people with truly great ideas are going to want to 1) have something to do with seeing them happen, and 2) want to benefit personally. (Even non-profits pay good salaries!) So I don't think this model provides adequate benefit to the idea owner to relinquish control of their intellectual property. Will the really good ideas come out?
If your idea is a slam-dunk winner for profitability, or if you expect to make money on an idea, go talk to a VC firm. If you've got a good idea you should be able to get it funded. The current system already works for this kind of idea.
What about all the ideas that could help many people, but require substantial investment and would at best break even? Outside of philanthropic efforts (such as this contest), the current system fails. VC firms won't touch something that won't turn a profit, and charities often focus on the immediate problems for which they have the money on hand to solve[1].
This contest is about long term fixes that need money to get off the ground, but are not likely to turn much of a profit, if any. Things like mosquito nets for malaria, not the next Viagra.
Alternatively, if you really just want to help people, you could turn in a profitable idea that would be self supporting and probably help even more people. A lot of people have no problem doing that, and nobody is forcing you to do that against your will.
But, don't trust me, RTFFAQ. Seen in light of that, the TOS makes sense, even if it not business, profit or fame friendly[2].
[1] You could call it shortsighted or risk averse, but to be fair charities don't have the luxury of taking risks in many instances; a failure will be quite public and negatively affect future funding of kill the charity entirely.
[2] One thing I think *should* be changed: Google should commit to returning any of its profit gained from this program back into the program itself, to fund other ideas. You would still need to allow subcontracted entities to make a profit (anything else it just too unrealistic an expectation), but Google could choose contractors based on their efficiency at production, or even choose multiple ones to stimulate competition and thus low prices.
there is absolutely no substantive change to our policy... because there was probably no substance there to begin with.
I guess I've just watched too many politicians ignore their grand plans/claims. OTOH, a voting record rarely lies. For whoever you support, educate yourself; don't just listen to what they say when they know what you want to hear.
This line of reasoning ends only when the whole net is blocked.
There are shades of gray, and you don't have to pick one of two extremes[1]. You can ban nuclear bombs without banning pocket knives, even thought they might both be weapons someone would like to own.
[1] It might not seem like that in an election year though.
"Putting spell checking into browsers just shifts the responsibility of good language practices from the user to some software company."
Just guessing what the response would be. He probably drives without a seatbelt and rides a bicycle/motorcycle without a helmet. After all, "I've never been in an accident, or lost my financial data." means you never will, right?
Who gets to decide what's true? The web is decentralized. All this would end up doing is making the groupthink problem even worse. Some loud people push an idea, it spreads a bit, then they declare a "concensus" and begin character-assassinating any dissenters. So I ask again, who gets to be the final authority on what is true and what isn't? The Pope, perhaps? (As a Protestant I've got a problem with that... [grin])
Clearly we need an ePope, infallible for all things internet-related.
I've been using Chrome for the past day or so, and had to stop leaving it open while I was working on other things because every so often it would bog down my CPU for no apparent reason.
What did the Chrome task manager say? In Firefox, you'd have a nearly impossible time figuring out what was causing the usage other than doing Russian roulette on tabs. In Chrome, at least in theory, you should be able to find exactly what the culprit is. Did you try that, and if you did, why didn't it work? Maybe the CPU usage was too bursty?
How did such an intense fire start in the building? I understand that there was debris from the other building, but seems like you would need a better than average fuel source for such an intense fire.
The ignition source has nothing to do with the eventual intensity of the fire. A refinery fire can start from a light bulb, a forest fire can start from a cigarette. All you need for an intense fire is plenty of fuel and oxygen. An office environment will give you all the fuel you'd need, and debris damage will poke holes to allow air in.
I remember on CNN, one of the researches claimed that this was the first recorded event of firing taking down such a structure.
This is not surprising. There really aren't that many 50 floor buildings in the entire world, normally a building would have a functioning anti-fire system, and you would not normally leave a fire burning in such an expensive building. With such a rare sequence of events, it's unlikely that it would happen too often.
The next such event will probably take place after an earthquake; much of the damage in places that are prepared for earthquakes ends up being due to fires; anti-fire systems are messed up by the earthquake and first responders are overstretched so they have to let some things burn. Hopefully we won't see this in our lifetimes, but time says it will happen.
So how many unlikely events happened in that one (12 hr?) period? I often hear Occam's razor being suggested to push against ridiculously unlikely events. Any one know what is the approximate probability of that 12hr period occurring as officially stated?
You act as if they were independent events, but they weren't. It was one unlikely event with a bunch of effects. For example, if you have a 1/10k chance of dying on an airplane flight, the chance that 100 passengers die is not (1/10k)^100, but on the order of 1/10k. That's because an unlikely event (a plane crash) causes a bunch of then likely outcomes (passenger death). Such things can be modeled with conditional probability. People without knowledge of conditional probability are famously inaccurate at estimating outcomes that involve it.
Also, with things like this, it doesn't make sense to talk about probability of a particular outcome: that will always be very low. What's the chance I will get to work at 9:12:34.26 tomorrow and spill coffee on my co-worker Joe Programmer? -- vanishingly small, but not much different than getting to work at 9:14:12.62 and spilling coffee on Jane. Thus, we usually talk about either simple events (binary), or similarly complex outcomes relative to one another.
In that light, here's a relative probability for you; The chance of a building falling down given two much larger nearby buildings fell down from a massive jet fuel fire, spewing all sorts of material on this other building, or a grand conspiracy involving hundreds or thousands of people is kept secret for 7 years, and even firemen and police in the building didn't discover the conspiracy, or kept silent about it when hundreds of their co-workers died. Grand conspiracies don't stay secret even in the most locked-down autocratic societies, let alone the US. Besides, if it was a conspiracy we would have made it look like Saddam did it, which would have been more "useful" to the agendas of those in power at the time.
Just seems to me, that if all these things did happened accidentally (aside from the actual hijacking and plane crash part), this is approaching the miraculous/"God did it"/fate level of likelihood.
Again, check your independence assumptions, and relearn your conditional probability theory.
Oh, and one more question, which I probably might know the answer to if I had read the full report: did the research set out to virtually replicate the collapse? Or did they model the entire environment and scenario, and th
Oh, your language was fine, so don't worry about that at all.
I was just pointing out how your "growing complexity" usability approach is much like what video games do. The "level up" quote is common for RPG-style games to announce new abilities a character has acquired, and a spelling checker was the first thing that came to mind of a slightly more advanced feature in basic everyday software. So, it was just meant as a joke.
I think your approach has merit, since its been used to great effect with video games. Usually people can just pick up a game and start playing, and I think part of that is that it doesn't throw everything at you at once; You build your way up to the more complex game elements.
Technically speaking Semantics is about the meaning of a given word or sign.
Do you mean differences like the definition of "capitalization" and the many definitions of "casing", none of which have anything to do with capitalization? You're right, that would be semantics.
Therefore proper casing is not about semantics. Like so many other Nazis, you're misinformed.
Like so many others who call others misinformed, you are yourself misinformed.
-- The Meta-Misinformed Nazi Nazi
How about just have one kid, instead of say, four, like our environmental "friend" Mr Gore. I've never really had respect for anyone who calls himself an environmentalist, but who has more than two children. Anything above replacement levels means your children and their descendants will do more damage to the earth than you could *ever* hope to avoid by your actions(*).
(*) Unless of course, you move a third world country to help educate women, which is the best thing you can do for population control, and thus for the environment and poverty.
What you are seeing is the difference between "Brand Advertising" and "Direct Response Advertising". Usually, the company wishing to advertise doesn't have that much of a choice. If you are a small operation or have a targeted product range, direct response is normally the only approach that makes monetary sense. If you are a large company with wide product presence (ex:Coke), you can just push on your brand, since you don't have a single specific action you want the viewer to take; you want them to like and use your product over time. Brand advertising is usually paid by the impression, while for direct response, pay-per-click is now dominant. There are good and bad ads in both of these categories, and the best approach to take in each category is often quite different.
aww, come on! Your ID is too small for not knowing that it has to be Netcraft!
Quite the contrary, you must be new here. Netcraft's sole purpose is to confirm the death of BSD. Since BSD is dying, and there can be no doubt about that, Netcraft's days are also numbered. Thus we must seek out alternatives in what little time remains.
I was considering that, but I decided that since a nuke doesn't stop the area from existing, its more like a clean-slate reboot. Of course, if you put emacs in/etc/{init,rc}.d, you deserve what you get.
Yes, and the easy fix is for people to pressure congress into giving the EPA this authority (within some newly defined limits), rather than bitching about the administration.
In general it's amazing how much people want to focus on the President/administration when Congress is where the real action (or damage) gets done. I guess it's easier to latch on to one face rather than 100s. It's like railing about an incompetent co-worker when you also have an incompetent manager, who for some reason you give a pass.
Airships really don't work well in inclement weather, and many crashes were at least in part caused by unexpected bad weather (even the Hindenburg). The thing that makes revisiting airships in the modern era potentially interesting is that we now have very good Doppler radar, weather satellites, etc. So, it shouldn't be that hard to fly around bad weather in many places.
Yeah, and I'd like this for the.NET CLR and Mono as well. I looked at the code and the generators are not that complicated, maybe I'll give it a shot over the weekend.
Some people have already mentioned that on the Google Group, so its probably a good idea to go there and compare ideas / combine efforts.
Does Google accept outside contribs for projects like these?
Yes, but I think the guy running it is encouraging separate projects that are then pushed upstream. Internally, this is very mature software, so the release cycle won't be as fast as some people will want, at least while it ramps up.
~2000-2001 (I think the reference is in this video). Even if something newer is a bit better, we're not going to go back and port everything. Some future Google APIs will probably have an optional PB interface, because that's what it was being converting to internally anyway, so everyone might as well benefit from the compact over-the-wire encoding.
Well now XML is wedged between YAML on the low end (e.g. config files, human readable data, ad hoc files) and ProBuff on the high end (massive structured data bases).
Individual PBs are meant to be fairly small and decode into memory in a single class/struct. The scale issue is mainly about having billions of these messages, and not wanting to overpay for storage in a less efficient format, or network bandwidth for moving them around.
Slashdot Mirror
people with truly great ideas are going to want to 1) have something to do with seeing them happen, and 2) want to benefit personally. (Even non-profits pay good salaries!) So I don't think this model provides adequate benefit to the idea owner to relinquish control of their intellectual property. Will the really good ideas come out?
If your idea is a slam-dunk winner for profitability, or if you expect to make money on an idea, go talk to a VC firm. If you've got a good idea you should be able to get it funded. The current system already works for this kind of idea.
What about all the ideas that could help many people, but require substantial investment and would at best break even? Outside of philanthropic efforts (such as this contest), the current system fails. VC firms won't touch something that won't turn a profit, and charities often focus on the immediate problems for which they have the money on hand to solve[1].
This contest is about long term fixes that need money to get off the ground, but are not likely to turn much of a profit, if any. Things like mosquito nets for malaria, not the next Viagra.
Alternatively, if you really just want to help people, you could turn in a profitable idea that would be self supporting and probably help even more people. A lot of people have no problem doing that, and nobody is forcing you to do that against your will.
But, don't trust me, RTFFAQ. Seen in light of that, the TOS makes sense, even if it not business, profit or fame friendly[2].
[1] You could call it shortsighted or risk averse, but to be fair charities don't have the luxury of taking risks in many instances; a failure will be quite public and negatively affect future funding of kill the charity entirely.
[2] One thing I think *should* be changed: Google should commit to returning any of its profit gained from this program back into the program itself, to fund other ideas. You would still need to allow subcontracted entities to make a profit (anything else it just too unrealistic an expectation), but Google could choose contractors based on their efficiency at production, or even choose multiple ones to stimulate competition and thus low prices.
there is absolutely no substantive change to our policy... because there was probably no substance there to begin with.
I guess I've just watched too many politicians ignore their grand plans/claims. OTOH, a voting record rarely lies. For whoever you support, educate yourself; don't just listen to what they say when they know what you want to hear.
This line of reasoning ends only when the whole net is blocked.
There are shades of gray, and you don't have to pick one of two extremes[1]. You can ban nuclear bombs without banning pocket knives, even thought they might both be weapons someone would like to own.
[1] It might not seem like that in an election year though.
"Putting spell checking into browsers just shifts the responsibility of good language practices from the user to some software company."
Just guessing what the response would be. He probably drives without a seatbelt and rides a bicycle/motorcycle without a helmet. After all, "I've never been in an accident, or lost my financial data." means you never will, right?
Who gets to decide what's true? The web is decentralized. All this would end up doing is making the groupthink problem even worse. Some loud people push an idea, it spreads a bit, then they declare a "concensus" and begin character-assassinating any dissenters. So I ask again, who gets to be the final authority on what is true and what isn't? The Pope, perhaps? (As a Protestant I've got a problem with that... [grin])
Clearly we need an ePope, infallible for all things internet-related.
I've been using Chrome for the past day or so, and had to stop leaving it open while I was working on other things because every so often it would bog down my CPU for no apparent reason.
What did the Chrome task manager say? In Firefox, you'd have a nearly impossible time figuring out what was causing the usage other than doing Russian roulette on tabs. In Chrome, at least in theory, you should be able to find exactly what the culprit is. Did you try that, and if you did, why didn't it work? Maybe the CPU usage was too bursty?
How did such an intense fire start in the building? I understand that there was debris from the other building, but seems like you would need a better than average fuel source for such an intense fire.
The ignition source has nothing to do with the eventual intensity of the fire. A refinery fire can start from a light bulb, a forest fire can start from a cigarette. All you need for an intense fire is plenty of fuel and oxygen. An office environment will give you all the fuel you'd need, and debris damage will poke holes to allow air in.
I remember on CNN, one of the researches claimed that this was the first recorded event of firing taking down such a structure.
This is not surprising. There really aren't that many 50 floor buildings in the entire world, normally a building would have a functioning anti-fire system, and you would not normally leave a fire burning in such an expensive building. With such a rare sequence of events, it's unlikely that it would happen too often.
The next such event will probably take place after an earthquake; much of the damage in places that are prepared for earthquakes ends up being due to fires; anti-fire systems are messed up by the earthquake and first responders are overstretched so they have to let some things burn. Hopefully we won't see this in our lifetimes, but time says it will happen.
So how many unlikely events happened in that one (12 hr?) period? I often hear Occam's razor being suggested to push against ridiculously unlikely events. Any one know what is the approximate probability of that 12hr period occurring as officially stated?
You act as if they were independent events, but they weren't. It was one unlikely event with a bunch of effects. For example, if you have a 1/10k chance of dying on an airplane flight, the chance that 100 passengers die is not (1/10k)^100, but on the order of 1/10k. That's because an unlikely event (a plane crash) causes a bunch of then likely outcomes (passenger death). Such things can be modeled with conditional probability. People without knowledge of conditional probability are famously inaccurate at estimating outcomes that involve it.
Also, with things like this, it doesn't make sense to talk about probability of a particular outcome: that will always be very low. What's the chance I will get to work at 9:12:34.26 tomorrow and spill coffee on my co-worker Joe Programmer? -- vanishingly small, but not much different than getting to work at 9:14:12.62 and spilling coffee on Jane. Thus, we usually talk about either simple events (binary), or similarly complex outcomes relative to one another.
In that light, here's a relative probability for you; The chance of a building falling down given two much larger nearby buildings fell down from a massive jet fuel fire, spewing all sorts of material on this other building, or a grand conspiracy involving hundreds or thousands of people is kept secret for 7 years, and even firemen and police in the building didn't discover the conspiracy, or kept silent about it when hundreds of their co-workers died. Grand conspiracies don't stay secret even in the most locked-down autocratic societies, let alone the US. Besides, if it was a conspiracy we would have made it look like Saddam did it, which would have been more "useful" to the agendas of those in power at the time.
Just seems to me, that if all these things did happened accidentally (aside from the actual hijacking and plane crash part), this is approaching the miraculous/"God did it"/fate level of likelihood.
Again, check your independence assumptions, and relearn your conditional probability theory.
Oh, and one more question, which I probably might know the answer to if I had read the full report: did the research set out to virtually replicate the collapse? Or did they model the entire environment and scenario, and th
Oh, your language was fine, so don't worry about that at all.
I was just pointing out how your "growing complexity" usability approach is much like what video games do. The "level up" quote is common for RPG-style games to announce new abilities a character has acquired, and a spelling checker was the first thing that came to mind of a slightly more advanced feature in basic everyday software. So, it was just meant as a joke.
I think your approach has merit, since its been used to great effect with video games. Usually people can just pick up a game and start playing, and I think part of that is that it doesn't throw everything at you at once; You build your way up to the more complex game elements.
Btw, Sorry for the slow response.
I can't wait to be greeted by a dialog like this:
Level up! You have unlocked the spelling checker.
Quick, somebody register cuil.cx
Technically speaking Semantics is about the meaning of a given word or sign.
Do you mean differences like the definition of "capitalization" and the many definitions of "casing", none of which have anything to do with capitalization? You're right, that would be semantics.
Therefore proper casing is not about semantics. Like so many other Nazis, you're misinformed.
Like so many others who call others misinformed, you are yourself misinformed.
-- The Meta-Misinformed Nazi Nazi
How about just have one kid, instead of say, four, like our environmental "friend" Mr Gore. I've never really had respect for anyone who calls himself an environmentalist, but who has more than two children. Anything above replacement levels means your children and their descendants will do more damage to the earth than you could *ever* hope to avoid by your actions(*).
(*) Unless of course, you move a third world country to help educate women, which is the best thing you can do for population control, and thus for the environment and poverty.
Any one that has tried using a magnifying glass to light tings on fire, should know that you have to aim it pretty well for this to work
So, what you're saying is that we should hire 7-year-olds to control the lenses, and put ants around the high efficiency cell. Got it.
You can list all of them with less than a gigabyte: 10^8 * (8+1) ~= 858 MB
The web is pretty big, so all of them are bound to happen *somewhere*.
Plus, I just registered all8digits.net
What you are seeing is the difference between "Brand Advertising" and "Direct Response Advertising". Usually, the company wishing to advertise doesn't have that much of a choice. If you are a small operation or have a targeted product range, direct response is normally the only approach that makes monetary sense. If you are a large company with wide product presence (ex:Coke), you can just push on your brand, since you don't have a single specific action you want the viewer to take; you want them to like and use your product over time. Brand advertising is usually paid by the impression, while for direct response, pay-per-click is now dominant. There are good and bad ads in both of these categories, and the best approach to take in each category is often quite different.
aww, come on! Your ID is too small for not knowing that it has to be Netcraft!
Quite the contrary, you must be new here. Netcraft's sole purpose is to confirm the death of BSD. Since BSD is dying, and there can be no doubt about that, Netcraft's days are also numbered. Thus we must seek out alternatives in what little time remains.
E3 is dying, Google trends confirms it.
I was considering that, but I decided that since a nuke doesn't stop the area from existing, its more like a clean-slate reboot. Of course, if you put emacs in /etc/{init,rc}.d, you deserve what you get.
type "killall -9 emacs"
No. "shutdown -r now" from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Yes, and the easy fix is for people to pressure congress into giving the EPA this authority (within some newly defined limits), rather than bitching about the administration.
In general it's amazing how much people want to focus on the President/administration when Congress is where the real action (or damage) gets done. I guess it's easier to latch on to one face rather than 100s. It's like railing about an incompetent co-worker when you also have an incompetent manager, who for some reason you give a pass.
Airships really don't work well in inclement weather, and many crashes were at least in part caused by unexpected bad weather (even the Hindenburg). The thing that makes revisiting airships in the modern era potentially interesting is that we now have very good Doppler radar, weather satellites, etc. So, it shouldn't be that hard to fly around bad weather in many places.
Without tag numbers how do you guarantee forward and backward compatibility between readers and writers?
Yeah, and I'd like this for the .NET CLR and Mono as well. I looked at the code and the generators are not that complicated, maybe I'll give it a shot over the weekend.
Some people have already mentioned that on the Google Group, so its probably a good idea to go there and compare ideas / combine efforts.
Does Google accept outside contribs for projects like these?
Yes, but I think the guy running it is encouraging separate projects that are then pushed upstream. Internally, this is very mature software, so the release cycle won't be as fast as some people will want, at least while it ramps up.
~2000-2001 (I think the reference is in this video). Even if something newer is a bit better, we're not going to go back and port everything. Some future Google APIs will probably have an optional PB interface, because that's what it was being converting to internally anyway, so everyone might as well benefit from the compact over-the-wire encoding.
Well now XML is wedged between YAML on the low end (e.g. config files, human readable data, ad hoc files) and ProBuff on the high end (massive structured data bases).
Individual PBs are meant to be fairly small and decode into memory in a single class/struct. The scale issue is mainly about having billions of these messages, and not wanting to overpay for storage in a less efficient format, or network bandwidth for moving them around.