't give you your music back if you buy the songs and lose the original copy.
I believe Apple will allow you to re-download all of your iTunes purchases for free at most once (in a lifetime). You get one mistake, and if you don't learn your lesson and make backups after that, you're on your own. Seems fair enough.
One huge advantage of such a system is that one could write a human surgery simulator much easier than one could construct a robust, responsive physical simultation of a human under surgery. Doctors can have done 100 surgeries
almost exactly like the real thing (and have watched "virtuoso" recordings of past surgeries) before ever putting a patient's life on the line.
(Playing devil's advocate) Hey, you're always free to use the old, "natural" rice for free, planting it year after year. Shouldn't the biotech companies be able to get return on their investment? Otherwise, they'd sell one year's worth of crops, and that'd be it. Not to mention that "terminator" crops (should) prevent potential issues with GE crops contaminating the natural food supply. (/devil's advocate)
That being said, I heard a story where a guy's crops got pollinated naturally by a neighbor's GE crops, he planted the seeds next year, and then got SUED by the biotech companies for infringement. That's clearly fucked up.
I'm surprised these things haven't started showing up in mobile devices yet. I guess maybe they're still a bit too pricy, and maybe a bit too large. Wouldn't be a total replacement for a keyboard, since you want to be able to provide input without putting the device down on a desk -- but would be great for when you want to do some serious typing.
I'm an AI grad student, and I can tell you that (rather complex) statistical learning methods, which are considered part of AI, blow most simple methods (and neural nets) out of the water on most classification problems these days. In fact, I'm procrastinating from my project involving SVMs right now to write this comment.
Perhaps by AI you're referring just to neural nets? While people get them to do some cool things, these (in the for you're used to seeing them in) are at the very very "dumb end" of AI, in that they don't exploit any of the prior knowledge about a problem. They're easy to understand and quite general, but for most specific problems there are much better AI techniques out there.
Don't fire them, give them a bonus! If they had picked some other boring name, do you really think the article would have, e.g., made in on/.? The name might very well be the deciding factor in their getting continued funding (as sad as that may be).
sites like Google News, which let you see an aggregate of all the mainstream sources at once. This pretty much ensures that you get to see all stories from all angles, which is quite different than if you stuck to a single print (or online) news source. There's also the added social factor, in that you can read blogs, sites, etc. that will point you directly to articles on a given topic or with a given viewpoint that might interest you, regardless of what source they came from. Ideally/. would be in this category, but I can hardly remember the last time I felt the urge to RTFA on a story here... the editors are a joke, but the comments keep me coming back.
This just in... Dvorak just took a massive dump. Reporters from various news outlets are gathering to cover the news, with at least two subsequent/. stories on the event expected.
Seriously, of course MS never expected to make money on a product they give away for free... it's like the XBox, a "loss leader" to help consolidate their monopoly.
Somewhat offtopic, but... has anyone else noticed the new bombardment of ads in the Slashdot RSS feed (I think they just started today)? I find them extremely obnoxious, especially since the same exact ad is sent with every third story. I think most people come and check out the comments if the story seems interesting, thus generating ad revenue, so this seems like a quite obnoxious and unnecessary intrusion that might lead me to block the site's ads altogether... just like I will now be avoiding all of Phillips' products.
I *insist* you double check before believing them.
Done, and belief duly suspended. You're only off by a factor of a million, not too bad... you should have been more suspicious when you gave the "less than a gram" figure. Multiplying the above two numbers gives 1.6 x 10^-3 m^3 = 1.6 x 10^6 mm^3. You need to pay for converting to millimeters in all three dimensions, not just 1. Which makes your figure 611 MegaJoules... IANAAE, so I don't know if that's gonna be lying around or not, but it seems that the GP may have had a point after all.
(rant) Meth, tobacco, alcohol, and perhaps PCP are the worst popular drugs, in terms of bodily harm. People do fucked up things when they're addicted to heroin, etc, but the drug itself is not that bad for you. From Wikipedia:... "Francis L. Young, an administrative law judge with the Drug Enforcement Agency, has declared that in its natural form, (cannabis) is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known." Whereas tobacco is the biggest easily preventable cause of death/bodily harm out there, with alcohol not too far behind. Its about protecting the interests of big tobacco and alcohol, not about the safety of people or even cost to society in terms of medical expenses, etc. Plus this way the politicians get to seem "pro-family" in their strong stance against "dangerous drugs". In this context, would it really be possible for some new drug to be allowed, even if it removes some of the negative consequences of alcohol (see GHB, benzodiazapenes, etc. etc.) (/rant)
It's always interesting to see how advanced these are. Most of the time, I'm really not impressed by the complexity of the assignments, although the optimalization work done by the teams can be pretty 'way-better-than-anything-I-could-ever-do".
You must be talking about another contest, on crack, or a super-genius (I won't hazard a guess as to which). I was on the Berkeley ACM team this year, and the International-level problems are HARD... unless by "complexity" you mean the difficulty of writing a guess-and-check "solution" (which will be exponentially too slow). Usually, coming up with an algorithm with good asymptotic time complexity is the focus, and is very difficult. Almost all of them are not ones you can look at and just say "oh, that's max flow", etc, unlike some of the regional contest problems. And, from my experience at least, optimization is not that important at all. If you get the right algorithm, the problems can typically be solved in well under the time limit without doing anything fancy. If you do the naive thing, no amount of constant-factor optimization will allow the thing to finish before the universe ends.
Just my $.02... don't take my word for it though, look at last year's problems and see what you think: http://cii-judge.baylor.edu/
No matter how fancy you make your captcha, human labor is cheap. This is especially true when you consider the lengths people are willing to go to get free internet porn. The most genius way I've heard of to beat CAPTCHAs:
1. Find links to a handful of free thumbnail galleries
2. Set up a webpage with links to said galleries
3. Make every outgoing link require filling in a CAPTCHA
When your page gets a hit, you pull down the CAPTCHA image (or whatever) from the target site, and serve it up to the masturbator. He/she (using left hand only) types the answer to the CAPTCHA, and gets free porn. You relay the answer to the target site, and get your account on. SPAM ahoy!
2. Why did the sea creatures decide to go on land?
Well, putting the loaded word "decide" aside, the obvious answer is that land represented a huge unexploited ecological niche, with tons of food and no predators.
I think you may have missed my point. You (I'll give you the benefit of the doubt) and I are NOT really fighting the battle... we are simply caught in the crossfire. If we could get rid of either of the fighting parties (spammers and stupid people), the problem would by and large sort itself out. Now, which group would be easier to eliminate.....
People must click on the "Cl1ck H33RE F0R S|0ft V1A_GR_A!!!!!" bullshit or the spamming fuckers would stop sending me this shit 10 times an hour. In general I think eugenics is a bad idea... but really... I think each and every person who orders from a spam like that should receive a bomb in the mail instead of penis pills. This solution would go a long way towards solving not only spam, but many of the other problems faced by our country today.
Why not project another, faster form of energy - such as light - instead of sound to get a better, higher-resolution image, at a faster rate?
Except that a faster form of energy will make actual depth readings less accurate, for obvious reasons. Slower is better in this case, as long as its not so slow to accumulate motion blur. Anyhow, FTFS it sounds like this thing works using computer vision techniques, rather than fancy laser range-finding.
So does this mean that I am smart, or that I'm just dumb faster?
Offtopic, but hilarious nonetheless:
Max Power (Homer): Kids, there's three ways to do things. The right way, the wrong way, and the Max Power way! Bart: Isn't that the wrong way? Max Power: Yeah, but faster! (Max runs into a cactus)
Anyway, why do you give a flying fuck? You can get a 250 GB hard drive for less than $100 these days... at that rate, that 4096 bytes costs you about $100/64000000~= $.0000016. Was that really worth your time bitching? I didn't think so.
Why would we need to limit population growth, and how would you ever propose we do this?
Environmentalists say that the best thing you can do for the earth, the best way to conserve resources, is to not have more than two children. In retrospect, this is obvious... the earth can barely handle the 6 or so billion people here now; try 60 billion on for size. As for the how... well people aren't gonna like it, but its gonna have to happen one way or another.
Slashdot Mirror
AFAIK, iTunes doesn't give you your music back if you buy the songs and lose the original copy.
I believe Apple will allow you to re-download all of your iTunes purchases for free at most once (in a lifetime). You get one mistake, and if you don't learn your lesson and make backups after that, you're on your own. Seems fair enough.
One huge advantage of such a system is that one could write a human surgery simulator much easier than one could construct a robust, responsive physical simultation of a human under surgery. Doctors can have done 100 surgeries almost exactly like the real thing (and have watched "virtuoso" recordings of past surgeries) before ever putting a patient's life on the line.
(Playing devil's advocate) Hey, you're always free to use the old, "natural" rice for free, planting it year after year. Shouldn't the biotech companies be able to get return on their investment? Otherwise, they'd sell one year's worth of crops, and that'd be it. Not to mention that "terminator" crops (should) prevent potential issues with GE crops contaminating the natural food supply. (/devil's advocate)
That being said, I heard a story where a guy's crops got pollinated naturally by a neighbor's GE crops, he planted the seeds next year, and then got SUED by the biotech companies for infringement. That's clearly fucked up.
I'm surprised these things haven't started showing up in mobile devices yet. I guess maybe they're still a bit too pricy, and maybe a bit too large. Wouldn't be a total replacement for a keyboard, since you want to be able to provide input without putting the device down on a desk -- but would be great for when you want to do some serious typing.
I'm an AI grad student, and I can tell you that (rather complex) statistical learning methods, which are considered part of AI, blow most simple methods (and neural nets) out of the water on most classification problems these days. In fact, I'm procrastinating from my project involving SVMs right now to write this comment.
Perhaps by AI you're referring just to neural nets? While people get them to do some cool things, these (in the for you're used to seeing them in) are at the very very "dumb end" of AI, in that they don't exploit any of the prior knowledge about a problem. They're easy to understand and quite general, but for most specific problems there are much better AI techniques out there.
babybot? robocub? fire your marketing people!
/.? The name might very well be the deciding factor in their getting continued funding (as sad as that may be).
Don't fire them, give them a bonus! If they had picked some other boring name, do you really think the article would have, e.g., made in on
sites like Google News, which let you see an aggregate of all the mainstream sources at once. This pretty much ensures that you get to see all stories from all angles, which is quite different than if you stuck to a single print (or online) news source. There's also the added social factor, in that you can read blogs, sites, etc. that will point you directly to articles on a given topic or with a given viewpoint that might interest you, regardless of what source they came from. Ideally /. would be in this category, but I can hardly remember the last time I felt the urge to RTFA on a story here ... the editors are a joke, but the comments keep me coming back.
Ummm ... http://research.microsoft.com/.
This just in ... Dvorak just took a massive dump. Reporters from various news outlets are gathering to cover the news, with at least two subsequent /. stories on the event expected.
... it's like the XBox, a "loss leader" to help consolidate their monopoly.
Seriously, of course MS never expected to make money on a product they give away for free
This story from BoingBoing is pretty cool, if you're interested in how Best Buy actually makes money (and how they reward their salespeople for selling customers crap they don't need): http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/04/howto_decode_ the_num.html
Somewhat offtopic, but ... has anyone else noticed the new bombardment of ads in the Slashdot RSS feed (I think they just started today)? I find them extremely obnoxious, especially since the same exact ad is sent with every third story. I think most people come and check out the comments if the story seems interesting, thus generating ad revenue, so this seems like a quite obnoxious and unnecessary intrusion that might lead me to block the site's ads altogether... just like I will now be avoiding all of Phillips' products.
I *insist* you double check before believing them.
... you should have been more suspicious when you gave the "less than a gram" figure. Multiplying the above two numbers gives 1.6 x 10^-3 m^3 = 1.6 x 10^6 mm^3. You need to pay for converting to millimeters in all three dimensions, not just 1. Which makes your figure 611 MegaJoules ... IANAAE, so I don't know if that's gonna be lying around or not, but it seems that the GP may have had a point after all.
Done, and belief duly suspended. You're only off by a factor of a million, not too bad
(rant) Meth, tobacco, alcohol, and perhaps PCP are the worst popular drugs, in terms of bodily harm. People do fucked up things when they're addicted to heroin, etc, but the drug itself is not that bad for you. From Wikipedia: ... "Francis L. Young, an administrative law judge with the Drug Enforcement Agency, has declared that in its natural form, (cannabis) is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known." Whereas tobacco is the biggest easily preventable cause of death/bodily harm out there, with alcohol not too far behind. Its about protecting the interests of big tobacco and alcohol, not about the safety of people or even cost to society in terms of medical expenses, etc. Plus this way the politicians get to seem "pro-family" in their strong stance against "dangerous drugs". In this context, would it really be possible for some new drug to be allowed, even if it removes some of the negative consequences of alcohol (see GHB, benzodiazapenes, etc. etc.) (/rant)
Credit where its due: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weber-Fechner_law
It's always interesting to see how advanced these are. Most of the time, I'm really not impressed by the complexity of the assignments, although the optimalization work done by the teams can be pretty 'way-better-than-anything-I-could-ever-do".
... unless by "complexity" you mean the difficulty of writing a guess-and-check "solution" (which will be exponentially too slow). Usually, coming up with an algorithm with good asymptotic time complexity is the focus, and is very difficult. Almost all of them are not ones you can look at and just say "oh, that's max flow", etc, unlike some of the regional contest problems. And, from my experience at least, optimization is not that important at all. If you get the right algorithm, the problems can typically be solved in well under the time limit without doing anything fancy. If you do the naive thing, no amount of constant-factor optimization will allow the thing to finish before the universe ends.
Just my $.02 ... don't take my word for it though, look at last year's problems and see what you think: http://cii-judge.baylor.edu/
You must be talking about another contest, on crack, or a super-genius (I won't hazard a guess as to which). I was on the Berkeley ACM team this year, and the International-level problems are HARD
No matter how fancy you make your captcha, human labor is cheap. This is especially true when you consider the lengths people are willing to go to get free internet porn. The most genius way I've heard of to beat CAPTCHAs:
1. Find links to a handful of free thumbnail galleries 2. Set up a webpage with links to said galleries 3. Make every outgoing link require filling in a CAPTCHA
When your page gets a hit, you pull down the CAPTCHA image (or whatever) from the target site, and serve it up to the masturbator. He/she (using left hand only) types the answer to the CAPTCHA, and gets free porn. You relay the answer to the target site, and get your account on. SPAM ahoy!
... an hour and a half too late
8 &cid=15082601
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=18246
2. Why did the sea creatures decide to go on land?
Well, putting the loaded word "decide" aside, the obvious answer is that land represented a huge unexploited ecological niche, with tons of food and no predators.
I think you may have missed my point. You (I'll give you the benefit of the doubt) and I are NOT really fighting the battle ... we are simply caught in the crossfire. If we could get rid of either of the fighting parties (spammers and stupid people), the problem would by and large sort itself out. Now, which group would be easier to eliminate .....
People must click on the "Cl1ck H33RE F0R S|0ft V1A_GR_A!!!!!" bullshit or the spamming fuckers would stop sending me this shit 10 times an hour. In general I think eugenics is a bad idea ... but really ... I think each and every person who orders from a spam like that should receive a bomb in the mail instead of penis pills. This solution would go a long way towards solving not only spam, but many of the other problems faced by our country today.
Why not project another, faster form of energy - such as light - instead of sound to get a better, higher-resolution image, at a faster rate?
Except that a faster form of energy will make actual depth readings less accurate, for obvious reasons. Slower is better in this case, as long as its not so slow to accumulate motion blur. Anyhow, FTFS it sounds like this thing works using computer vision techniques, rather than fancy laser range-finding.
So does this mean that I am smart, or that I'm just dumb faster?
Offtopic, but hilarious nonetheless:
Max Power (Homer): Kids, there's three ways to do things. The right way, the wrong way, and the Max Power way!
Bart: Isn't that the wrong way?
Max Power: Yeah, but faster! (Max runs into a cactus)
Anyway, why do you give a flying fuck? You can get a 250 GB hard drive for less than $100 these days ... at that rate, that 4096 bytes costs you about $100/64000000~= $.0000016. Was that really worth your time bitching? I didn't think so.
Why would we need to limit population growth, and how would you ever propose we do this?
... the earth can barely handle the 6 or so billion people here now; try 60 billion on for size. As for the how ... well people aren't gonna like it, but its gonna have to happen one way or another.
Environmentalists say that the best thing you can do for the earth, the best way to conserve resources, is to not have more than two children. In retrospect, this is obvious
I've found this ad blocker to be exceptionally good: http://everythingisnt.com/hosts.html. Just install and you're good in any browser.