I work from home, usually leaving the television on, tuned to Spike TV, since there's like a 5 hour marathon of ST:DS9 and ST:TNG reruns, which seem like heaven when compared with the rest of the afternoon fare. Spike ran this commercial at every break during that 5 hour marathon every weekday for the entire months of January through March.
Being in a similar situation, I certainly understand. I too work from home and I need some video noise to help me through the day sometimes. But I do it in a different way. I have a second monitor which is routinely playing TV shows. I've been re-running entire series (Did all the Star Treks last year, on the 3rd season of Northern exposure right now).
I like the noise, but commercials would actually distract me from work. No way I'd put up with that. I recommend you try getting commercial free versions of your favorite shows. I won't comment on where to get them...
I have to say, if any industry is going to master digital delivery of movies first, it's going to be the porn industry. They have simply been on top of the technology game and they've made a killing at it. Whereas the RIAA and MPAA are out suing their customers, the porn industry in the past 15 years has seen incredible growth, largely due to the internet.
If the RIAA and MPAA are smart, they'll keep an eye on how the porn industry operates. But seeing as they've shown no signs of being smart, I doubt that will happen.
For years, I refused to buy a laptop. I had to use them for work (for trips, demos, etc) all the time and hated them. At work, we used primarily Think Pads, but I had also used a few other brands.
Then I visited a friend who had a Toshiba and my whole outlook on Notebooks changed.
The fan and battery on mine are shot now, after years of abuse (including a year in Mexico sucking really dusty air through it which I'm sure is what killed the fan). But it still runs, albeit at a slower CPU speed. If I need it to speed up, I just stick the dust buster up to the vent and give it a couple seconds and it perks right up.
I was recently looking into this area and I'm actually surprised that bionic prosthetic arms aren't commonplace by now. Granted, I'm a bit new to all this stuff, but for example, let's say you have an amputee who's lost his arm from about halfway between the elbow and shoulder. The median nerve is a large group of nerve cells that runs through the center and controls most of the muscles below the elbow (you'd have to tap some other nerves for elbow control). Now, with groups of needle sensors implanted in the nerve (and I'm pretty sure placement wouldn't have to be exactly on specific nerve cells, but enough needles that you'd get pretty good coverage over the various nerve cells running through the median nerve), you could then use a fairly basic neural net to interpret the signals and program the arm.
Basically, you'd train the neural net as follows: Tell the patient to bend their pinky, for example. Of course, they don't have one, but they have the knowledge of how to move one and while it wouldn't be there, the nerves would be stimulated. The neural net would then learn what the bent pinky nerve impulses are. You'd have to do various degrees of movement and different types of movements, but I'm fairly certain this would all be pretty doable.
The nerves of the arm are pretty robust and while there might be some breaks in the nerves after the sensors are implanted, the nerves would regenerate with maybe some minor crossover, but that wouldn't really matter since the real limb wouldn't be there anyway.
But like I said, this isn't my field. I could be completely off base, but it seems to me that this is pretty doable and I suspect this isn't too far off from what Kevin Warwick did to control his robotic arm. And if a single professor with some students can come up with this system, why can the prosthetic industry not do it?
It would be nice if you gave a quick description of what exactly iFolder is. From reading the article posting, the first few paragraphs of your blog, and the link in the first paragraph of your blog, I know it's written in GTK# and that it's from Novell, but I still have no idea what the hell it is and now I don't care anymore.
To the editors, please reject stories that don't describe what new products (or not commonly known products) are so that people can have some clue right away whether or not they want to bother reading the story.
I don't know if I want to read this because I don't know what ifolder is and I obviously can't figure it out without reading a lot more of the article than I want.
In Windows, it's fairly easy to hook up voice recognition to a browser. It would probably take me about 2 hours to come up with a basic voice-controlled browser.
As the article suggests, the vocabulary is the problem. When doing dictation, grammar rules allow the voice recognition engine to usually narrow the list of words making recognition more accurate.
The problem with searching is that you could be searching for anything. I'm not even sure their ideas of using past searches is even a particularly good idea. I do searches on such a wide variety of subjects, I'm not sure I'd want it to make assumptions about what I'm searching for.
This would be a nice application for a PDA or something, but for desktop, voice recognition just doesn't make much sense yet. The biggest problem is background noise, which really intereferes with recognition accuracy. Then there's the issue of whether or not you're actually talking to the computer. I like to listen to music when I work, so that's an issue, after all, it doesn't matter if it works for the rest of the world, it matters if it works for me!
There are various groups working on these problems and I suspect in the next 5 years, we'll start seeing much better voice recognition that can get past a lot of these problems. Once that happens, I think we'll start seeing a lot more voice recognition applications on the desktop.
All that said, voice recognition is in pretty good shape today. In a quiet environment, accuracy is pretty impressive. I've been playing with it off and on for about 6 years now and things have come a long way in that time. I remember when doing dictation had horrible accuracy and hogged my 200mhz Pentium. The extra computing power we have today definitely helps.
Hmm, let's see, the MPAA banked on DRM on DVDs. That worked real well. For an encore they're going to do what? Come on, anyone who's been in the software industry knows that software companies have tried protecting their software since the days of the Atari. But go on eMule and you'll see cracked this and cracked that. You simply cannot stop piracy. Not doable. You can't even put a dent in it because once a single copy gets out, it's out. And as with CSS, once it's cracked, your entire library is available.
I remember in the old Atari days, the used to protect software on floppy discs by writing a few bad sectors in specific places to the disc. It wasn't long before people figured out you could write to that sector over and over while, using a screwdriver, you adjusted a pot that changed the drive speed, thus reproducing the bad sectors. Then someone got even smarter and released a chip that would copy discs, bad sectors and all.
There are the hardware keys you used to put in the serial or parallel ports, but all you had to do was hack the code to not check for it anymore which, was pretty doable, because a lot of stuff got cracked that way.
Every attempt to prevent piracy of products that people wanted bad enough, has been broken. If history is any indication, and I have absolutely no reason to think that it isn't, this will continue to be the case for a long time to come. There's always going to be someone(s) out there who's more clever than the people that design the protection. That's simply a fact. The sooner these industries face that fact and move on with their business, the better off we'll all be.
Now, I'm not endorsing intelligent design. Personally, I believe in evolution, not out of faith, but because the evidence is in, has been in, and will continue to be in, on the fact that evolution is the truth.
That said, I've recently been reading a lot of biology stuff and I have to say, the mechanisms, even at the cellular level, that have evolved, are simply astounding. Here's just a single example: The membranes of cells contain proteins for different functions. For example, there may be a protein that collects "food" of some sort for the cell. Some of these proteins, will just sit there and when a "food" molecule comes by, it binds to the protein, the protein then changes shape in such a way, that it pulls the "food" molecule inside the cell. It then releases the "food" inside the cell and then changes shape back to the way it was.
I mean, I can see how someone can look at that and say, "That can't just evolve." It did, but I can understand the counterposition on it. And that's simply one example, and that's just a lowly cell. You've got 70kg of cells (+ or - depending on the person) in a person, each one doing it's own thing, and somehow, it's a living, breathing, thinking, person. It's all pretty mind boggling.
And even after seeing the individual steps of how each piece evolved, each protein, each cell, each organism, it's still hard to believe that all these amazing little mechanisms work together, in sync, and they weren't designed by anyone.
I mean, hell, it's all we can do to build a robot that walks upright, and mother nature did it without any thiking at all. How stupid are we.
You can be a really educated person and understand a lot about biology, and you can still question evolution simply because it's so friggin' hard to believe on a lot of levels. So, while I understand most of us here believe in evolution, I'd ask that you keep an open mind and try to understand the other side as well. I'd also ask that people on the other side try to keep an open mind and understand why we don't want to be preached to and told what we should believe.
In the past 9000 years, the only real advancement in dentistry appears to be the addition of fillings to the procedure. Otherwise, going to the dentist is still pretty much like having a neolithic barbarian bang on your teeth with rocks.
Frankly, I'm disappointed that he didn't even include any of the mounting evidence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster story of creation. I know I've been touched by his noodly appendage!
Call be back when it's untethered, has arms, and can stand itself back up after it trips. Then I'll be impressed. Until then, it's no more impressive than a bot on wheels.
The alternative is you could actually earn real world money at a job and spend it on real world things like going out to movies and restaurants and stuff with real live human beings. But I guess that wouldn't be nerdy enough.
Ethics in just 5 days?
on
Hacker Boot Camp
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Sorry, but people can't really learn ethics in a 5 day camp. Ethics begin at home and in early childhood. It comes from the people who raise you and the people you're around as you grow. A 5 day camp is going to have absolutely no impact on your ethics. By the time you're old enough to go to a hacker camp, your ethics (or lack thereof) are firmly established. 5 days of camp is simply going to give them some new skillz to use ethically or unethically.
No, it warps the socially acceptable ideas of "love" and "sex" that you prefer.
I don't give 2 shits what consenting adults do in private or what kind of sex videos they like to watch. What I do care about is what children are exposed to at ages where they're not able to make proper sense of it and put it in a proper context. I'm not saying there's only one way to have sex or to love. What I'm saying is that watching guys abuse women is not appropriate for children. Are you arguing that it is appropriate for children? If so, you really need to get out of the gene pool fast.
The idea that seeing a naked human being, or even seeing people having sex, would somehow "harm" a person is completely silly.
I completely agree. However, you clearly haven't seen any modern pornography. It's not just naked human beings. It's guys cumming on womens faces saying, "Take that bitch, want some more?" This kind of material can be very harmful to kids. It provides for a horrendous role model that some children adopt and it causes a number of problems in their ability to develop relationships with the opposite sex. It warps their ideas of love and sex.
No, it doesn't screw up every kid, and kids who have particularly good parents are certainly less prone to the effects, but there is no question that there is damage being done. There are simply too many studies showing it.
Don't get me wrong. I view my own share of porn. I don't have anything against porn, per se. But I don't want my kids seeing the kind of hard core stuff that's out there these days. Hell, I looked at playboys when I was a kid. I even saw a few porno movies as a kid. But it just isn't the same. The nature of what's considered mainstream material has changed the availability has definitely changed. You can try to deny there's a problem, but then that would simply show that you've done absolutely no research into the issue.
My intent in not to discourage you but you may be underestimating the amount of time, money and effort it requires to become a doctor.
Gosh, I never knew any of this. I thought I just showed up at med school, gave them a check and they handed me a stethiscope and scalpal and sent me on my way. Thanks. I guess I'll just go into forestry instead...
I'm going back to school to take some biology classes and then I'm going to try to get into med school. Surgery doesn't get outsourced. In fact, the number of med school applications has been declining for the past decade. The hours are longer, but the pay is much better (at least in surgery, and that's what I want to do) and frankly, I think saving lives will be a bit more satisfying than shaving a few seconds off of a sort routine.
I've been programming professionally for almost 20 years. I've done the management thing and I don't like it, so the only way for me to really move up is to move out. It's been a nice career, but it's starting to get stale. The technologies change, but the job doesn't really change that much. Changing careers will keep things exciting and interesting, probably for the rest of my life.
On a related topic, I was trying to pay my Bank of America bill online yesterday and they had some new security system (called "SiteKey", I think. Probably (r)(tm) and whatever) where it gives me some picture and also had me provide 3 answers to 3 questions (like lost password questions). Now, I kind of went through it quickly, but I was under the impression that whenever I login, it was supposed to show me the picture (my Site Key) and told me not to use the site if I don't see it, but since I signed up, it doesn't show me the site key. I'm hoping that whatever is broken about it they fix... Not that I really care if someone hacks it. All they can really do online is pay my bill which they're welcome to do.
I don't know. Do you? Sure, they'll make money with ads as they do it, but I wouldn't put it past Google to do things for altruistic reasons as well. I mean, they did make the billion dollar Google.org. I'm sure they're going to make a killing off of it by advertising, though.
Thank God For Google. They seem to be one of the few companies that actually gets the fact that information wants to be free. On top of which, it's just absolutely absurd that ANYONE other than God can get a patent on genetic sequences. It kind of reminds me of that old joke, "In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first make an apple." Anyone who can do that deserves to get the patent for the genetic sequence of an apple.
That's kind of like getting a patent for the number pi. That would actually be a good one. If you have the patent to the decimal sequence that makes up pi, you could really argue that you have a patent on everything, including every genetic sequence. Theoretically, pi will contain every conceivable sequence of digits somewhere in its infinitely long sequencey and thus, anything that can be encoded as a sequence of digits (movies, music, books, genes), can be found somewhere in pi. Therefore, the patent holder for pi is the patent holder for everything. QED.
I mean, I think it's great that we're using UAVs to monitor these rowdy crowds, but I think we really ought to follow what we did in a Iraq and Afghanistan and make sure the UAVs are armed with air to ground missiles as well. After all, when those crowds start getting out of control, you don't want to risk putting actual police in danger. I like to call it push button crowd control.
If it's holographic, aren't you more concerned with how much data per cubic inch? I mean, per square inch kind of loses meaning at that point, doesn't it?
And why is 1.6TB the largest they're offering? 3 square inches of recording surface? A 5.25" drive gives what, about 70-80 square inches of recording surface? Give me a 40TB drive for the price of a 500GB hard drive. That'll be worth something to me, otherwise I'll just stick with standard hard drives. They're cheap and fast.
[Reimann] realized that the places where the zeta function outputs zero... hold crucial information about the nature of the primes. Mathematicians call these significant places the zeros.
Man, those mathematicians are really clever at naming stuff. Next thing you know, they're going to call the places where the function outputs ones, "ones". Will it never end?
Thanks to the Apollo missions and more recent studies it was determined that our moon and many others in the solar system actually have very faint atmospheres.
You might want to read the link you posted. The moon does not actually have a very faint atmosphere. From your link: "[the moon is] surrounded by a *very* this [sic] region of molecules which might be loosely classified as an atmosphere."
My math may not be that great but my English is pretty good: "might be loosely classifed as" != "is"
Slashdot Mirror
I work from home, usually leaving the television on, tuned to Spike TV, since there's like a 5 hour marathon of ST:DS9 and ST:TNG reruns, which seem like heaven when compared with the rest of the afternoon fare. Spike ran this commercial at every break during that 5 hour marathon every weekday for the entire months of January through March.
Being in a similar situation, I certainly understand. I too work from home and I need some video noise to help me through the day sometimes. But I do it in a different way. I have a second monitor which is routinely playing TV shows. I've been re-running entire series (Did all the Star Treks last year, on the 3rd season of Northern exposure right now).
I like the noise, but commercials would actually distract me from work. No way I'd put up with that. I recommend you try getting commercial free versions of your favorite shows. I won't comment on where to get them...
I have to say, if any industry is going to master digital delivery of movies first, it's going to be the porn industry. They have simply been on top of the technology game and they've made a killing at it. Whereas the RIAA and MPAA are out suing their customers, the porn industry in the past 15 years has seen incredible growth, largely due to the internet.
If the RIAA and MPAA are smart, they'll keep an eye on how the porn industry operates. But seeing as they've shown no signs of being smart, I doubt that will happen.
For years, I refused to buy a laptop. I had to use them for work (for trips, demos, etc) all the time and hated them. At work, we used primarily Think Pads, but I had also used a few other brands.
Then I visited a friend who had a Toshiba and my whole outlook on Notebooks changed.
The fan and battery on mine are shot now, after years of abuse (including a year in Mexico sucking really dusty air through it which I'm sure is what killed the fan). But it still runs, albeit at a slower CPU speed. If I need it to speed up, I just stick the dust buster up to the vent and give it a couple seconds and it perks right up.
I was recently looking into this area and I'm actually surprised that bionic prosthetic arms aren't commonplace by now. Granted, I'm a bit new to all this stuff, but for example, let's say you have an amputee who's lost his arm from about halfway between the elbow and shoulder. The median nerve is a large group of nerve cells that runs through the center and controls most of the muscles below the elbow (you'd have to tap some other nerves for elbow control). Now, with groups of needle sensors implanted in the nerve (and I'm pretty sure placement wouldn't have to be exactly on specific nerve cells, but enough needles that you'd get pretty good coverage over the various nerve cells running through the median nerve), you could then use a fairly basic neural net to interpret the signals and program the arm.
Basically, you'd train the neural net as follows: Tell the patient to bend their pinky, for example. Of course, they don't have one, but they have the knowledge of how to move one and while it wouldn't be there, the nerves would be stimulated. The neural net would then learn what the bent pinky nerve impulses are. You'd have to do various degrees of movement and different types of movements, but I'm fairly certain this would all be pretty doable.
The nerves of the arm are pretty robust and while there might be some breaks in the nerves after the sensors are implanted, the nerves would regenerate with maybe some minor crossover, but that wouldn't really matter since the real limb wouldn't be there anyway.
But like I said, this isn't my field. I could be completely off base, but it seems to me that this is pretty doable and I suspect this isn't too far off from what Kevin Warwick did to control his robotic arm. And if a single professor with some students can come up with this system, why can the prosthetic industry not do it?
It would be nice if you gave a quick description of what exactly iFolder is. From reading the article posting, the first few paragraphs of your blog, and the link in the first paragraph of your blog, I know it's written in GTK# and that it's from Novell, but I still have no idea what the hell it is and now I don't care anymore.
To the editors, please reject stories that don't describe what new products (or not commonly known products) are so that people can have some clue right away whether or not they want to bother reading the story.
I don't know if I want to read this because I don't know what ifolder is and I obviously can't figure it out without reading a lot more of the article than I want.
In Windows, it's fairly easy to hook up voice recognition to a browser. It would probably take me about 2 hours to come up with a basic voice-controlled browser.
As the article suggests, the vocabulary is the problem. When doing dictation, grammar rules allow the voice recognition engine to usually narrow the list of words making recognition more accurate.
The problem with searching is that you could be searching for anything. I'm not even sure their ideas of using past searches is even a particularly good idea. I do searches on such a wide variety of subjects, I'm not sure I'd want it to make assumptions about what I'm searching for.
This would be a nice application for a PDA or something, but for desktop, voice recognition just doesn't make much sense yet. The biggest problem is background noise, which really intereferes with recognition accuracy. Then there's the issue of whether or not you're actually talking to the computer. I like to listen to music when I work, so that's an issue, after all, it doesn't matter if it works for the rest of the world, it matters if it works for me!
There are various groups working on these problems and I suspect in the next 5 years, we'll start seeing much better voice recognition that can get past a lot of these problems. Once that happens, I think we'll start seeing a lot more voice recognition applications on the desktop.
All that said, voice recognition is in pretty good shape today. In a quiet environment, accuracy is pretty impressive. I've been playing with it off and on for about 6 years now and things have come a long way in that time. I remember when doing dictation had horrible accuracy and hogged my 200mhz Pentium. The extra computing power we have today definitely helps.
Hmm, let's see, the MPAA banked on DRM on DVDs. That worked real well. For an encore they're going to do what? Come on, anyone who's been in the software industry knows that software companies have tried protecting their software since the days of the Atari. But go on eMule and you'll see cracked this and cracked that. You simply cannot stop piracy. Not doable. You can't even put a dent in it because once a single copy gets out, it's out. And as with CSS, once it's cracked, your entire library is available.
I remember in the old Atari days, the used to protect software on floppy discs by writing a few bad sectors in specific places to the disc. It wasn't long before people figured out you could write to that sector over and over while, using a screwdriver, you adjusted a pot that changed the drive speed, thus reproducing the bad sectors. Then someone got even smarter and released a chip that would copy discs, bad sectors and all.
There are the hardware keys you used to put in the serial or parallel ports, but all you had to do was hack the code to not check for it anymore which, was pretty doable, because a lot of stuff got cracked that way.
Every attempt to prevent piracy of products that people wanted bad enough, has been broken. If history is any indication, and I have absolutely no reason to think that it isn't, this will continue to be the case for a long time to come. There's always going to be someone(s) out there who's more clever than the people that design the protection. That's simply a fact. The sooner these industries face that fact and move on with their business, the better off we'll all be.
Now, I'm not endorsing intelligent design. Personally, I believe in evolution, not out of faith, but because the evidence is in, has been in, and will continue to be in, on the fact that evolution is the truth.
That said, I've recently been reading a lot of biology stuff and I have to say, the mechanisms, even at the cellular level, that have evolved, are simply astounding. Here's just a single example: The membranes of cells contain proteins for different functions. For example, there may be a protein that collects "food" of some sort for the cell. Some of these proteins, will just sit there and when a "food" molecule comes by, it binds to the protein, the protein then changes shape in such a way, that it pulls the "food" molecule inside the cell. It then releases the "food" inside the cell and then changes shape back to the way it was.
I mean, I can see how someone can look at that and say, "That can't just evolve." It did, but I can understand the counterposition on it. And that's simply one example, and that's just a lowly cell. You've got 70kg of cells (+ or - depending on the person) in a person, each one doing it's own thing, and somehow, it's a living, breathing, thinking, person. It's all pretty mind boggling.
And even after seeing the individual steps of how each piece evolved, each protein, each cell, each organism, it's still hard to believe that all these amazing little mechanisms work together, in sync, and they weren't designed by anyone.
I mean, hell, it's all we can do to build a robot that walks upright, and mother nature did it without any thiking at all. How stupid are we.
You can be a really educated person and understand a lot about biology, and you can still question evolution simply because it's so friggin' hard to believe on a lot of levels. So, while I understand most of us here believe in evolution, I'd ask that you keep an open mind and try to understand the other side as well. I'd also ask that people on the other side try to keep an open mind and understand why we don't want to be preached to and told what we should believe.
In the past 9000 years, the only real advancement in dentistry appears to be the addition of fillings to the procedure. Otherwise, going to the dentist is still pretty much like having a neolithic barbarian bang on your teeth with rocks.
Frankly, I'm disappointed that he didn't even include any of the mounting evidence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster story of creation. I know I've been touched by his noodly appendage!
Call be back when it's untethered, has arms, and can stand itself back up after it trips. Then I'll be impressed. Until then, it's no more impressive than a bot on wheels.
The alternative is you could actually earn real world money at a job and spend it on real world things like going out to movies and restaurants and stuff with real live human beings. But I guess that wouldn't be nerdy enough.
Sorry, but people can't really learn ethics in a 5 day camp. Ethics begin at home and in early childhood. It comes from the people who raise you and the people you're around as you grow. A 5 day camp is going to have absolutely no impact on your ethics. By the time you're old enough to go to a hacker camp, your ethics (or lack thereof) are firmly established. 5 days of camp is simply going to give them some new skillz to use ethically or unethically.
No, it warps the socially acceptable ideas of "love" and "sex" that you prefer.
I don't give 2 shits what consenting adults do in private or what kind of sex videos they like to watch. What I do care about is what children are exposed to at ages where they're not able to make proper sense of it and put it in a proper context. I'm not saying there's only one way to have sex or to love. What I'm saying is that watching guys abuse women is not appropriate for children. Are you arguing that it is appropriate for children? If so, you really need to get out of the gene pool fast.
The idea that seeing a naked human being, or even seeing people having sex, would somehow "harm" a person is completely silly.
I completely agree. However, you clearly haven't seen any modern pornography. It's not just naked human beings. It's guys cumming on womens faces saying, "Take that bitch, want some more?" This kind of material can be very harmful to kids. It provides for a horrendous role model that some children adopt and it causes a number of problems in their ability to develop relationships with the opposite sex. It warps their ideas of love and sex.
No, it doesn't screw up every kid, and kids who have particularly good parents are certainly less prone to the effects, but there is no question that there is damage being done. There are simply too many studies showing it.
Don't get me wrong. I view my own share of porn. I don't have anything against porn, per se. But I don't want my kids seeing the kind of hard core stuff that's out there these days. Hell, I looked at playboys when I was a kid. I even saw a few porno movies as a kid. But it just isn't the same. The nature of what's considered mainstream material has changed the availability has definitely changed. You can try to deny there's a problem, but then that would simply show that you've done absolutely no research into the issue.
My intent in not to discourage you but you may be underestimating the amount of time, money and effort it requires to become a doctor.
Gosh, I never knew any of this. I thought I just showed up at med school, gave them a check and they handed me a stethiscope and scalpal and sent me on my way. Thanks. I guess I'll just go into forestry instead...
I'm going back to school to take some biology classes and then I'm going to try to get into med school. Surgery doesn't get outsourced. In fact, the number of med school applications has been declining for the past decade. The hours are longer, but the pay is much better (at least in surgery, and that's what I want to do) and frankly, I think saving lives will be a bit more satisfying than shaving a few seconds off of a sort routine.
I've been programming professionally for almost 20 years. I've done the management thing and I don't like it, so the only way for me to really move up is to move out. It's been a nice career, but it's starting to get stale. The technologies change, but the job doesn't really change that much. Changing careers will keep things exciting and interesting, probably for the rest of my life.
Phishing works because most people are suckers.
On a related topic, I was trying to pay my Bank of America bill online yesterday and they had some new security system (called "SiteKey", I think. Probably (r)(tm) and whatever) where it gives me some picture and also had me provide 3 answers to 3 questions (like lost password questions). Now, I kind of went through it quickly, but I was under the impression that whenever I login, it was supposed to show me the picture (my Site Key) and told me not to use the site if I don't see it, but since I signed up, it doesn't show me the site key. I'm hoping that whatever is broken about it they fix... Not that I really care if someone hacks it. All they can really do online is pay my bill which they're welcome to do.
You think google are doing this to be altruistic?
I don't know. Do you? Sure, they'll make money with ads as they do it, but I wouldn't put it past Google to do things for altruistic reasons as well. I mean, they did make the billion dollar Google.org. I'm sure they're going to make a killing off of it by advertising, though.
Thank God For Google. They seem to be one of the few companies that actually gets the fact that information wants to be free. On top of which, it's just absolutely absurd that ANYONE other than God can get a patent on genetic sequences. It kind of reminds me of that old joke, "In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first make an apple." Anyone who can do that deserves to get the patent for the genetic sequence of an apple.
That's kind of like getting a patent for the number pi. That would actually be a good one. If you have the patent to the decimal sequence that makes up pi, you could really argue that you have a patent on everything, including every genetic sequence. Theoretically, pi will contain every conceivable sequence of digits somewhere in its infinitely long sequencey and thus, anything that can be encoded as a sequence of digits (movies, music, books, genes), can be found somewhere in pi. Therefore, the patent holder for pi is the patent holder for everything. QED.
I mean, I think it's great that we're using UAVs to monitor these rowdy crowds, but I think we really ought to follow what we did in a Iraq and Afghanistan and make sure the UAVs are armed with air to ground missiles as well. After all, when those crowds start getting out of control, you don't want to risk putting actual police in danger. I like to call it push button crowd control.
If it's holographic, aren't you more concerned with how much data per cubic inch? I mean, per square inch kind of loses meaning at that point, doesn't it?
And why is 1.6TB the largest they're offering? 3 square inches of recording surface? A 5.25" drive gives what, about 70-80 square inches of recording surface? Give me a 40TB drive for the price of a 500GB hard drive. That'll be worth something to me, otherwise I'll just stick with standard hard drives. They're cheap and fast.
[Reimann] realized that the places where the zeta function outputs zero ... hold crucial information about the nature of the primes. Mathematicians call these significant places the zeros.
Man, those mathematicians are really clever at naming stuff. Next thing you know, they're going to call the places where the function outputs ones, "ones". Will it never end?
Thanks to the Apollo missions and more recent studies it was determined that our moon and many others in the solar system actually have very faint atmospheres.
You might want to read the link you posted. The moon does not actually have a very faint atmosphere. From your link: "[the moon is] surrounded by a *very* this [sic] region of molecules which might be loosely classified as an atmosphere."
My math may not be that great but my English is pretty good: "might be loosely classifed as" != "is"
As a software developer, how does watching TV fall into the scope of your work?
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You hear that? That's the sound of the joke flying overhead.