A new standard is needed because the "standard kilogram" held in France has been slowly losing mass, about 50 micrograms in the last 100 years, compared to other reference masses. It's not known how this has occurred.
This reminds me of the futuristic story "Manna" by Marshall Brain (the founder of HowStuffWorks.com).
In the story, computers progressively dehumanise work in the interests of efficiency (imagine Amazon's Mturk applied to McDonalds). When things get really bad, the protagonist is lucky enough to be rescued and taken to Australia where an alternative future project has produced what seems at first glance to be paradise (but is it really?).
Anyway, the human-computer interface in the Australia project is an implant that replaces the top three vertebrae.
The story is not a masterpiece, but it's an enjoyable and thought-provoking read.
The house I live in was future-proofed in 1947. The owners obviously spared no expense pimping it out, with the highest of high tech for the time. And let me tell you, it doesn't work.
Every room is wired for sound, with its own volume control and channel selector for four audio sources, which could be supplied locally or from the cable audio service (yes, such a thing really existed back then).
Of course, cable audio is no longer available, stereo and surround sound have been invented, and four audio sources seems remarkably little nowadays.
There were also other gadgets such as multiple doorbells with natty little indicators showing which doorbell had been pressed. But nowadays the tradesmen all use the front door anyway.
There were gas sockets generously provided. Yes, gas sockets! Back then you could get portable gas appliances that just "plugged in", but they long since stopped selling those due to safety concerns.
On the wall of every room was a clock socket. Try buying a mains-operated wall clock nowadays - the market has chosen AA batteries instead. And even if you could buy such a clock, you couldn't get the specialised plug that would mate with the clock socket.
I could go on, but my gist is that the world is going to change more than you can imagine, and CAT cable of any specification will soon, inevitably, become obsolete.
So put in lots of power outlets, because you're always going to need power. Put in some strategic conduits to provide access to places that will be hard to get to with surface wiring or wiring in the walls.
But apart from that, just put in a few toys that interest you now. Anything more grand is inevitably futile, and you'll never get back the cost when you sell.
> Since we joined the EU last century, we have further
> restrictions on state power.
You think so? The European Convention on Human Rights doesn't restrict state power, it enables it. Most of the Convention's protocols follow the pattern of: "Humans have some right... except as prescribed by law". For example:
ARTICLE 10: Everyone has the right to freedom of expression... The exercise of these freedoms may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law...
Software from 1986 didn't have scalable fonts, 32-bit colour, etc, but the interface was usually snappy. Menus dropped down snappily, and dialog boxes opened immediately, for example.
Operations that took a long time (such as reflowing a page in a desktop publishing program) at least appeared deterministic - you knew it would take a second or two to reflow, so you weren't anxiously waiting for the system to do something.
We faced the same dilemma at Uclue.com, a paid Q&A service. Although we don't encourage people to ask for essays to be written, we can't completely block such questions because it's not always easy to tell whether a question is for a student essay or for some other purpose.
We resolved it by deciding that we would reject such questions if there was any hint of them being requested in "final form". In any case, we post the answer publicly on the web, so the essay research is available for all students and staff to see, and a quick web search will readily show up if a student is trying to submit the essay as their own work.
Unfortunately, it won't backfire. The same thing happened in 1969/1970 in Australia. The main radio stations stopped playing the big-label records that they would have had to start paying for. Instead, they played music from the independent labels, who were happy to not demand a royalty.
It lasted about six weeks before the radio stations capitulated. Their listeners wanted music from the big names.
It's not a regexp search. Google treats words joined by a dot as if they were enclosed in doublequotes (thereby triggering a phrase search), and treats an asterisk as matching any whole word (actually sometimes short phrases are matched too.
So your search for foo.*baz is the same as a search for "foo *" baz. Because the phrase "foo bar baz" is common on programming sites, you're likely to see "bar" bolded because it matches the asterisk.
Also at 7:01 he says "I'm an old fart" but the subtitle gives this as "I'm an old part".
Who cares?
A non-evil NDA would be symmetrical
on
Google's Evil NDA
·
· Score: 1
A non-evil NDA would at least be symmetrical.
According to Valleywag:
"7. Google does not wish to receive any confidential information from Participant, and Google assumes no obligation, either express or implied, for any information disclosed by Participant."
A prosumer is someone prepared to pay big money for well-specified equipment. A prosumer camera, for example, will have more pixels and more features but will also cost disproportionately more.
Cellphones were used effectively by passengers and cabin crew during the 9/11 hijackings, apparently without messing up ground communications.
Logically, if it's a technical problem using a cellphone from a plane, it would also be a problem using it from the top of a tall building. In a metropolitan area, the top of a skyscraper would be "line of sight" to hundreds of cellphone towers.
Many years ago I saw an early book describing the advances that FORTRAN would bring, compared to assembler or autocode (which was like a kind of higher-level assembler).
Recall that FORTRAN is a contraction of "Formula Translation". The promise made in the late 50's was that, with FORTRAN, you no longer needed to program your formulae. Instead, you simply had to write out your formulae and they would be evaluated, meaning no more opportunity for programming bugs to sneak in.
If only!
From next year's FA: Official sources said Google News would distort reports by adding bogus sentences where none existed or masking certain aspects of a story. This could be done without attracting attention to such news items, which range from Amnesty reports, Chinese Government leaks, reports of military failures, nuclear power disasters, and activities of high-profile politicians.
A bunch of soon-to-be-ex-researchers is preparing a replacement service, although it might take a few weeks to get it running. Announcements will be made at http://web-owls.com/, a team blog run by GA Researchers.
We researchers can see the potential for a new service. Even though the existing service might not suit Google's current needs, it has been popular with researchers, customers and commenters.
I'm researcher eiffel-ga at Google Answers, and I've enjoyed my four years there even though I only answered 199 questions. All of the researchers are really sad to see the service folding.
Do this for her: Install Firefox, set up a browser bookmark for her bank's HTTPS address, and configure her email so that URLs in email phishing messages are non-clickable.
If she can figure out how to make her URLs clickable again, she's probably smart enough to learn about secure surfing. If not, at least she's less likely to be phished.
The last thing we need is for particles sent into the atmosphere to settle on the polar ice, thereby increasing heat absorption and melting the ice caps, raising the sea level and flooding most of our major cities.
Just trying to wildly "think outside the box" here: suppose that gravity is conserved - for every quantity of gravity that is exerted by matter, an equal quantity of antigravity is left behind in the "ether".
The antigravity drives the expansion of the universe, and the gravity drives the accretion of matter into stars and planets. The "big bang" then was some kind of probabalistic quantum event that separated out some gravity and antigravity.
This is not science, I know. But sooner or latter all of these complicated theories are going to be superseded by something simpler and more encompassing, as surely as nested epicycles were inevitably superseded by the idea of the sun at the center of the solar system.
Slashdot Mirror
The story is a great read! If you don't normally RTFA, I can really recommend this one.
A new standard is needed because the "standard kilogram" held in France has been slowly losing mass, about 50 micrograms in the last 100 years, compared to other reference masses. It's not known how this has occurred.
2 7/023252
Wikipedia - Kilogram
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilogram
Slashdot: The Changing Definition of 'Kilogram'
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/05/
This reminds me of the futuristic story "Manna" by Marshall Brain (the founder of HowStuffWorks.com).
In the story, computers progressively dehumanise work in the interests of efficiency (imagine Amazon's Mturk applied to McDonalds). When things get really bad, the protagonist is lucky enough to be rescued and taken to Australia where an alternative future project has produced what seems at first glance to be paradise (but is it really?).
Anyway, the human-computer interface in the Australia project is an implant that replaces the top three vertebrae.
The story is not a masterpiece, but it's an enjoyable and thought-provoking read.
The house I live in was future-proofed in 1947. The owners obviously spared no expense pimping it out, with the highest of high tech for the time. And let me tell you, it doesn't work.
Every room is wired for sound, with its own volume control and channel selector for four audio sources, which could be supplied locally or from the cable audio service (yes, such a thing really existed back then).
Of course, cable audio is no longer available, stereo and surround sound have been invented, and four audio sources seems remarkably little nowadays.
There were also other gadgets such as multiple doorbells with natty little indicators showing which doorbell had been pressed. But nowadays the tradesmen all use the front door anyway.
There were gas sockets generously provided. Yes, gas sockets! Back then you could get portable gas appliances that just "plugged in", but they long since stopped selling those due to safety concerns.
On the wall of every room was a clock socket. Try buying a mains-operated wall clock nowadays - the market has chosen AA batteries instead. And even if you could buy such a clock, you couldn't get the specialised plug that would mate with the clock socket.
I could go on, but my gist is that the world is going to change more than you can imagine, and CAT cable of any specification will soon, inevitably, become obsolete.
So put in lots of power outlets, because you're always going to need power. Put in some strategic conduits to provide access to places that will be hard to get to with surface wiring or wiring in the walls.
But apart from that, just put in a few toys that interest you now. Anything more grand is inevitably futile, and you'll never get back the cost when you sell.
> restrictions on state power.
You think so? The European Convention on Human Rights doesn't restrict state power, it enables it. Most of the Convention's protocols follow the pattern of: "Humans have some right
Yeah, like that really helps.
Software from 1986 didn't have scalable fonts, 32-bit colour, etc, but the interface was usually snappy. Menus dropped down snappily, and dialog boxes opened immediately, for example.
Operations that took a long time (such as reflowing a page in a desktop publishing program) at least appeared deterministic - you knew it would take a second or two to reflow, so you weren't anxiously waiting for the system to do something.
We faced the same dilemma at Uclue.com, a paid Q&A service. Although we don't encourage people to ask for essays to be written, we can't completely block such questions because it's not always easy to tell whether a question is for a student essay or for some other purpose.
We resolved it by deciding that we would reject such questions if there was any hint of them being requested in "final form". In any case, we post the answer publicly on the web, so the essay research is available for all students and staff to see, and a quick web search will readily show up if a student is trying to submit the essay as their own work.
Unfortunately, it won't backfire. The same thing happened in 1969/1970 in Australia. The main radio stations stopped playing the big-label records that they would have had to start paying for. Instead, they played music from the independent labels, who were happy to not demand a royalty.
It lasted about six weeks before the radio stations capitulated. Their listeners wanted music from the big names.
So your search for foo.*baz is the same as a search for "foo *" baz. Because the phrase "foo bar baz" is common on programming sites, you're likely to see "bar" bolded because it matches the asterisk.
Well yes, he does.
Also at 7:01 he says "I'm an old fart" but the subtitle gives this as "I'm an old part".
Who cares?
A non-evil NDA would at least be symmetrical.
According to Valleywag:
"7. Google does not wish to receive any confidential information from
Participant, and Google assumes no obligation, either express or
implied, for any information disclosed by Participant."
You may enjoy the list of mascots at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mascots
A prosumer is someone prepared to pay big money for well-specified equipment. A prosumer camera, for example, will have more pixels and more features but will also cost disproportionately more.
Firefox usage varies a bit from country to country, but it varies much more among different demographics within each country.
In March I launched a new website, which got Dugg. Sixty-nine percent of my visitors had Firefox.
Then, as visitors started to arrive from other places, the percentage of Firefox users dropped and has kept dropping. It's now down to 29%.
So lucky for Microsoft that the leak wasn't posted by somebody with username "Bill".
Cellphones were used effectively by passengers and cabin crew during the 9/11 hijackings, apparently without messing up ground communications.
Logically, if it's a technical problem using a cellphone from a plane, it would also be a problem using it from the top of a tall building. In a metropolitan area, the top of a skyscraper would be "line of sight" to hundreds of cellphone towers.
It's about time to stop flogging this dead horse.
Now, do I put that comment on www.blog.bestiality, www.blog.necrophilia, or www.blog.sado-masichism? Life would perhaps be easier with www.blog.xxx
Many years ago I saw an early book describing the advances that FORTRAN would bring, compared to assembler or autocode (which was like a kind of higher-level assembler). Recall that FORTRAN is a contraction of "Formula Translation". The promise made in the late 50's was that, with FORTRAN, you no longer needed to program your formulae. Instead, you simply had to write out your formulae and they would be evaluated, meaning no more opportunity for programming bugs to sneak in. If only!
> Reusable code is not truly reusable until it has been used more than once.
Also, reusable code is not truly reusable until it is truly usable.
From next year's FA: Official sources said Google News would distort reports by adding bogus sentences where none existed or masking certain aspects of a story. This could be done without attracting attention to such news items, which range from Amnesty reports, Chinese Government leaks, reports of military failures, nuclear power disasters, and activities of high-profile politicians.
A bunch of soon-to-be-ex-researchers is preparing a replacement service, although it might take a few weeks to get it running. Announcements will be made at http://web-owls.com/, a team blog run by GA Researchers.
We researchers can see the potential for a new service. Even though the existing service might not suit Google's current needs, it has been popular with researchers, customers and commenters.
I'm researcher eiffel-ga at Google Answers, and I've enjoyed my four years there even though I only answered 199 questions. All of the researchers are really sad to see the service folding.
Do this for her: Install Firefox, set up a browser bookmark for her bank's HTTPS address, and configure her email so that URLs in email phishing messages are non-clickable.
If she can figure out how to make her URLs clickable again, she's probably smart enough to learn about secure surfing. If not, at least she's less likely to be phished.
The last thing we need is for particles sent into the atmosphere to settle on the polar ice, thereby increasing heat absorption and melting the ice caps, raising the sea level and flooding most of our major cities.
Just trying to wildly "think outside the box" here: suppose that gravity is conserved - for every quantity of gravity that is exerted by matter, an equal quantity of antigravity is left behind in the "ether".
The antigravity drives the expansion of the universe, and the gravity drives the accretion of matter into stars and planets. The "big bang" then was some kind of probabalistic quantum event that separated out some gravity and antigravity.
This is not science, I know. But sooner or latter all of these complicated theories are going to be superseded by something simpler and more encompassing, as surely as nested epicycles were inevitably superseded by the idea of the sun at the center of the solar system.