Maxwell's 2nd equation, aka "Gauss' law for Magnetism", which is written in differential form as del * B = 0 (divergence of the magnetic field lines is zero). In integral form it's written as the double integral over a closed surface of the magnetic field lines is equal to zero).
Either way you look at it, that says "no magnetic monopoles". The law may need to be rewritten, but as written it does say no monopoles.
Looks like a nice interjection of levity to me. But then again I'm an Evil White Male and responsible for all the problems in the world and couldn't possibly understand.
- Gallic Wars - Lost. In a war whose ending foreshadows the next 2000 years of French history, France is conquered by of all things, an Italian.
- Hundred Years War - Mostly lost, saved at last by female schizophrenic who inadvertently creates The First Rule of French Warfare; "France's armies are victorious only when not led by a Frenchman." Sainted.
- Italian Wars - Lost. France becomes the first and only country to ever lose two wars when fighting Italians.
- Wars of Religion - France goes 0-5-4 against the Huguenots
- Thirty Years War - France is technically not a participant, but manages to get invaded anyway. Claims a tie on the basis that eventually the other participants started ignoring her.
- War of Revolution - Tied. Frenchmen take to wearing red flowerpots as chapeaux.
- The Dutch War - Tied
- War of the Augsburg League/King William's War/French and Indian War - Lost, but claimed as a tie. Three ties in a row induces deluded Frogophiles the world over to label the period as the height of French military power.
- War of the Spanish Succession - Lost. The War also gave the French their first taste of a Marlborough, which they have loved every since.
- American Revolution - In a move that will become quite familiar to future Americans, France claims a win even though the English colonists saw far more action. This is later known as "de Gaulle Syndrome", and leads to the Second Rule of French Warfare; "France only wins when America does most of the fighting."
- French Revolution - Won, primarily due the fact that the opponent was also French.
- The Napoleonic Wars - Lost. Temporary victories (remember the First Rule!) due to leadership of a Corsican, who ended up being no match for a British footwear designer.
- The Franco-Prussian War - Lost. Germany first plays the role of drunk Frat boy to France's ugly girl home alone on a Saturday night.
- World War I - Tied and on the way to losing, France is saved by the United States [Entering the war late -ed.]. Thousands of French women find out what it's like to not only sleep with a winner, but one who doesn't call her "Fraulein." Sadly, widespread use of condoms by American forces forestalls any improvement in the French bloodline.
- World War II - Lost. Conquered French liberated by the United States and Britain just as they finish learning the Horst Wessel Song.
- War in Indochina - Lost. French forces plead sickness; take to bed with the Dien Bien Flu
- Algerian Rebellion - Lost. Loss marks the first defeat of a western army by a Non-Turkic Muslim force since the Crusades, and produces the First Rule of Muslim Warfare; "We can always beat the French." This rule is identical to the First Rules of the Italians, Russians, Germans, English, Dutch, Spanish, Vietnamese and Esquimaux.
- War on Terrorism - France, keeping in mind its recent history, surrenders to Germans and Muslims just to be safe. Attempts to surrender to Vietnamese ambassador fail after he takes refuge in a McDonald's.
Bedevere: What makes you think she is a witch?
Villager: Well, She turned me into a newt!!
Bedevere: a newt?
Villager: I got better...
Villagers: BURN HER anyway! BURN! BURN! BURN HER!
B: Quiet, quiet, quiet, QUIET! There are ways of *telling* whether she is a witch!
Villagers: Are there? What? Tell us, then! Tell us!
B: Tell me. What do you do with witches?
V: BUUUURN!!!!! BUUUUUURRRRNN!!!!! You BURN them!!!! BURN!!
B: And what do you burn apart from witches?
Villager: More Witches!
Other Villager: Wood.
B: So. Why do witches burn?
Villager: (tentatively) Because they're made of.....wood?
B: Goooood!
Other Villagers: oh yeah... oh....
B: So. How do we tell whether she is made of wood?
One Villager: Build a bridge out of 'er!
B: Aah. But can you not also make bridges out of stone?
Villagers: oh yeah. oh. umm...
B: Does wood sink in water?
One Villager: No! No, no, it floats!
Other Villager: Throw her into the pond!
Villagers: yaaaaaa!
B: What also floats in water?
Villager: Bread!
Another Villager: Apples!
Another Villager: Uh...very small rocks!
Another Villager: Cider!
Another Villager: Uh...great gravy!
Another Villager: Cherries!
Another Villager: Mud!
Another Villager: Churches! Churches!
Another Villager: Lead! Lead!
King Arthur: A Duck!
Villagers: (in amazement) ooooooh!
B: exACTly!
B: (to a villager) So, *logically*...
Villager: (very slowly, with pauses between each word) If...she...weighs the same as a duck......she's made of wood.
Show me how the receiving antenna changes at all. It doesn't, it is still a metal stick after working as antenna.
Looking at this screen isn't giving me cancer. I'd need UV or higher frequency, ionizing, radiation for that.
The scientific way of answering the question "does (low frequency) EM radiation effect biological systems (enough to give cancer)" is to apply the principals of science already known and to see if there is anyway within the model that it could happen. It can't. You can then go ahead and do a study anyway, to see if there is anything new to learn. Been done. There isn't, in this case, anything new to learn.
Non-ionizing radiation doesn't cause cancer, there is no reason to suspect it would. Saying "just because we can't prove it doesn't" is just like faith saying "we can't prove there isn't a God", and isn't science.
It could induce microcurrents in some tissues, or cause certain molecules to resonate in a way which affected important chemical reactions.
That would also be known as "an increase in temperature", and you'd have to be standing damn close to the tower to get warmed up by it -- esp. by RF radiation.
If the radiation is non-ionizing then it does not induce any chemical reactions, nothing changes (except maybe something gets a little warmer). If you don't understand this last sentence then please go take a chemistry class and come back.
Won't load in Chrome on XP either, it says "sorry, your browser is not compatible". Really? There's something wrong with my browser? Or did MS just choose not to have things work on Chrome. When we launch a new web service at my company we test across a lot of browsers, including Chrome and IE, to make sure our stuff works. I guess we're just better at web dev than MS, though that's a pretty low bar.
Firefox on XP prompts me to install Silverlight "A cool new browser add-on that brings Web experiences like this to life. Installation is secure, free, and only takes a few seconds". I had to download a.exe file, okay I guess I'll put that under c:\Programs\Silverlight, and then run it, and then it took about 20 seconds to install and then it wanted me to restart my browser. Total time a minute or two.
Wait, really? Let's say my HD crashes and I want to download all the pictures I ever uploaded to FB. This could take a long time if I do it one right-mouse-click at a time.
I'm not allowed to write a script that logs into my FB account and gets all my pictures for me? I can't give someone else my FB log/pass and let them do it for me (automated or not)? FB agrees it's my data, and I have access to it through their provided web interface. I'm not asking for a special XML pipe or anything. I'd be kinda cranky if FB wouldn't let me farm that task out to a trusted 3rd party.
Following is a transcript of Bernard L. Madoffâ(TM)s statement to the court during his sentencing, as provided by the court:
Jine Lee/Bloomberg News
" Your Honor, I cannot offer you an excuse for my behavior. How do you excuse betraying thousands of investors who entrusted me with their life savings? How do you excuse deceiving 200 employees who have spent most of their working life working for me? How do you excuse lying to your brother and two sons who spent their whole adult life helping to build a successful and respectful business? How do you excuse lying and deceiving a wife who stood by you for 50 years, and still stands by you? And how do you excuse deceiving an industry that you spent a better part of your life trying to improve?
There is no excuse for that, and I donâ(TM)t ask any forgiveness.
Although I may not have intended any harm, I did a great deal of harm. I believed when I started this problem, this crime, that it would be something I would be able to work my way out of, but that became impossible. As hard as I tried, the deeper I dug myself into a hole. I made a terrible mistake, but it wasnâ(TM)t the kind of mistake that I had made time and time again, which is a trading mistake. In my business, when you make a trading error, youâ(TM)re expected to make a trading error, itâ(TM)s accepted. My error was much more serious. I made an error of judgment. I refused to accept the fact, could not accept the fact, that for once in my life I failed. I couldnâ(TM)t admit that failure and that was a tragic mistake.
I am responsible for a great deal of suffering and pain. I understand that. I live in a tormented state now knowing of all the pain and suffering that I have created. I have left a legacy of shame, as some of my victims have pointed out, to my family and my grandchildren. Thatâ(TM)s something I will live with for the rest of my life. People have accused me of being silent and not being sympathetic. That is not true. They have accused my wife of being silent and not being sympathetic. Nothing could be further from the truth. She cries herself to sleep every night knowing of all the pain and suffering I have caused, and I am tormented by that as well. She was advised not to speak publicly until after my sentencing by our attorneys, and she complied with that. Today she will make a statement about how she feels about my crimes. I ask you to listen to that. She is sincere and all I ask you is to listen to her.
Apologizing and saying I am sorry, thatâ(TM)s not enough. Nothing I can say will correct the things I have done. I feel terrible that an industry I spent my life trying to improve is being criticized terribly now, that regulators who I helped work with over the years are being criticized by what I have done. That is a horrible guilt to live with. There is nothing I can do that will make anyone feel better for the pain and suffering I caused them, but I will live with this pain, with this torment for the rest of my life. I apologize to my victims. I will turn and face you. I am sorry. I know that doesnâ(TM)t help you. Your Honor, thank you for listening to me. â
Ninety-two point four per cent of juvenile delinquents have eaten tomatoes.
Eighty-seven point one per cent of the adult criminals in penitentiaries throughout
the United States have eaten tomatoes.
Informers reliably inform that of all known American Communists ninety-two point
three percent have eaten tomatoes.
Eighty-four per cent of all people killed in automobile accidents during the year
2004 had eaten tomatoes.
Those who object to singling out specific groups for statistical proofs require
measurements within in the total. Of those people born before the year 1850,
regardless of race, color, creed or caste, and known to have eaten tomatoes,
there has been one hundred per cent mortality!
In spite of their dread addiction, a few tomato eaters born between 1850
and 1900 still manage to survive, but the clinical picture is poor-their
bones are brittle, their movements feeble, their skin seamed and wrinkled,
their eyesight failing, hair falling, and frequently they have lost all their
teeth.
Those born between 1900 and 1950 number somewhat more survivors,
but the overt signs of the addiction's dread effects differ not in kind but
only in degree of deterioration. Prognostication is not hopeful.
Exhaustive experiment shows that when tomatoes are withheld from an
addict, invariably his cravings will cause him to turn to substitutes-such
as oranges, or steak and potatoes. If both tomatoes and all substitutes are
persistently withheld-death invariably results within a short time!
The skeptic of apocryphal statistics, or the stubborn nonconformist who
will not accept the clearly proved conclusions of others may conduct his
own experiment.
Obtain two dozen tomatoes-they may actually be purchased within a block
of some high schools, or discovered growing in a respected neighbor's
back yard! - crush them to a pulp in exactly the state they would have if
introduced into the stomach, pour the vile juice into a bowl, and place a
goldfish therein. Within minutes the goldfish will be dead!
Those who argue that what affects a goldfish might not apply to a human
being may, at their own choice, wish to conduct a direct experiment by
fully immersing a live human head* into the mixture for a full five minutes.
* It is suggested that best results will be obtained by using an experimental
subject who is thoroughly familiar with and frequently uses the logical
methods demonstrated herein, such as:
(a) The average politician. Extremely unavailable to the average citizen
except during the short open season before election.
(b) The advertising copywriter. Extremely wary and hard to catch due to
his experience with many lawsuits for fraudulent claims.
(c) The dedicated moralist. Extremely plentiful in supply, and the experimenter
might even obtain a bounty on each from a grateful community.
THE DREAD TOMATO ADDICTION
Mark Clifton
This essay originally appeared in the February 1958 edition of Astounding.
The dates in this version have been modified (all dates plus 50 years).
whether whoever happens to be able to copy their work has the same rights to it as the creator.
No, that's not it at all. No one is suggesting that you can copy a piece of work that doesn't belong to you and then sell it. That's the sole right of the creator. We are talking about once you buy something whether or not you have the right to do with it whatever you want (make a backup copy, have it read out loud to you, play it on any device you own, give/lend a copy to your friend...). I think it's obvious that once I buy something it's MINE and I can do with it whatever I want, which includes giving it away, making backup copies, enjoying it whether I'm in my car or at my computer....
Back in the.com boom I started a telematics company, we had five-figures of devices on our system that we could track and control over the cellular control channel http://www.thebentleys.com/televoke/, we merged it with Telcontar, they changed their name to deCarta (www.decarta.com) who spun it out to Lunar Eye who flipped it to Celevoke where the servers are running but it's about to move to a new home. In fact, the guy (Chuck) who ran Celevoke into the ground still owes me personally ~$20k for helping him keep the system alive, but that's another story. Here's what you're up against, it's a two part problem:
1) you need a device that knows where it is and talks to a wireless network
2) you need a service to talk to that device and display the info on web/phone/whatever interface you want.
Back in 1998 when I started Televoke there was only the analog cellular network and no assisted GPS (quicker GPS location times from cold start based on cell tower location information; basically allows the device to get a fix much faster because it starts out with an idea where it is). Analog cellular sucked because the standby current on the analog transceiver was too high, so, unless you were doing just a geo-fencing application (device goes outside of geographic boundary, then turn on and report the event and current location) the standby battery life of portable devices was too low and the devices were too big. We went after the automotive after-market industry instead of tracking people/pets, since cars are size/weight/power insensitive. Nowadays it's a different game. You can get tracking devices that run for a month or three on AA batteries and live on a GSM network. There are back end services out there too, the Televoke one is still running under a different name, but finding a product/service combo that will work exactly the way you want, and not cost a fortune, and be small enough to put on a kid, is hard. Some services wont transmit unless queried. Some can't take queries (no "forward channel") and only update every hour or so, or when in motion, or some other power/packet saving algorithm. I'll give you the shortcut:
Buy your daughter a cellular phone, put it in a teddy bear or backpack or something she wont lose, charge it for her every night and track her on Google Lattitude. That will seriously be your lowest cost headache and cheapest solution when it's all said and done. As she gets older she'll WANT a cell phone and then you'll never lose her because she won't go anywhere with out. By the time she's 16 there is a 0% chance she'll keep the kiddie-finder attached to her wrist/belt/whatever.
...and this is sensationalism, there is no good way to process 15,000 faces/second.
Here's how it works in the real world:
1) Face recognition demos well with small data sets. When you set it up on a conference room and scan everyone's face in the meeting, and then have each subject re-approach the camera, it works great. Note that the each subject in this demo is in the same lighting and didn't grow a mustache in the last 5min -- and there were only ~10 people in the data set. The real world is very different. A 15,000 subject data set is very very different.
2) When you set up a camera to scan for faces you need a lot of pixels in a head-on portrait type of shot. 640x480 is actually still pretty high resolution for a camera (there are some 8 megapixel ones but they are rare and they generate so much data that it quickly gets hard to switch and store that much data, even locally). Still, you'll need most of those 640 pixels wide in order to get a good shot of a face -- esp. if you're going to run that face against a large data set.
3) So, if you had 15,000 640x480 cameras, they'd still have to be setup in front of 15,000 turnstiles, or some other kind of crowd control device, for you to know that you're going to get a good face shot AND people would have to be moving through those turnstiles at 1 person/second. Picking faces out of a crowd? Not going to happen. You'd at least need PTZ (Pan/Tilt/Zoom cameras) with face finding/tracking/grabbing algorithm to even try... and those algorithms tend to get confused easily (the one on our test bench, from a very large company that does a lot of government sales, tries to chase shadows from the ceiling fan, inevitably follows them to the corner and never sees anything useful again until someone manually overrides it).
The closest centralized face-tracking technology is from a company called 3VR, they are used by banks to spot known bad-check writers at the bank counter (when someone cashes a bad check, they will use a different name/account/ID but they still show up with the same face). It works okay, better than nothing at least, but they can tolerate a lot of false-positives and just slow pay them or ask for a 2nd form of ID or whatever.
The company I started, Connexed, centralizes video from a lot of cameras, but I can say definitively that there is no tool on the market that will process 15,000 faces per second, no matter how much money you throw at it, and do anything useful other than trigger a flood of false-positive ID's faster than humans can process. You could always try to set the algorithm for maximum false-negatives (let a lot of bad guys get by) and minimum false-positives but even then, unless you have some way to get 15,000 people/second to look directly into a camera under good lighting, you're not going to have anything useful happen.
I'm sure it demo'd well, though, and the vendor got a good chunk of money for the trial that will ultimately fail.
I called the REI and talked to the store manager. They say that they did NOT ask him to be arrested. They are NOT pressing any charges. They say he is welcome back in the store anytime.
I also called Loomis (couldn't reach anyone who could tell me anything) and Seattle PD. Seattle PD said that there "is a lot more to the story" so I sent a written request for the police report. I'll post a link to it here if/when I get it.
There should be a single social network that is flexible and open enough so that there's no need for any other one. In fact, there already is such a network. It is called the Internet.
Slashdot Mirror
What? Uhm, no.
Maxwell's 2nd equation, aka "Gauss' law for Magnetism", which is written in differential form as del * B = 0 (divergence of the magnetic field lines is zero). In integral form it's written as the double integral over a closed surface of the magnetic field lines is equal to zero).
Either way you look at it, that says "no magnetic monopoles". The law may need to be rewritten, but as written it does say no monopoles.
in large friendly letters, of course.
CouchDB
.
- Gallic Wars
- Lost. In a war whose ending foreshadows the next 2000 years of French history, France is conquered by of all things, an Italian.
- Hundred Years War
- Mostly lost, saved at last by female schizophrenic who inadvertently creates The First Rule of French Warfare; "France's armies are victorious only when not led by a Frenchman." Sainted.
- Italian Wars
- Lost. France becomes the first and only country to ever lose two wars when fighting Italians.
- Wars of Religion
- France goes 0-5-4 against the Huguenots
- Thirty Years War
- France is technically not a participant, but manages to get invaded anyway. Claims a tie on the basis that eventually the other participants started ignoring her.
- War of Revolution
- Tied. Frenchmen take to wearing red flowerpots as chapeaux.
- The Dutch War
- Tied
- War of the Augsburg League/King William's War/French and Indian War
- Lost, but claimed as a tie. Three ties in a row induces deluded Frogophiles the world over to label the period as the height of French military power.
- War of the Spanish Succession
- Lost. The War also gave the French their first taste of a Marlborough, which they have loved every since.
- American Revolution
- In a move that will become quite familiar to future Americans, France claims a win even though the English colonists saw far more action. This is later known as "de Gaulle Syndrome", and leads to the Second Rule of French Warfare; "France only wins when America does most of the fighting."
- French Revolution
- Won, primarily due the fact that the opponent was also French.
- The Napoleonic Wars
- Lost. Temporary victories (remember the First Rule!) due to leadership of a Corsican, who ended up being no match for a British footwear designer.
- The Franco-Prussian War
- Lost. Germany first plays the role of drunk Frat boy to France's ugly girl home alone on a Saturday night.
- World War I
- Tied and on the way to losing, France is saved by the United States [Entering the war late -ed.]. Thousands of French women find out what it's like to not only sleep with a winner, but one who doesn't call her "Fraulein." Sadly, widespread use of condoms by American forces forestalls any improvement in the French bloodline.
- World War II
- Lost. Conquered French liberated by the United States and Britain just as they finish learning the Horst Wessel Song.
- War in Indochina
- Lost. French forces plead sickness; take to bed with the Dien Bien Flu
- Algerian Rebellion
- Lost. Loss marks the first defeat of a western army by a Non-Turkic Muslim force since the Crusades, and produces the First Rule of Muslim Warfare; "We can always beat the French." This rule is identical to the First Rules of the Italians, Russians, Germans, English, Dutch, Spanish, Vietnamese and Esquimaux.
- War on Terrorism
- France, keeping in mind its recent history, surrenders to Germans and Muslims just to be safe. Attempts to surrender to Vietnamese ambassador fail after he takes refuge in a McDonald's.
"Mr. Sarkozy would be subject to having his Net disconnected the next time he pirates something"
As president / head of France does it mean whole France would be disconnected ?
Would anyone notice?
Bedevere: What makes you think she is a witch?
Villager: Well, She turned me into a newt!!
Bedevere: a newt?
Villager: I got better...
Villagers: BURN HER anyway! BURN! BURN! BURN HER!
B: Quiet, quiet, quiet, QUIET! There are ways of *telling* whether she is a witch!
Villagers: Are there? What? Tell us, then! Tell us!
B: Tell me. What do you do with witches?
V: BUUUURN!!!!! BUUUUUURRRRNN!!!!! You BURN them!!!! BURN!!
B: And what do you burn apart from witches?
Villager: More Witches!
Other Villager: Wood.
B: So. Why do witches burn?
Villager: (tentatively) Because they're made of.....wood?
B: Goooood!
Other Villagers: oh yeah... oh....
B: So. How do we tell whether she is made of wood?
One Villager: Build a bridge out of 'er!
B: Aah. But can you not also make bridges out of stone?
Villagers: oh yeah. oh. umm...
B: Does wood sink in water?
One Villager: No! No, no, it floats!
Other Villager: Throw her into the pond!
Villagers: yaaaaaa!
B: What also floats in water?
Villager: Bread!
Another Villager: Apples!
Another Villager: Uh...very small rocks!
Another Villager: Cider!
Another Villager: Uh...great gravy!
Another Villager: Cherries!
Another Villager: Mud!
Another Villager: Churches! Churches!
Another Villager: Lead! Lead!
King Arthur: A Duck!
Villagers: (in amazement) ooooooh!
B: exACTly!
B: (to a villager) So, *logically*...
Villager: (very slowly, with pauses between each word) If...she...weighs the same as a duck......she's made of wood.
B: and therefore...
Villager: A Witch!
All Villagers: A WITCH!
and more women. Plus a whole new level of drunkenness.
Why is it always the people with the fewest facts who are the most arrogant, and start throwing around insults first? ;)
No, seriously, take a chem class. :-P
Show me how the receiving antenna changes at all. It doesn't, it is still a metal stick after working as antenna.
Looking at this screen isn't giving me cancer. I'd need UV or higher frequency, ionizing, radiation for that.
The scientific way of answering the question "does (low frequency) EM radiation effect biological systems (enough to give cancer)" is to apply the principals of science already known and to see if there is anyway within the model that it could happen. It can't. You can then go ahead and do a study anyway, to see if there is anything new to learn. Been done. There isn't, in this case, anything new to learn.
Non-ionizing radiation doesn't cause cancer, there is no reason to suspect it would. Saying "just because we can't prove it doesn't" is just like faith saying "we can't prove there isn't a God", and isn't science.
It could induce microcurrents in some tissues, or cause certain molecules to resonate in a way which affected important chemical reactions.
That would also be known as "an increase in temperature", and you'd have to be standing damn close to the tower to get warmed up by it -- esp. by RF radiation.
If the radiation is non-ionizing then it does not induce any chemical reactions, nothing changes (except maybe something gets a little warmer). If you don't understand this last sentence then please go take a chemistry class and come back.
BINGO!!! (*snort* huh?) ... I mean: "FIRST POST!!!" ... now back to my nap.
and went straight to Omnidate's website to sign up?
Won't load in Chrome on XP either, it says "sorry, your browser is not compatible". Really? There's something wrong with my browser? Or did MS just choose not to have things work on Chrome. When we launch a new web service at my company we test across a lot of browsers, including Chrome and IE, to make sure our stuff works. I guess we're just better at web dev than MS, though that's a pretty low bar.
.exe file, okay I guess I'll put that under c:\Programs\Silverlight, and then run it, and then it took about 20 seconds to install and then it wanted me to restart my browser. Total time a minute or two.
Firefox on XP prompts me to install Silverlight "A cool new browser add-on that brings Web experiences like this to life. Installation is secure, free, and only takes a few seconds". I had to download a
I love Feynman, but MS just makes me itch.
Wait, really? Let's say my HD crashes and I want to download all the pictures I ever uploaded to FB. This could take a long time if I do it one right-mouse-click at a time.
I'm not allowed to write a script that logs into my FB account and gets all my pictures for me? I can't give someone else my FB log/pass and let them do it for me (automated or not)? FB agrees it's my data, and I have access to it through their provided web interface. I'm not asking for a special XML pipe or anything. I'd be kinda cranky if FB wouldn't let me farm that task out to a trusted 3rd party.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/business/30bernietext.html
Following is a transcript of Bernard L. Madoffâ(TM)s statement to the court during his sentencing, as provided by the court:
Jine Lee/Bloomberg News " Your Honor, I cannot offer you an excuse for my behavior. How do you excuse betraying thousands of investors who entrusted me with their life savings? How do you excuse deceiving 200 employees who have spent most of their working life working for me? How do you excuse lying to your brother and two sons who spent their whole adult life helping to build a successful and respectful business? How do you excuse lying and deceiving a wife who stood by you for 50 years, and still stands by you? And how do you excuse deceiving an industry that you spent a better part of your life trying to improve?
There is no excuse for that, and I donâ(TM)t ask any forgiveness.
Although I may not have intended any harm, I did a great deal of harm. I believed when I started this problem, this crime, that it would be something I would be able to work my way out of, but that became impossible. As hard as I tried, the deeper I dug myself into a hole. I made a terrible mistake, but it wasnâ(TM)t the kind of mistake that I had made time and time again, which is a trading mistake. In my business, when you make a trading error, youâ(TM)re expected to make a trading error, itâ(TM)s accepted. My error was much more serious. I made an error of judgment. I refused to accept the fact, could not accept the fact, that for once in my life I failed. I couldnâ(TM)t admit that failure and that was a tragic mistake.
I am responsible for a great deal of suffering and pain. I understand that. I live in a tormented state now knowing of all the pain and suffering that I have created. I have left a legacy of shame, as some of my victims have pointed out, to my family and my grandchildren. Thatâ(TM)s something I will live with for the rest of my life. People have accused me of being silent and not being sympathetic. That is not true. They have accused my wife of being silent and not being sympathetic. Nothing could be further from the truth. She cries herself to sleep every night knowing of all the pain and suffering I have caused, and I am tormented by that as well. She was advised not to speak publicly until after my sentencing by our attorneys, and she complied with that. Today she will make a statement about how she feels about my crimes. I ask you to listen to that. She is sincere and all I ask you is to listen to her.
Apologizing and saying I am sorry, thatâ(TM)s not enough. Nothing I can say will correct the things I have done. I feel terrible that an industry I spent my life trying to improve is being criticized terribly now, that regulators who I helped work with over the years are being criticized by what I have done. That is a horrible guilt to live with. There is nothing I can do that will make anyone feel better for the pain and suffering I caused them, but I will live with this pain, with this torment for the rest of my life. I apologize to my victims. I will turn and face you. I am sorry. I know that doesnâ(TM)t help you. Your Honor, thank you for listening to me. â
or should we be cherishing them and making sure they don't see Janet Jackson's nipple?
...more important that they don't see Michael Jackson's nipple.
Ninety-two point four per cent of juvenile delinquents have eaten tomatoes.
Eighty-seven point one per cent of the adult criminals in penitentiaries throughout the United States have eaten tomatoes.
Informers reliably inform that of all known American Communists ninety-two point three percent have eaten tomatoes.
Eighty-four per cent of all people killed in automobile accidents during the year 2004 had eaten tomatoes.
Those who object to singling out specific groups for statistical proofs require measurements within in the total. Of those people born before the year 1850, regardless of race, color, creed or caste, and known to have eaten tomatoes, there has been one hundred per cent mortality!
In spite of their dread addiction, a few tomato eaters born between 1850 and 1900 still manage to survive, but the clinical picture is poor-their bones are brittle, their movements feeble, their skin seamed and wrinkled, their eyesight failing, hair falling, and frequently they have lost all their teeth.
Those born between 1900 and 1950 number somewhat more survivors, but the overt signs of the addiction's dread effects differ not in kind but only in degree of deterioration. Prognostication is not hopeful.
Exhaustive experiment shows that when tomatoes are withheld from an addict, invariably his cravings will cause him to turn to substitutes-such as oranges, or steak and potatoes. If both tomatoes and all substitutes are persistently withheld-death invariably results within a short time!
The skeptic of apocryphal statistics, or the stubborn nonconformist who will not accept the clearly proved conclusions of others may conduct his own experiment.
Obtain two dozen tomatoes-they may actually be purchased within a block of some high schools, or discovered growing in a respected neighbor's back yard! - crush them to a pulp in exactly the state they would have if introduced into the stomach, pour the vile juice into a bowl, and place a goldfish therein. Within minutes the goldfish will be dead!
Those who argue that what affects a goldfish might not apply to a human being may, at their own choice, wish to conduct a direct experiment by fully immersing a live human head* into the mixture for a full five minutes.
* It is suggested that best results will be obtained by using an experimental subject who is thoroughly familiar with and frequently uses the logical methods demonstrated herein, such as:
(a) The average politician. Extremely unavailable to the average citizen except during the short open season before election.
(b) The advertising copywriter. Extremely wary and hard to catch due to his experience with many lawsuits for fraudulent claims.
(c) The dedicated moralist. Extremely plentiful in supply, and the experimenter might even obtain a bounty on each from a grateful community.
THE DREAD TOMATO ADDICTION Mark Clifton This essay originally appeared in the February 1958 edition of Astounding. The dates in this version have been modified (all dates plus 50 years).
whether whoever happens to be able to copy their work has the same rights to it as the creator.
No, that's not it at all. No one is suggesting that you can copy a piece of work that doesn't belong to you and then sell it. That's the sole right of the creator. We are talking about once you buy something whether or not you have the right to do with it whatever you want (make a backup copy, have it read out loud to you, play it on any device you own, give/lend a copy to your friend...). I think it's obvious that once I buy something it's MINE and I can do with it whatever I want, which includes giving it away, making backup copies, enjoying it whether I'm in my car or at my computer....
"Two days ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square 'incident,"
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"anniversary" IS included in the summary, you edited it out in your false quote above. "Incident" is also in quotes, drawing question to the word.
I'll take new stream media over the old any day.
Back in the .com boom I started a telematics company, we had five-figures of devices on our system that we could track and control over the cellular control channel http://www.thebentleys.com/televoke/, we merged it with Telcontar, they changed their name to deCarta (www.decarta.com) who spun it out to Lunar Eye who flipped it to Celevoke where the servers are running but it's about to move to a new home. In fact, the guy (Chuck) who ran Celevoke into the ground still owes me personally ~$20k for helping him keep the system alive, but that's another story. Here's what you're up against, it's a two part problem:
1) you need a device that knows where it is and talks to a wireless network
2) you need a service to talk to that device and display the info on web/phone/whatever interface you want.
Back in 1998 when I started Televoke there was only the analog cellular network and no assisted GPS (quicker GPS location times from cold start based on cell tower location information; basically allows the device to get a fix much faster because it starts out with an idea where it is). Analog cellular sucked because the standby current on the analog transceiver was too high, so, unless you were doing just a geo-fencing application (device goes outside of geographic boundary, then turn on and report the event and current location) the standby battery life of portable devices was too low and the devices were too big. We went after the automotive after-market industry instead of tracking people/pets, since cars are size/weight/power insensitive. Nowadays it's a different game. You can get tracking devices that run for a month or three on AA batteries and live on a GSM network. There are back end services out there too, the Televoke one is still running under a different name, but finding a product/service combo that will work exactly the way you want, and not cost a fortune, and be small enough to put on a kid, is hard. Some services wont transmit unless queried. Some can't take queries (no "forward channel") and only update every hour or so, or when in motion, or some other power/packet saving algorithm. I'll give you the shortcut:
Buy your daughter a cellular phone, put it in a teddy bear or backpack or something she wont lose, charge it for her every night and track her on Google Lattitude. That will seriously be your lowest cost headache and cheapest solution when it's all said and done. As she gets older she'll WANT a cell phone and then you'll never lose her because she won't go anywhere with out. By the time she's 16 there is a 0% chance she'll keep the kiddie-finder attached to her wrist/belt/whatever.
...and this is sensationalism, there is no good way to process 15,000 faces/second.
... and those algorithms tend to get confused easily (the one on our test bench, from a very large company that does a lot of government sales, tries to chase shadows from the ceiling fan, inevitably follows them to the corner and never sees anything useful again until someone manually overrides it).
Here's how it works in the real world:
1) Face recognition demos well with small data sets. When you set it up on a conference room and scan everyone's face in the meeting, and then have each subject re-approach the camera, it works great. Note that the each subject in this demo is in the same lighting and didn't grow a mustache in the last 5min -- and there were only ~10 people in the data set. The real world is very different. A 15,000 subject data set is very very different.
2) When you set up a camera to scan for faces you need a lot of pixels in a head-on portrait type of shot. 640x480 is actually still pretty high resolution for a camera (there are some 8 megapixel ones but they are rare and they generate so much data that it quickly gets hard to switch and store that much data, even locally). Still, you'll need most of those 640 pixels wide in order to get a good shot of a face -- esp. if you're going to run that face against a large data set.
3) So, if you had 15,000 640x480 cameras, they'd still have to be setup in front of 15,000 turnstiles, or some other kind of crowd control device, for you to know that you're going to get a good face shot AND people would have to be moving through those turnstiles at 1 person/second. Picking faces out of a crowd? Not going to happen. You'd at least need PTZ (Pan/Tilt/Zoom cameras) with face finding/tracking/grabbing algorithm to even try
The closest centralized face-tracking technology is from a company called 3VR, they are used by banks to spot known bad-check writers at the bank counter (when someone cashes a bad check, they will use a different name/account/ID but they still show up with the same face). It works okay, better than nothing at least, but they can tolerate a lot of false-positives and just slow pay them or ask for a 2nd form of ID or whatever.
The company I started, Connexed, centralizes video from a lot of cameras, but I can say definitively that there is no tool on the market that will process 15,000 faces per second, no matter how much money you throw at it, and do anything useful other than trigger a flood of false-positive ID's faster than humans can process. You could always try to set the algorithm for maximum false-negatives (let a lot of bad guys get by) and minimum false-positives but even then, unless you have some way to get 15,000 people/second to look directly into a camera under good lighting, you're not going to have anything useful happen.
I'm sure it demo'd well, though, and the vendor got a good chunk of money for the trial that will ultimately fail.
...and replace it with what, Genius?
I called the REI and talked to the store manager. They say that they did NOT ask him to be arrested. They are NOT pressing any charges. They say he is welcome back in the store anytime. I also called Loomis (couldn't reach anyone who could tell me anything) and Seattle PD. Seattle PD said that there "is a lot more to the story" so I sent a written request for the police report. I'll post a link to it here if/when I get it.
There should be a single social network that is flexible and open enough so that there's no need for any other one. In fact, there already is such a network. It is called the Internet.
get ready for a quad-core TiVo...