I haven't tried a dishwasher, but I have run a keyboard under warm sink water for a few minutes. It was fine after leaving it to air-dry for a few days.
"It is the URL that turnes those random blocks into something."
OK, then any person who posts a URL to a copyrighted file will be sued for copyright infringement, rather than the person hosting the data. In what sense is that an improvement over the status quo?
Actually, this would be an interesting experiment to try out just for that reason. People are notoriously bad at random number generation; I bet the mean guess wouldn't be near 500000.
Good observation about the Gaussian distribution being necessary. Thought experiment: I am thinking of a number between one and a million. What's the likelihood that the average of a bunch of people's guesses are anywhere near the number I am thinking of?
"also a tech guy"... yes, and an infamous one: "LINUX is obsolete [...] LINUX is a monolithic style system. This is a giant step back into the 1970s. That is like taking an existing, working C program and rewriting it in BASIC. To me, writing a monolithic system in 1991 is a truly poor idea." -Andrew S. Tanenbaum, comp.os.minix, Jan. 29 1992.
Right before the 2004 election, electoral-vote.com called the election for Kerry. Oops!
I appreciate his sentiments and his methodology but it seems he doesn't have a great track record for picking winners:)
The problem here is one of hypocrisy. Christians who argue against homosexuality are basing their argument on an interpretation of a couple passages of text that were written a couple thousand years ago. If a person is arguing that morality ought to be based on thousand-year-old texts, a legitimate counterpoint is that those same texts have historically been used to justify all kinds of atrocities.
I agree... my point is that the benefit is only a *potential* benefit, and that if all the other companies are ruthlessly cloning, you'll be out of business (due to selling bananas perceived as inferior) long before the benefit is likely to occur. So even if your company *is* looking past the next quarter, the fact that OTHER companies don't means that you will lose to them.
It's not that scientists are oblivious to negative ramifications -- it's economics, specifically tragedy of the commons.
If everyone else is cloning Tasty Profitable Banana, and you don't, you go out of business because either your bananas aren't Tasty or your bananas aren't Profitable. Therefore there's a penalty for maintaining variation, and the only potential benefit -- not having your whole crop wiped out by a blight -- isn't something you can bet on. Most likely, economic forces will drive you out of business long before your more varied gene pool can have any beneficial effect.
There's a benefit to society (and the entire banana-growing industry) if there is a diverse gene pool, but no individual business has an incentive to maintain such a gene pool.
It's not surprising this is similar to the Google Image Labeler since that's just a re-implementation of the ESP Game, which is also one of the games available on the GWAP site.
After playing with the site for a while, I especially like Squigl... basically you and a partner draw an outline around an object in an image. If you play, make sure you check the "auto-submit when done" button, it helps save precious time:)
The state I live in (Pennsylvania) has a state-wide liquor monopoly, and private citizens are banned from shipping mail-order wine from other states into Pennsylvania without going through a state store (and the state store adds $4.50 + 25% tax per bottle). In theory, this law might suffer from the same enforcement problem you're talking about, but in reality most out-of-state wine sellers won't ship wine to Pennsylvania addresses.
With the exception of multi-story homes, most places you'd want a personal robot to go are handicap-accessible. Just make a robot use ramps and elevators instead of stairs.
"Personally, I can't see how NY is going to be able to enforce this law. They can't compel businesses outside of their jurisdiction to collect and remit these taxes without some sort of federal law."
Sure they can. Maybe they can't sue Amazon for lost revenue, but they can certainly say "you are no longer allowed to sell anything to our residents". At that point they potentially set up a standoff -- if Amazon calls their bluff and shuts down New York operations, would the citizens of New York raise enough hell to make the NY government change its laws?
Yes, I wish we could score the article -1, Wrong. This is the smallest exoplanet discovered "around a Sun-like star". More details on this and previous discoveries can be found at the Bad Astronomy blog:
Roughly half of the book is about establishing a data haven inside a mountain in the (fictional) island-state of Kinakuta. Neal doesn't specifically address search engines, the application in the book is closer to anonymous internet banking. It's only tangentially related to what you're asking for here, but it's an enjoyable read nonetheless.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't tried a dishwasher, but I have run a keyboard under warm sink water for a few minutes. It was fine after leaving it to air-dry for a few days.
"It is the URL that turnes those random blocks into something."
OK, then any person who posts a URL to a copyrighted file will be sued for copyright infringement, rather than the person hosting the data. In what sense is that an improvement over the status quo?
Actually, this would be an interesting experiment to try out just for that reason. People are notoriously bad at random number generation; I bet the mean guess wouldn't be near 500000.
Good observation about the Gaussian distribution being necessary. Thought experiment: I am thinking of a number between one and a million. What's the likelihood that the average of a bunch of people's guesses are anywhere near the number I am thinking of?
Wait... pH over 7 means a solution is "salty"? Salts are electrically neutral; surely they meant "alkaline" or "basic".
If you RTFP, Figure 6 shows the difference between the performance of the algorithm and random guessing. It's pretty significant.
I got a page with SVN conflict markers.
:)
http://optim.coral.cs.cmu.edu:8080/firefox3.png
The irony of it is that the FF3 homepage didn't render correctly in FF3
"also a tech guy" ... yes, and an infamous one: "LINUX is obsolete [...] LINUX is a monolithic style system. This is a giant step back into the 1970s. That is like taking an existing, working C program and rewriting it in BASIC. To me, writing a monolithic system in 1991 is a truly poor idea." -Andrew S. Tanenbaum, comp.os.minix, Jan. 29 1992.
:)
Right before the 2004 election, electoral-vote.com called the election for Kerry. Oops!
I appreciate his sentiments and his methodology but it seems he doesn't have a great track record for picking winners
The problem here is one of hypocrisy. Christians who argue against homosexuality are basing their argument on an interpretation of a couple passages of text that were written a couple thousand years ago. If a person is arguing that morality ought to be based on thousand-year-old texts, a legitimate counterpoint is that those same texts have historically been used to justify all kinds of atrocities.
If you want good coverage of space/astronomy news, I recommend the Bad Astronomy Blog:
http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/
Speaking of which, Phil Plait (the "Bad Astronomer") is also no fan of the ISS. From his article on this same experiment:
"So some European scientists came up with the idea of using the International Space Station (I know! Using ISS for science! Wow!) to test this out."
I agree... my point is that the benefit is only a *potential* benefit, and that if all the other companies are ruthlessly cloning, you'll be out of business (due to selling bananas perceived as inferior) long before the benefit is likely to occur. So even if your company *is* looking past the next quarter, the fact that OTHER companies don't means that you will lose to them.
It's not that scientists are oblivious to negative ramifications -- it's economics, specifically tragedy of the commons.
If everyone else is cloning Tasty Profitable Banana, and you don't, you go out of business because either your bananas aren't Tasty or your bananas aren't Profitable. Therefore there's a penalty for maintaining variation, and the only potential benefit -- not having your whole crop wiped out by a blight -- isn't something you can bet on. Most likely, economic forces will drive you out of business long before your more varied gene pool can have any beneficial effect.
There's a benefit to society (and the entire banana-growing industry) if there is a diverse gene pool, but no individual business has an incentive to maintain such a gene pool.
It's not surprising this is similar to the Google Image Labeler since that's just a re-implementation of the ESP Game, which is also one of the games available on the GWAP site.
After playing with the site for a while, I especially like Squigl... basically you and a partner draw an outline around an object in an image. If you play, make sure you check the "auto-submit when done" button, it helps save precious time :)
+1, You win this thread.
I'm going to be modded insightful! I'm going to be modded insightful! I'm going to be modded insightful!
*crosses fingers*
Hey, at least these people have one :) I ordered my XO on day 1 of the Give One, Get One program and it's still not arrived yet.
The state I live in (Pennsylvania) has a state-wide liquor monopoly, and private citizens are banned from shipping mail-order wine from other states into Pennsylvania without going through a state store (and the state store adds $4.50 + 25% tax per bottle). In theory, this law might suffer from the same enforcement problem you're talking about, but in reality most out-of-state wine sellers won't ship wine to Pennsylvania addresses.
With the exception of multi-story homes, most places you'd want a personal robot to go are handicap-accessible. Just make a robot use ramps and elevators instead of stairs.
"Personally, I can't see how NY is going to be able to enforce this law. They can't compel businesses outside of their jurisdiction to collect and remit these taxes without some sort of federal law."
Sure they can. Maybe they can't sue Amazon for lost revenue, but they can certainly say "you are no longer allowed to sell anything to our residents". At that point they potentially set up a standoff -- if Amazon calls their bluff and shuts down New York operations, would the citizens of New York raise enough hell to make the NY government change its laws?
Yes, I wish we could score the article -1, Wrong. This is the smallest exoplanet discovered "around a Sun-like star". More details on this and previous discoveries can be found at the Bad Astronomy blog:
http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2008/04/10/no-its-not-the-smallest-exoplanet-found/
Roughly half of the book is about establishing a data haven inside a mountain in the (fictional) island-state of Kinakuta. Neal doesn't specifically address search engines, the application in the book is closer to anonymous internet banking. It's only tangentially related to what you're asking for here, but it's an enjoyable read nonetheless.
"Any recommendations?"
Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson.
Slashdot needs a +1, Macabre mod.
Wikipedia is like XML. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more. :)