The company operated the UAVs in class B airspace over New York City. It's not "away from an airport" but is less than 5 miles from LaGuardia Airport, and is also the densest metropolitan area in the country. One of the issues was a series of flights over 432 Park Ave, which is the second-tallest building in NYC at nearly 1400 feet. The company took their 360* VR images up to 1400 feet, as well some separate aerial shots from a helicopter that were legal.
It's not illegal to fly over NYC. But if you plan to fly, you must follow FAA rules regarding transponders and such, and file flight plans with the ATC. Keep in mind that Manhattan is almost in the middle of 3 airports and its airspace is heavily trafficked.
In this particular case, future predictability doesn't work. The sample size is way too small (as SCOTUS only hears ~80 cases/year), and the cases are not evenly distributed. The last couple years, for example, the court has become very conservative and happens to hear a significantly higher percentage of business-related cases. It's hard to predict anything from that.
It would make more sense to divide the data into training and validation/cross-validation data sets like in a standard machine learning approach.
It depends on how many cases you expect. Smallpox has been eradicated worldwide, so a single case is considered an epidemic. Ebola is so rare and deadly that a small number is needed for it to be called an outbreak or an epidemic. Whooping cough is more common, but this recent outbreak is at a much higher rate than normal.
That's a good point. But I don't think people would be paying for single articles because they're too lazy to pull out their credit card. But yes, most subscriptions wouldn't be useful unless you subscribe to a newspaper that you read every day.
It seems that many people nowadays consider their Facebook News Feed and Twitter to be "news." And that's just sad.
I pay for the NYT, Ars, and The Economist, although the last 2 really aren't newspapers. Why does everyone here hate "paywalls"? Running a newsroom is extremely expensive. From the beat reporters and copy editors all the way up to the editorial board, plus all the foreign bureaus with their own reporters, a "real" newspaper needs to support a ton of people. I'm also a huge fan of investigative reporting, which you rarely ever see outside of major newspapers because the paper and the reporters must invest a huge amount of time and money.
Aggregation sites are nothing like a real newspaper. But at least Ars Technica has a large amount of original content (including their great feature articles), instead of resorting to Huffington Post-style click generation with "articles" that summarize someone else's hard work.
This could easily backfire, especially when patent trolls have an army of high-paid lawyers. Just the threat of having to pay millions of dollars for the plaintiff's legal fees means that you had better have some really good representation as well. And if you lose, you end up paying all of your own legal fees as well as the army of lawyers working for the patent troll. In most cases, it would just be cheaper to settle which actually strengthens the capabilities of patent troll racketeering.
Isn't it cheaper to settle in most cases anyway? Currently, the ones willing to fight a patent suit must have huge amounts of cash. Smaller companies don't have the resources to pay millions to defend a patent lawsuit to begin with. When Newegg.com beat that online "shopping cart" patent, did they win any money? Most of the other online retailers had settled earlier, and Avon and Victoria's Secret had lost even larger verdicts in court.
Here's a recent example: Blythe Masters, an executive at JP Morgan Chase, may escape prosecution after having manipulated energy prices in California and Michigan. Officials have accused her of rigging prices, and they also accuse JP Morgan Chase of trying to cover up the evidence. Strangely, the recommendation was for a civil case, not a criminal case, against Ms. Masters.
I agree. I would start out looking at university job postings first. My own field is genomics and bioinformatics, and there really is a huge need for programmers and data analysts. Actually, my first research assistant position was as a programmer in a lab in which I did MATLAB programming. MPI and GPGP programming is very useful too.
As someone else mentioned, you can also work for the large national labs or supercomputing centers as well. A lot of the supercomputers are publicly owned, and there's a fairly large staff of people who maintain the systems or develop for them.
Judges also ask questions during oral arguments specifically to direct the subject or issues in a certain direction. For example, during the debate over Obama's health plan (PPACA), Scalia asked questions about the government forcing people to eat broccoli, while other justices asked questions about requiring car insurance payments.
Thomas is unusual because he almost never speaks, yet he clearly has a political bias. Back in January, he finally asked a question (or made a comment, no one is quite sure) for the first time in seven years. It was surprising enough that it was noteworthy.
Wasn't it a combination of all of the above? The FBI collected video recordings and photos from all available sources, and identified two suspects. The FBI had one of the suspects putting the backpack on the ground right before one of the explosions, and also saw the two of them walk away from the scene afterward. That information was enough to pick those two and, for example, rule out the people identified by the NY Post and Reddit. But the images weren't clear enough, so they asked for the public's help for clearer images and for the suspect's names.
That's the thing about the case that bothers me the most. I'm not religious so I'm a little biased, but what exactly does the ID card have to do with the so-called "mark of the beast"? The school has a right (and well, responsibility) to know where students are during school hours, and takes attendance because it only receives money when students show up. The school even offered to disable the RFID, which should have dealt with the "mark" issue. And like the situation involving the nurse fired for refusing the flu shot, the policy is applied to everyone and isn't narrowly targeted at a small group. I fail to see how this is even a religious issue, other than some random defense against a rule that the girl and her father dislike. Or even another chance to claim "religious freedom!"
If the Antichrist were so evil, I think there would be more serious ways for he (it?) to make his presence known than as RFID. Business people and lawyers, for example.
Influenza is and has always been lethal. There are different types of influenzavirus A, and they are named based on the two main proteins that allow it to infect cells: hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N). A new strain can result from mutation after an influenza virus is transmitted from an animal species to humans. My understanding is that (small) viral mutations occur all the time; thus, we create a flu vaccine based on the three strains that we believe are going to be most common in the next year. These are the seasonal epidemics, and are caused by antigenic drift. The "old" strains will either have died out or many people will still have immunity to them. However, if a gene reassortment occurs involving strains from different animal species (antigenic shift), then a global pandemic can result. The pandemic ends after people begin developing immunity to the new strain, and new infections begin to drop, and this phase is called the post-pandemic phase.
(In response to your other post...) incidentally, I have narcolepsy, although it wasn't caused by the vaccine. I wonder how the vaccine may have lead to these cases, though.
I'm not so sure I would agree with Google's typical defense on this issue, which is that they have an algorithm that automatically ranks all the search results and they can't change that. Except they manually change the results. When companies break their rules, they can punish them. For example, when BMW's German website was found to influence results, Google banned them from their index. An eyeglass company, DecorMyEyes, verbally abused its customers to generate bad reviews... and more publicity. After being published in The Times, they dropped the company from the index. Even in the Santorum case, they eventually made some results less prominent. Google has also been accused of pushing up the rankings of its own products. So it's kinda hypocritical to say that Google doesn't adjust individual results.
The irony is that the FDA, through the investigation of its own scientists, released companies' trade secrets. An FDA contractor had compiled a report, and one of the fired scientists came across it by doing a search online.
Also, spying on members of Congress and making an "enemies" list of them is certainly a great way to piss off some powerful people...
Why does Apple need to complain and whine about all these stupid patents? It's already the largest and most profitable technology company, and its cash reserves are insane. Everything it's doing is just like the Microsoft of the 1990's. And Steve Jobs was possibly a bigger asshole than Gates and Ballmer. Except, for some reason, people actually liked Jobs.
Sure, I agree with your points. But they don't have much to do with government control and regulation. What's your solution to these problems? Having a single-payer healthcare system and schools run by the federal government? Half the country would start to scream "socialism," even though it's much more like the systems in other developed countries. The problem isn't the tax deductions that employers get from offering health insurance, it's from the healthcare system and health insurance itself. Do you know what else isn't sometimes covered by insurance? Anesthesiologists. Because when you're going into surgery, nobody asks whether the anesthesiologist is in-network or out-of-network.
The free market has produced some quite amazing advances in medical technology. If the government would stop its practice of mandates, price controls, cost shifting and barriers to competition, medical services would once again be affordable. Education? Plenty of excellent private schools. If you want the service, pay for it. The free market has been superb with communications. Look at the evolution of cell phone technology. Steadily smaller, faster, cheaper and more capable. Thank $deity government isn't in the cell phone business. Housing? Another government clusterf***. We have an over-abundance of cheap food and I'm confident that we could ensure that people don't die of thirst without having men with guns confiscating our wealth and throwing us in prison.
What? The free market has produced very few advances in medical technology. Many of the advances in the basic sciences (including biochemistry and physics) are sponsored by the government. The same goes for drugs and medical equipment. The free market has actually not developed many items on its own, without piggy-backing on projects that were originally or partially government funded. Interestingly, the government also pays a large portion of the costs of training medical residents.
Price controls? There aren't any. I used to work at a very large biotech that sold good but absurdly expensive drugs, because there aren't any price controls that prevented it from doing so. And I actually argue for greater barriers to entry in the pharmaceutical and medical device industries. There are too many drugs and devices on the market that don't work, and may do more harm than good. One of the first things we learned about in my CS courses was the Therac-25. Additionally, things like metal-on-metal hip replacements should not have been approved, given their high failure rates and higher tendency of causing metal toxicity.
As the sibling posters have pointed out, you're falsely equating two things. Although the Republicans essentially block any Democratic bill, that doesn't mean the Democrats knew they would oppose it. When it was revealed in 2004 that John Edwards was exploiting the tax loophole, Republicans everywhere assailed the loophole. According to that article/blog post, the Wall St. Journal's editorial page, which is just as conservative as Fox News, criticized Edwards. As did Robert Novak and Sean Hannity. So no, you're wrong. Only the Senate Republicans' proposal was made because they knew the Democrats would vote against it.
Isn't this completely off-topic? Anyway... Our society currently values a college education. How many companies are going to hire you if you only have a high school diploma? Other than those that may require a portfolio (e.g., art, music, programming, web design, etc.), there are few. You can't even apply for medical or graduate school without a bachelor's or equivalent.
No one said that the Democrats are pushing for students to go to four-year colleges. They want to allow students to receive the financial aid to do so, and they want to prevent the predatory for-profit schools from abusing the system.
I agree that the best solution is a free college education (or one that is so heavily subsidized that it is inexpensive, like in most other countries). The problem is that the education system in the US is broken, partially by design. The US is practically the only developed country in the world with a strong private college system, and this elitism only means that more money is being funneled away from public schools and into the deep pockets of private schools. I went to UC Berkeley, which has about five times as many undergraduate students as Harvard or Yale, but the endowment is only approximately one-tenth and one-seventh of those schools', respectively.
Your logic is retarded. This was a provision that would remove tax loopholes on the wealthy to pay for the funding of the federal Stafford loans program (who was, incidentally, a Republican). These are tax loopholes that even the Republicans opposed! How does this make the Democrats "hate the small guy"?
I don't know if Slashdot loves repeating the "both parties are the same, both parties are stupid" mantra, but really, at least make a coherent argument when doing so. You're just like Mitt Romney, trying to rewrite history.
From the lab's website, it appears that this wide-angle bionic eye has only 98 electrodes. I believe each electrode can only stimulate one photoreceptor, creating a "phosphene" (which is essentially a single point of light). With 98 electrodes, you can have a grid of up to 98 phosphenes to give a very primitive description of what you see. This research group also has a high-acuity implant with 1024 electrodes for better quality.
As to your original comment, I don't know but I imagine that stimulating any brain tissue is a complex thing itself. I've seen a short video about a woman using the Dobelle system, in which a pair of glasses with 144 electrodes is wired directly through the skull and the electrode is implanted in the visual cortex. I'm not sure what kind of signal processing is involved, but every patient had to be trained to interpret the images they saw (similar to this case). It looks much more difficult than the neuroprosthetic arms, since vision requires much less room for error.
Slashdot Mirror
The company operated the UAVs in class B airspace over New York City. It's not "away from an airport" but is less than 5 miles from LaGuardia Airport, and is also the densest metropolitan area in the country. One of the issues was a series of flights over 432 Park Ave, which is the second-tallest building in NYC at nearly 1400 feet. The company took their 360* VR images up to 1400 feet, as well some separate aerial shots from a helicopter that were legal.
It's not illegal to fly over NYC. But if you plan to fly, you must follow FAA rules regarding transponders and such, and file flight plans with the ATC. Keep in mind that Manhattan is almost in the middle of 3 airports and its airspace is heavily trafficked.
In this particular case, future predictability doesn't work. The sample size is way too small (as SCOTUS only hears ~80 cases/year), and the cases are not evenly distributed. The last couple years, for example, the court has become very conservative and happens to hear a significantly higher percentage of business-related cases. It's hard to predict anything from that.
It would make more sense to divide the data into training and validation/cross-validation data sets like in a standard machine learning approach.
It depends on how many cases you expect. Smallpox has been eradicated worldwide, so a single case is considered an epidemic. Ebola is so rare and deadly that a small number is needed for it to be called an outbreak or an epidemic. Whooping cough is more common, but this recent outbreak is at a much higher rate than normal.
http://www.washoecounty.us/hea...
But the beta site sucks. Fuck beta.
That's a good point. But I don't think people would be paying for single articles because they're too lazy to pull out their credit card. But yes, most subscriptions wouldn't be useful unless you subscribe to a newspaper that you read every day.
It seems that many people nowadays consider their Facebook News Feed and Twitter to be "news." And that's just sad.
I pay for the NYT, Ars, and The Economist, although the last 2 really aren't newspapers. Why does everyone here hate "paywalls"? Running a newsroom is extremely expensive. From the beat reporters and copy editors all the way up to the editorial board, plus all the foreign bureaus with their own reporters, a "real" newspaper needs to support a ton of people. I'm also a huge fan of investigative reporting, which you rarely ever see outside of major newspapers because the paper and the reporters must invest a huge amount of time and money.
Aggregation sites are nothing like a real newspaper. But at least Ars Technica has a large amount of original content (including their great feature articles), instead of resorting to Huffington Post-style click generation with "articles" that summarize someone else's hard work.
This could easily backfire, especially when patent trolls have an army of high-paid lawyers. Just the threat of having to pay millions of dollars for the plaintiff's legal fees means that you had better have some really good representation as well. And if you lose, you end up paying all of your own legal fees as well as the army of lawyers working for the patent troll. In most cases, it would just be cheaper to settle which actually strengthens the capabilities of patent troll racketeering.
Isn't it cheaper to settle in most cases anyway? Currently, the ones willing to fight a patent suit must have huge amounts of cash. Smaller companies don't have the resources to pay millions to defend a patent lawsuit to begin with. When Newegg.com beat that online "shopping cart" patent, did they win any money? Most of the other online retailers had settled earlier, and Avon and Victoria's Secret had lost even larger verdicts in court.
Here's a recent example: Blythe Masters, an executive at JP Morgan Chase, may escape prosecution after having manipulated energy prices in California and Michigan. Officials have accused her of rigging prices, and they also accuse JP Morgan Chase of trying to cover up the evidence. Strangely, the recommendation was for a civil case, not a criminal case, against Ms. Masters.
I agree. I would start out looking at university job postings first. My own field is genomics and bioinformatics, and there really is a huge need for programmers and data analysts. Actually, my first research assistant position was as a programmer in a lab in which I did MATLAB programming. MPI and GPGP programming is very useful too.
As someone else mentioned, you can also work for the large national labs or supercomputing centers as well. A lot of the supercomputers are publicly owned, and there's a fairly large staff of people who maintain the systems or develop for them.
Oops, here's the link.
Judges also ask questions during oral arguments specifically to direct the subject or issues in a certain direction. For example, during the debate over Obama's health plan (PPACA), Scalia asked questions about the government forcing people to eat broccoli, while other justices asked questions about requiring car insurance payments.
Thomas is unusual because he almost never speaks, yet he clearly has a political bias. Back in January, he finally asked a question (or made a comment, no one is quite sure) for the first time in seven years. It was surprising enough that it was noteworthy.
Wasn't it a combination of all of the above? The FBI collected video recordings and photos from all available sources, and identified two suspects. The FBI had one of the suspects putting the backpack on the ground right before one of the explosions, and also saw the two of them walk away from the scene afterward. That information was enough to pick those two and, for example, rule out the people identified by the NY Post and Reddit. But the images weren't clear enough, so they asked for the public's help for clearer images and for the suspect's names.
That's the thing about the case that bothers me the most. I'm not religious so I'm a little biased, but what exactly does the ID card have to do with the so-called "mark of the beast"? The school has a right (and well, responsibility) to know where students are during school hours, and takes attendance because it only receives money when students show up. The school even offered to disable the RFID, which should have dealt with the "mark" issue. And like the situation involving the nurse fired for refusing the flu shot, the policy is applied to everyone and isn't narrowly targeted at a small group. I fail to see how this is even a religious issue, other than some random defense against a rule that the girl and her father dislike. Or even another chance to claim "religious freedom!"
If the Antichrist were so evil, I think there would be more serious ways for he (it?) to make his presence known than as RFID. Business people and lawyers, for example.
Darrell Issa strongly opposes net neutrality, with a Republican platform that supports some ironic thing called "internet freedom". Last year, Issa ripped into FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski at a Congressional hearing, accusing him of doing Obama's bidding regarding net neutrality (wtf?).
In short, Issa is a conservative Republican who has been on a mission to destroy net neutrality.
Influenza is and has always been lethal. There are different types of influenzavirus A, and they are named based on the two main proteins that allow it to infect cells: hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N). A new strain can result from mutation after an influenza virus is transmitted from an animal species to humans. My understanding is that (small) viral mutations occur all the time; thus, we create a flu vaccine based on the three strains that we believe are going to be most common in the next year. These are the seasonal epidemics, and are caused by antigenic drift. The "old" strains will either have died out or many people will still have immunity to them. However, if a gene reassortment occurs involving strains from different animal species (antigenic shift), then a global pandemic can result. The pandemic ends after people begin developing immunity to the new strain, and new infections begin to drop, and this phase is called the post-pandemic phase.
(In response to your other post...) incidentally, I have narcolepsy, although it wasn't caused by the vaccine. I wonder how the vaccine may have lead to these cases, though.
I'd much rather not have Santorum go Santorum on my ass...
I'm not so sure I would agree with Google's typical defense on this issue, which is that they have an algorithm that automatically ranks all the search results and they can't change that. Except they manually change the results. When companies break their rules, they can punish them. For example, when BMW's German website was found to influence results, Google banned them from their index. An eyeglass company, DecorMyEyes, verbally abused its customers to generate bad reviews ... and more publicity. After being published in The Times, they dropped the company from the index. Even in the Santorum case, they eventually made some results less prominent. Google has also been accused of pushing up the rankings of its own products. So it's kinda hypocritical to say that Google doesn't adjust individual results.
The irony is that the FDA, through the investigation of its own scientists, released companies' trade secrets. An FDA contractor had compiled a report, and one of the fired scientists came across it by doing a search online.
Also, spying on members of Congress and making an "enemies" list of them is certainly a great way to piss off some powerful people...
Why does Apple need to complain and whine about all these stupid patents? It's already the largest and most profitable technology company, and its cash reserves are insane. Everything it's doing is just like the Microsoft of the 1990's. And Steve Jobs was possibly a bigger asshole than Gates and Ballmer. Except, for some reason, people actually liked Jobs.
Sure, I agree with your points. But they don't have much to do with government control and regulation. What's your solution to these problems? Having a single-payer healthcare system and schools run by the federal government? Half the country would start to scream "socialism," even though it's much more like the systems in other developed countries. The problem isn't the tax deductions that employers get from offering health insurance, it's from the healthcare system and health insurance itself. Do you know what else isn't sometimes covered by insurance? Anesthesiologists. Because when you're going into surgery, nobody asks whether the anesthesiologist is in-network or out-of-network.
The free market has produced some quite amazing advances in medical technology. If the government would stop its practice of mandates, price controls, cost shifting and barriers to competition, medical services would once again be affordable. Education? Plenty of excellent private schools. If you want the service, pay for it. The free market has been superb with communications. Look at the evolution of cell phone technology. Steadily smaller, faster, cheaper and more capable. Thank $deity government isn't in the cell phone business. Housing? Another government clusterf***. We have an over-abundance of cheap food and I'm confident that we could ensure that people don't die of thirst without having men with guns confiscating our wealth and throwing us in prison.
What? The free market has produced very few advances in medical technology. Many of the advances in the basic sciences (including biochemistry and physics) are sponsored by the government. The same goes for drugs and medical equipment. The free market has actually not developed many items on its own, without piggy-backing on projects that were originally or partially government funded. Interestingly, the government also pays a large portion of the costs of training medical residents.
Price controls? There aren't any. I used to work at a very large biotech that sold good but absurdly expensive drugs, because there aren't any price controls that prevented it from doing so. And I actually argue for greater barriers to entry in the pharmaceutical and medical device industries. There are too many drugs and devices on the market that don't work, and may do more harm than good. One of the first things we learned about in my CS courses was the Therac-25. Additionally, things like metal-on-metal hip replacements should not have been approved, given their high failure rates and higher tendency of causing metal toxicity.
As the sibling posters have pointed out, you're falsely equating two things. Although the Republicans essentially block any Democratic bill, that doesn't mean the Democrats knew they would oppose it. When it was revealed in 2004 that John Edwards was exploiting the tax loophole, Republicans everywhere assailed the loophole. According to that article/blog post, the Wall St. Journal's editorial page, which is just as conservative as Fox News, criticized Edwards. As did Robert Novak and Sean Hannity. So no, you're wrong. Only the Senate Republicans' proposal was made because they knew the Democrats would vote against it.
Isn't this completely off-topic? Anyway ... Our society currently values a college education. How many companies are going to hire you if you only have a high school diploma? Other than those that may require a portfolio (e.g., art, music, programming, web design, etc.), there are few. You can't even apply for medical or graduate school without a bachelor's or equivalent.
No one said that the Democrats are pushing for students to go to four-year colleges. They want to allow students to receive the financial aid to do so, and they want to prevent the predatory for-profit schools from abusing the system.
I agree that the best solution is a free college education (or one that is so heavily subsidized that it is inexpensive, like in most other countries). The problem is that the education system in the US is broken, partially by design. The US is practically the only developed country in the world with a strong private college system, and this elitism only means that more money is being funneled away from public schools and into the deep pockets of private schools. I went to UC Berkeley, which has about five times as many undergraduate students as Harvard or Yale, but the endowment is only approximately one-tenth and one-seventh of those schools', respectively.
Your logic is retarded. This was a provision that would remove tax loopholes on the wealthy to pay for the funding of the federal Stafford loans program (who was, incidentally, a Republican). These are tax loopholes that even the Republicans opposed! How does this make the Democrats "hate the small guy"?
I don't know if Slashdot loves repeating the "both parties are the same, both parties are stupid" mantra, but really, at least make a coherent argument when doing so. You're just like Mitt Romney, trying to rewrite history.
From the lab's website, it appears that this wide-angle bionic eye has only 98 electrodes. I believe each electrode can only stimulate one photoreceptor, creating a "phosphene" (which is essentially a single point of light). With 98 electrodes, you can have a grid of up to 98 phosphenes to give a very primitive description of what you see. This research group also has a high-acuity implant with 1024 electrodes for better quality.
As to your original comment, I don't know but I imagine that stimulating any brain tissue is a complex thing itself. I've seen a short video about a woman using the Dobelle system, in which a pair of glasses with 144 electrodes is wired directly through the skull and the electrode is implanted in the visual cortex. I'm not sure what kind of signal processing is involved, but every patient had to be trained to interpret the images they saw (similar to this case). It looks much more difficult than the neuroprosthetic arms, since vision requires much less room for error.
Many groups have done similar things, but with different approaches. Here's a list of some of them:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_prosthesis