dodo53

Would predictable statistical distribution of complexity not be enough? As in, you get a randomly assigned job, that takes on average a given amount of processing power, and is proven to not need more than some upper limit - or even, you time out after a given amount of processing power and request a new job. And ideally have each unit small enough that mining will completing multiple jobs so difference in complexity starts averaging out.

Could do with more of a portfolio of previous work - there's not much to go on at the moment.

I think social scheduling is not properly solved yet - mostly for me, this is either via facebook events (which is, I'm doing this, please show up) or email conversations (which get messy with lots of people). Like, I'd like to go out to the theatre with a good number of this group of friends - here are shows I'm interested in. This is when they're on (ideally event listing is provided via companies) Here's when I'm free. Here's what I'd pay. Collect that information from my friends and find a solution within constraints.

Also - could lead to a targeted-groupon like business model (in your circle of friends, 2 people have said they really want to come to our restaurant. Convince 10 people and get 20% off! Someone's friends that already like a product are probably the best word of mouth you can get). Or advertising could be much better targeted if you say what you're planning on doing instead of what you have done.

I had an idea like this once (and gave up cos I thought it was unlikely I'd pull it off - and I think I have a more reasonable idea to execute on) for a social-network travel agent. If you have hundreds of people giving you advance notification of their desires (I'd like to go skiing, for < £800, anywhere in the alps, with this group of people), travel agents could do collective purchases like booking entire chalets / chartering flights (a la Social Flights which also just hit HN headlines).

>One of these experiments, the Tardkiss experiment, will expose colonies of tardigrade to different levels of ionising radiation

Sounds like the start of a sci-fi horror, would not want to meet a giant mutant version :o)

Special relativity is actually quite accessible and really interesting - find a good book or set of lectures on iTunes U or something. (General relativity, the generalised version including acceleration and gravity, is what makes people think relativity is hard).

What would be the implications for space junk in orbit? Is lots of dust-size stuff more dangerous (would spread over a wider volume, or is it just like having a normal satellite but only most of it is empty space)?

And one of the tests in trademark law is if a reasonable person would be confused between the original and the imposter. So you only have to have 'reasonable' knowledge of other brands in your industry.

There needs to be a cash penalty for people bringing frivolous patent claims - and that money should be awarded to the defendant. Then you could get no-win-no-fee laywers defending collections of small devs against claims they think are unlikely to win but which the devs couldn't afford to defend against.

Maybe having enough money to pay lawyers to attack people. But yes, I think this would be awesome, and if it was successful enough, whenever large companies say 'oh, we only hold patents for defensive reasons' they could be pressured to donate them. Hmm thing is though, the countersue companies to stop them enforcing patents doesn't work so well for true patent trolls who aren't actually doing anything so probably aren't breaching patents (unless their patents breach patents, if that's possible).

Yes, and due to accelerating change, the rate at which laws are generated/enforced by people ignorant of the subject matter will only go up.

also would be nice to have overlapping tags instead of discrete lists. You could have your startup people / people interested in ${tech} / people you'd invite to your birthday / people you'd share photos with.

Also, one thing I find annoying in Facebook newsfeed noise is for multilingual friends getting their non-English updates. Language groupings would be nice (or auto-tagging based on language detection (or autotranslations)).

Well it's fine if it's a symmetrical both of you think each other as same tier; less so if you'd disagree (e.g. some bosses think all their subordinates are their friends and would want them at their parties).

What I was thinking is if you have a list of scrapers supplied and a publish notification, Google could then index the alleged scraper sites directly (instead of waiting for a general index to find them), and then at some interval later. For true scraper, this should result in no match followed by match. Then Google can establish order of publishing, assuming Googles push-notification-to-index time is shorter than the scraper-polling-interval. And it seems people often know of their regular scrapers.

IANAT (I am not a teacher): Hmm.. I certainly don't think classroom style would lead to people not engaging in face-to-face conversations - I think many/most people seek that out by themselves socially (and entertainment technology like say WoW has much more impact on that). I think it's a really odd context - volunteering in class to answer (normally fairly closed) questions; it's not a presentation, it's not a conversation of peers. I think the main thing you can learn from that is to get over risking being embarassed by asking stupid questions. But I think in terms of social/communication skills, group projects / debates are much more valuable.

I think the main reason people don't speak up is social - it's not seen as a cool or valuable thing to do by peers (and I've seen that even at university level in a self-selected group interested people, for anything beyond small groups, except with exceptional lecturers).

Chatroom style interactions seems to somehow change the dynamic somehow. One of the better set of lectures I had used an everybody-vote-on-answers-to-problems format, and because you're not singled out, there was much more engagement. It also gives the lecturer/teacher more input (whereas volunteers I think are often on extremes of ability curve).

So how about - content creator pushes content to Google, and list of people they think will scrape it. If sufficiently large sufficiently close copy of content shows up on scraper page they're penalized (adwords, search, banned from Blogger whatever).

Edit: I guess that only works if they're fixed IPs.

Sounds like something to build as part of your tricorder and get paid twice :oP http://www.reghardware.com/2011/05/12/x_prize_foundation_tri...

Also, that doesn't sound like a lot of money to transfer intellectual property rights for that. I guess they have patents on the hardware side so the algorithm is not easily monetisable by itself.

Some people think that your usual language affects how you can thnik (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir%E2%80%93Whorf_hypothesis; not sure if I'd agree that strongly) - so possibly you wouldn't be able to miss expressiveness you're not familiar with (simlar to pg's idea of Blub programming language).

Wish I knew more about linguistics - but I think missing tenses or grammatic logical structures are more interesting than missing vocab - like for example some languages have a tense for describing things you only know about second-hand http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferential_mood

(missed the bit I was meant to be replying to sorry...)

It's also a good recruitment tool having a couple of world-class people working on stuff that interests a lot of computer science types.

I think it could help solve congestion as a problem too. Maybe cars could book their routes, and the road brokers will maximise for #cars/destination instead of allowing people to keep piling in even after the useful capacity is exceeded.

And yet individual regret / manslaughter charges don't seem to actually change road death statistics. I'd so love for this to happen; I kinda also doubt it will though anytime soon.

I bet the first time robots are legally recognised as sentient (not saying they are now!) will be in court for a liability claim :oP

Could this not be the same thing you sometimes get on the human-driven tubes - for some reason (bizarre safety?) apparently if people lean on the doors they brake suddenly (have heard drivers say that over PA, googled for some kinda explanation but couldn't see anything except speculation).

hmmm if all the legs are too short the table is still stable?

That sounds lovely - but I think the legality thing is something to investigate early. I think a lot of places have rules about restaurants having hygiene certificates and passing inspections - maybe having a meal exchange would bypass that (like you can try other peoples' food as long as you also host every so often?). If you're taking money, I'd talk to a lawyer early (or friendly person with legal knowledge at least!)

Also, it might be worth starting on a specific scene first so you concentrate your community (your local town, your uni alumni, conference attendees at local tech conference or whatever).

edit: OK actually people do this, trended in London a year or so ago (sorry for non-reputable source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/food/article-1253584/I-ope...)

Build a paywall for the NY times :o)

It's funny that in other news they're getting flack for including LOL and OMG and their defence is that they're descriptive not prescriptive - and I think most brits would use *-ise indiscriminately.

Or Google gets bought by someone who would like Oracle's use of Sun's patents (although imagining Google being bought out is hard at them moment). Would be nice if there was a way of actively public-domaining patents (so you can use them defensively, but no-one can ever use them offensively. Would be a non-issue if prior art was more reliably a defence (or IMHO non-obviousness was more rigorously enforced)).

(edit: Maybe there is already, IANAL. Like what Manfred does in Charles Stross' Accelerando).

I wonder if he asked EFF if they were willing to defend the case. The thing is it's probably never individually worth defending against these cases, but on a society level there'd be so much gain if someone had set a legal precedence for the validity of robots.txt.

Philip Greenspun has an interesting explanation of this (tldr - senior pilots run the unions). http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines