I hope you're joking. Mt St Helens was 24 megatons, while Hiroshima was 13 kilotons; 26,000 Hiroshima bombs would be 338 megatons, or 14 times Mt St Helens.
Independent, publicly traded American newspapers have lost forty-two per cent of their market value in the past three years...
These public companies have lost 42% of their market capitalization over the past three years, and this warrants cries about a dying industry?
What about Google--which has lost almost 37% since January---or Apple which has lost nearly 30% in the same time? Are Apple and Google dying too? I think that a bit more data than stock prices is required to conclude that an industry is dying.
Just curious: where/when did you go to high school? These sound like absolutely fantastic experiments that I fear are entirely impossible these days (legally). I know that you and I can go out and buy mild gamma sources (like here) but that doesn't mean it is legal in a public high school (e.g. mercury).
Am I the only one who notices that there almost certainly cannot be any 'world of hurt' by Gateway's legal team: every state I've lived in requires NO LAWYERS to be present at the court date---Gateway would be required to send out a representative of the company in person. But the very idea of small claims is to make it accessible to normal people who don't have the resources of lawyers.
I sued Dell a while back, and it took them only a week to settle the full amount I had sued them for. I was contacted by a lawyer, but that lawyer would not have been legally allowed to represent Dell in court. If Dell actually wanted to bring the case to trial it would have 1. cost them more than I was suing them for and 2. required that they bring someone other than the lawyer fully up to date on my case.
I like to think I 'won' the lawsuit because I was in the right, but I cannot help but thinking it was in Dell's best interest to simply settle without looking too far into the matter.
(But because I read the legal babble, I understand that I technically didn't win anything, and that Dell admitted no responsibility. And come to think of it, I wasn't allowed to talk about it. Shit.)
The US was never officially at war against North Vietnam
That is true, but neither did the US declare war against Iraq, or terrorism, or North Korea, or any foreign entity since World War II. The declaration of war is an act of Congress and no Congress has made such an act since 1942.
Random fun-fact: I put up solutions my to homework from Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics on my website. This generates nearly 1000 hits a day.
Where does the traffic come from? Well, in terms of pure volume of traffic, the US is of course in first place. Second? Iran.
I don't know what it means, but per-capita, that means that an obscenely large fraction of Iranian physics students are in the habit of Googling for answers to homework problems.
I heard an example of this on NPR yesterday---a voice telling someone to throw away their rubbish. There was a lot of discussion that the system was extremely effective: that people no longer throw rubbish on the street.
Even neglecting the whole privacy issue, do they appreciate the utter waste of money this street-cleaner is? How many hundreds of full-time street sweepers could they have hired for the same cost as all those cameras, speakers, and police to watch these CCTVs all day and night? And worse, the use of this utterly wasteful experiment diminishes with time: when people learn to not litter, there really isn't any value of the system at all.
Yes, like most of you, I am shocked by the Big Brother-like overtones of this absurd experiment. But even those people who don't mind Big Brother should consider how damn expensive it is to keep Big Brother watching on salary (and how expensive the equipment is). At the end of the day, what do they get for that waste of tax dollars? cleaner streets!? What kind of people are in charge of spending our money?!
Support your local businesses. Support businesses which treat their employees well. Try to buy American made whenever you can. I dunno if I'll get in trouble for a plug but I have heard a lot of good things and read many articles about Costco being responsible corporation by offering its employees fair wages, benefits, etc. I try to shop there whenever I can and avoid Wal Mart whenever possible.
Common now: what the hell are you talking about. You are saying that people should only buy US OIL? Haliburton isn't an international business because it is seeking slave labour in sweat-shops, it is international because that's where the oil is.
Easier to find something!? When they're overloading their employees looking into the whole population at once? This type of blind removal of everyone's rights will not make it easier for the government. It will make real criminals easier to hide in the crowd.
You mentioned grad school. At least where I grew up, the only (realizable) way for teachers to have post-graduate degrees was if they earned them while teaching. Why? Because anyone with more than a bachelor's degree requires a higher salary by the Teacher's Union and so therefore no school in the area would hire them. I'm glad that more education gets more pay, but this is nuts.
Such a fight could be long and costly, but with Google's backing, YouTube could afford it.
The article's notion of 'afford' is odd: just because Google (and therefore YouTube) has money doesn't mean they can afford to blow it on lawsuits. Youtube needs to increase in profitability by 1000 fold in order for Google to make any profit on it at all. Google cannot afford YouTube as it is today, let alone with huge lawsuits to deal with.
No incentive? If they do settle for any amount of cash then it sends a BIG message to the rest of the world (especially the other 49 states) that Microsoft will cave in and pay big fees for any future class action law suits---because they fear the possibility of losing a real battle. This sets a nasty precedent where every state will be knocking on MS's door for hand-outs.
IMHO: if you don't like using MS software, go to Linux or Apple. The argument ''there isn't any other player in town and so you're robbing me blind just because you can'' is both wrong in today's software market and based on an absolutely misguided interpretation of how capitalism works.
Actually, most of the learned scholars of the time knew for a fact that heliocentrism gave far more accurate mathematicals results to build sailing tables.
Just to nitpick, at the time of Galileo, heliocentrism had not yet achieved Kepler's simplicity and Copernicus' model had more epicycles than Ptolemy. It is not at all true that Copernican heliocentrism achieved objectively better tables (or even easier to calculate tables). Only the very rough picture was simpler (having planets orbit the sun avoids major epicycles)---but to get accurate tables, tons of minor epicycles needed to be added to correct for Copernicus' assumption that the sun was at the centre of the solar system, that planets orbited in circles, etc.
And while you're description of the result of Galileo's trial as a 'plea bargain' isn't exactly wrong, it is important to remember that Galileo was permanently under house arrest in his villa in Arcetri until his death. And he wasn't formally forgiven until the 1990s. So it was a bit worse than a plea bargain.
I completely agree: this was a terrible abuse of rights. But I think the 'majority' opinion was actually protecting a lot more than what appeared in TFA (please, be advised, I'm a libertarian and don't like this line of thought at all, but this is probably what they were thinking): if under 18 year olds can take provocative pictures of themselves without being considered child pornographers, then you could imagine legally sanctioned self-produced child porn sites appearing on the web.
(Actually, that is probably a stretch of logic even for this absurd set of judges, but still.)
Ahh, but that costs the Russians around $12 million dollars. In contrast, they probably only spend a few dollars a day to keep someone shivering in Siberia (and even less to have them shot). I don't think the IMF would approve of that expensive a ritual!
the point I am making is that, by cramming all these together under one degree, CS programs tend to suck because you are forced to learn stuff that you don't want to, and so the degree you earn isn't necessarily relevant to what you want to do.
Is that really all that different from other departments? I got my degrees in physics and mathematics. Physics departments are often an umbrella over atomic physics, condensed matter, particle physics, atmospheric science, astrophysics, engineering, nuclear physics, etc. Yet all these disciplines get the BS degree.
It is also rather similar in mathematics, where one department houses actuarians, scientists of all disciplines (& CS), engineers, and a few mathematicians.
I don't think that having a diverse output hurts the number of people who want to major---in fact, I'd argue it is just the opposite.
...they had to redo the driver from the ground up and seriously underestimated the time it would take.
Marketing went ahead and sold the hardware as "The first vista ready video card" (DX 10 whee), engineering was not ready. It really is borderline plausible that they could be gulty [sic] of false advertising.
If marketing labels a product to have certain features, and sales sells this product without with the false label, it is "false advertising" in a strict sense. If you tell a customer that a product does [foo] and you sell it to them without [foo], you're liable to tort law---as you should be.
Well, actually, if someone wanted your data bad enough, scanning electron microscopes can do an amazing job of seeing underneath your overwrites. Although it isn't quite recent, Peter Gutmann wrote an interesting paper basically saying that it to first approximation the DoD, for example can extract data even dozens of overwrites.
I've read articles within the last year about how police have used this to convict child pornographers even after multiple-overwrites.
The only effective way to erase data from a magnetic disc that I know of is to microwave it. And just to clarify: burning it probably isn't enough---there are plenty of firms that specialize in recovering data from fires.
And unless I'm missing something, I can think of no obvious scientific reason to attribute Gulf War Syndrome with U-238. It smells very much like public paranoia and mis-information: Uranium 238 is depleted Uranium: it is not fissile, and it's half-life is near 5 billion years. It is rather abundant in bricks---which is why most building have a higher ambient radiation than the outdoors (even though the buildings shield some cosmic rays, they usually have enough Uranium in the bricks to compensate).
That the level of radiation is of absolutely no concern whatsoever, and calling it one of the 'most dangerous toys of all time' is spreading public mis-information.
I notice that you write in the past tense... does that mean you left the company or that the company didn't survive? Making money is not a sin, indeed: it is noble. Wealth is created before it is mooched and looted by governments and beggars.
I guess my point is: if your company was not 'making tons of money' for altruistic reasons, then I suspect it failed---and if not, they deserved to fail: altruism is the sacrifice of earned, honourable wealth in favour of unearned favours. If they were not 'making tons of money' because they had a good long-term strategy, then fantastic; and I hope they're raking it in today.
One of the references for the article is http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf" >The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Serach Engine published in Computer Networks and ISDN Systems. At the end of the paper, they have a very interesting appendix: "Advertising and Mixed Motives"
Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of
the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For
example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of
Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and
risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because
of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on
the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone
ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this
type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising
funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the
consumers.
Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly
insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be
listed at the top of the search results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of bias is much
more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to
pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a
viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search
engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from
results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant
effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's
homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an
expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this
ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it
could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer
advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the
advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be
money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely
new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a
competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.
Also observe that Office 2007 isn't affected. Obviously MS is doing something right in the next generation of their products.
Are you sure that they didn't mention it because it isn't commercially available yet? I mean, a virus would have a hard time running rampant on a small population of pre-release machines. (I know they released it to corporate customers recently, but anything if Amazon tells me that I cannot even pre-order something, then is not on the market as far as I'm concerned.)
Morality is not a set of rules told to me by a religious leader, it is simply 'what is right.' And even if you and I do not agree about 'what is right' your concept of morality doesn't change when you cross a border.
Slashdot Mirror
These public companies have lost 42% of their market capitalization over the past three years, and this warrants cries about a dying industry?
What about Google--which has lost almost 37% since January---or Apple which has lost nearly 30% in the same time? Are Apple and Google dying too? I think that a bit more data than stock prices is required to conclude that an industry is dying.
Just curious: where/when did you go to high school? These sound like absolutely fantastic experiments that I fear are entirely impossible these days (legally). I know that you and I can go out and buy mild gamma sources (like here) but that doesn't mean it is legal in a public high school (e.g. mercury).
I sued Dell a while back, and it took them only a week to settle the full amount I had sued them for. I was contacted by a lawyer, but that lawyer would not have been legally allowed to represent Dell in court. If Dell actually wanted to bring the case to trial it would have 1. cost them more than I was suing them for and 2. required that they bring someone other than the lawyer fully up to date on my case.
I like to think I 'won' the lawsuit because I was in the right, but I cannot help but thinking it was in Dell's best interest to simply settle without looking too far into the matter.
(But because I read the legal babble, I understand that I technically didn't win anything, and that Dell admitted no responsibility. And come to think of it, I wasn't allowed to talk about it. Shit.)
That is true, but neither did the US declare war against Iraq, or terrorism, or North Korea, or any foreign entity since World War II. The declaration of war is an act of Congress and no Congress has made such an act since 1942.
Where does the traffic come from? Well, in terms of pure volume of traffic, the US is of course in first place. Second? Iran.
I don't know what it means, but per-capita, that means that an obscenely large fraction of Iranian physics students are in the habit of Googling for answers to homework problems.
Even neglecting the whole privacy issue, do they appreciate the utter waste of money this street-cleaner is? How many hundreds of full-time street sweepers could they have hired for the same cost as all those cameras, speakers, and police to watch these CCTVs all day and night? And worse, the use of this utterly wasteful experiment diminishes with time: when people learn to not litter, there really isn't any value of the system at all.
Yes, like most of you, I am shocked by the Big Brother-like overtones of this absurd experiment. But even those people who don't mind Big Brother should consider how damn expensive it is to keep Big Brother watching on salary (and how expensive the equipment is). At the end of the day, what do they get for that waste of tax dollars? cleaner streets!? What kind of people are in charge of spending our money?!
But a lighter will light at 6,000 feet (say, near Aspen). Something is wrong here...
Common now: what the hell are you talking about. You are saying that people should only buy US OIL? Haliburton isn't an international business because it is seeking slave labour in sweat-shops, it is international because that's where the oil is.
Easier to find something!? When they're overloading their employees looking into the whole population at once? This type of blind removal of everyone's rights will not make it easier for the government. It will make real criminals easier to hide in the crowd.
You mentioned grad school. At least where I grew up, the only (realizable) way for teachers to have post-graduate degrees was if they earned them while teaching. Why? Because anyone with more than a bachelor's degree requires a higher salary by the Teacher's Union and so therefore no school in the area would hire them. I'm glad that more education gets more pay, but this is nuts.
The article's notion of 'afford' is odd: just because Google (and therefore YouTube) has money doesn't mean they can afford to blow it on lawsuits. Youtube needs to increase in profitability by 1000 fold in order for Google to make any profit on it at all. Google cannot afford YouTube as it is today, let alone with huge lawsuits to deal with.
IMHO: if you don't like using MS software, go to Linux or Apple. The argument ''there isn't any other player in town and so you're robbing me blind just because you can'' is both wrong in today's software market and based on an absolutely misguided interpretation of how capitalism works.
Just to nitpick, at the time of Galileo, heliocentrism had not yet achieved Kepler's simplicity and Copernicus' model had more epicycles than Ptolemy. It is not at all true that Copernican heliocentrism achieved objectively better tables (or even easier to calculate tables). Only the very rough picture was simpler (having planets orbit the sun avoids major epicycles)---but to get accurate tables, tons of minor epicycles needed to be added to correct for Copernicus' assumption that the sun was at the centre of the solar system, that planets orbited in circles, etc.
And while you're description of the result of Galileo's trial as a 'plea bargain' isn't exactly wrong, it is important to remember that Galileo was permanently under house arrest in his villa in Arcetri until his death. And he wasn't formally forgiven until the 1990s. So it was a bit worse than a plea bargain.
(Actually, that is probably a stretch of logic even for this absurd set of judges, but still.)
Ahh, but that costs the Russians around $12 million dollars. In contrast, they probably only spend a few dollars a day to keep someone shivering in Siberia (and even less to have them shot). I don't think the IMF would approve of that expensive a ritual!
It is also rather similar in mathematics, where one department houses actuarians, scientists of all disciplines (& CS), engineers, and a few mathematicians.
I don't think that having a diverse output hurts the number of people who want to major---in fact, I'd argue it is just the opposite.
If marketing labels a product to have certain features, and sales sells this product without with the false label, it is "false advertising" in a strict sense. If you tell a customer that a product does [foo] and you sell it to them without [foo], you're liable to tort law---as you should be.
I've read articles within the last year about how police have used this to convict child pornographers even after multiple-overwrites.
The only effective way to erase data from a magnetic disc that I know of is to microwave it. And just to clarify: burning it probably isn't enough---there are plenty of firms that specialize in recovering data from fires.
And unless I'm missing something, I can think of no obvious scientific reason to attribute Gulf War Syndrome with U-238. It smells very much like public paranoia and mis-information: Uranium 238 is depleted Uranium: it is not fissile, and it's half-life is near 5 billion years. It is rather abundant in bricks---which is why most building have a higher ambient radiation than the outdoors (even though the buildings shield some cosmic rays, they usually have enough Uranium in the bricks to compensate).
That the level of radiation is of absolutely no concern whatsoever, and calling it one of the 'most dangerous toys of all time' is spreading public mis-information.
I guess my point is: if your company was not 'making tons of money' for altruistic reasons, then I suspect it failed---and if not, they deserved to fail: altruism is the sacrifice of earned, honourable wealth in favour of unearned favours. If they were not 'making tons of money' because they had a good long-term strategy, then fantastic; and I hope they're raking it in today.
my two pence.
Are you sure that they didn't mention it because it isn't commercially available yet? I mean, a virus would have a hard time running rampant on a small population of pre-release machines. (I know they released it to corporate customers recently, but anything if Amazon tells me that I cannot even pre-order something, then is not on the market as far as I'm concerned.)
Can anyone say, Wikipedia?
Morality is not a set of rules told to me by a religious leader, it is simply 'what is right.' And even if you and I do not agree about 'what is right' your concept of morality doesn't change when you cross a border.