goodness

That appears to be the bed width between the wheel wells. I assume it would fit width wise on top of the wheels, which is still in the bed. As to the length, not even most full size trucks are long enough to fit the whole sheet. I guess the main point is that you wouldn't have any trouble getting the sheet of plywood home.

The main reason for this is just fucking iMessage.

It's not even just that iMessage segregates non-iPhone messages by color. It screws up video and group texts.

The Fandango scores were also higher than the Rotten Tomatoes user ratings 74% of the time. But yeah, Fandango is obviously incentivized to be biased.

I think this is a better summary of his conclusions from that same paragraph:

I conclude that, even rather optimistically, it's going to take many, many deep ideas to build an AI.

The appendix linked there doesn't seem to be ready yet though. In any case, I like how this is phrased. I'd like to see some of the hype around deep learning calm down.

You can use EC2 in somewhat similar ways to GAE. They have Elastic Map Reduce (which runs the MapReduce side of Hadoop) and SimpleDB/S3 for storage. SimpleDB is even one of the backends that Django nonrel supports. The only real instance you have to manage is the web/app server. Amazon also offers a level of free service:

http://aws.amazon.com/free/

So I'd say they are at least somewhat comparable.

I am more sad about the current state of android tablets. Are there any decent tablets available? When I looked recently, I found a bunch of announcements for stuff that was coming, like the Dell Streak. But the actual tablets available look like knockoff Chinese junk. The Archos tablets seem to be the only moderately respectable devices in the bunch, and those seem to have their share of problems.

Sorry, you're right about the refined carbs. Also, going further along the meat lines, there was also recent research differentiating processed meats (e.g. bacon, sausage, lunch meats, etc.) versus unprocessed meats. If I remember correctly, the unprocessed meats had no real links to heart disease and cancers (in moderation). However, the processed meats did show some links to those health problems. The researchers speculated that it was probably either the high salt content or the nitrates in the processed meats that were the culprits, but the study didn't actually look at that.

The other thing to say here is that the latest research indicates that carbs may actually be a leading cause of heart disease rather than fat. For example:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=carbs-again...

So low carbs can be healthy even if you're not trying to lose weight.

This is actually where exercise can come in to play. The author is right that recent research says that exercise is not necessarily the most effective way to lose weight. However, there is evidence that exercise can help you maintain your weight.

So if you backslide a bit and stop watching what you eat, you can still help yourself out by exercising.

Not the API, but I went to the homepage and tried out the help bubble. The text went outside the bubble, which made it hard to read and didn't look very nice. This is Firefox 3.6.3 on Windows XP. I also have a custom DPI, but that usually just causes problems in IE.

Hmm, started with a vanity search and got totally irrelevant results. Then tried vanity searches with friends names. Again, bad results. Putting the names in quotes seems to do a better job, so the problem doesn't seem to be coverage. Makes it seem like they may not be doing a very good pagerank-like calculation.

Well, I would like to see Chrome-like private browsing in Firefox. I don't like the whole shutdown the browser to go in to private mode thing. I often use private browsing mode in Chrome to log in to the same site with multiple accounts. For example, when my wife to log in to GMail while I'm still logged in. Hopefully this is on their radar. I also like how every text box in Chrome is resizable. Not sure if those things really warrant a fork.

I also in principle like Chrome's process per tab idea. But in practice, I've never actually found myself killing off an individual tab. Usually when I have browser problems, it's in Windows and it's an I/O issue that tends to make the whole OS unresponsive.

Actually, their docs claim that the limits aren't really related to the API key. The API key is just so they can contact you if they start blocking you:

  http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/key.html

That may just be disinformation though. For example, if you can spread your usage over multiple IPs, you might be allowed more searches than if you told them your API key for all your requests on multiple IP addresses.

There was an article at UIST (a user interface conference) making similar points about 15 years ago. Here's one free version of the paper: http://research.sun.com/techrep/1995/abstract-33.html That paper had some actual concrete recommendations for different kinds of animations that were implemented in Self.

Like the article says, anybody can make money in the food business if they do a decent job. They don't have to be the best burgers on the entire east coast. They just have to have good food at reasonable prices. And I think they've got pretty good food. Definitely better than most other fast food in my area.

Is it the best food I've ever had? No. I definitely like In & Out fries better. And I like the burgers better at Urban Burger (in MD).

Google is working with Adobe. For example, the flash player is now coming bundled with Chrome:

http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2010/03/improved_flash_pl...

I also mentioned this above, but the CS5 release of the Flash IDE (due out in a couple days) is supposed to support deploying native iPhone/iPod/iPad apps. Given that Android phones already support some level of flash, this could make flash a pretty attractive option for developing cross platform apps.

It seems like Adobe is already filling this niche, but it has the potential to be better than HTML/JS in couple ways. First of all, you're supposed to be able to deploy native apps to the iPhone/iPod/iPad in CS5. Second, you can develop with the Flex IDE (or whatever Adobe is calling it now), which has a GUI builder, a visual CSS editor, and lots of other nice stuff.

Also, I use a laptop with no scroll wheel. There are ways to do scrolling, like clicking both buttons, but it doesn't seem to send all the scroll wheel events. So I can't even find a way to get that version of the calendar to work.

An alternative to both might be to use a linear fisheye. It would just need a selection for 31 days at the bottom, 12 months in the middle, and a few years at the top. The thing that you would probably need to change for the fisheye is not scrolling between months from the day row or years from the months row. In some ways, this is a bit more intuitive anyway.

Cool. There was just a post the other day on that Polyglot Chrome extension with a similar goal. That one is at:

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/plpjkjplknknmhfh...

The polyglot just auto-translates some of the words on the page. Might be a feature worth adding here too.

Exactly. The article says that Flash isn't inherently slow. Is anything inherently slow if you take time to optimize it? Why has Adobe/Macromedia taken so long to get decent performance out of Flash?

I'd say the ball is in Adobe's court to actually make a version of Flash that doesn't suck on the existing platforms.

I just tried it with my old bike route to work. It actually did pick the route I used. In this case, the route is just the shortest path instead of the roads with the fastest driving time.

I also tried http://maps.cloudmade.com that someone recommended above. That one didn't pick my route. It picked the shortest driving time route. I guess this makes sense, since looking at http://opencyclemap.org, I don't see any bike maps listed near my house.

Incidentally, I just noticed that Google maps also has an option to get directions for public transportation, at least in my city. That's pretty cool. I knew there were buses running near me, but I hadn't ever taken the time to look them up.

Everyone here is negative, but I think the general idea is reasonable (though not new). I don't know that the length should be 7 years, but something significantly shorter than ~17 seems like it could help fix a lot of the current problem.

This would definitely change the cost-benefit analysis on filing patents. Companies definitely take into consideration the costs of employee time, legal fees, filing fees, etc. when considering whether to pursue a patent. If the expected benefit is suddenly less than half of what it was, then decisions start to change. If some portion of patents can't even make it through the system in 7 years (or whatever), then that makes the expected benefit of software patents even lower.

I did something similar in Java, though it was for a company so I can't open source it. FYI, I noticed that the script changed drastically between (roughly) December and January. The new script works a lot more reliably in my experience. It now has a multi-pass algorithm that relaxes various criteria if it can't find anything with the strictest settings. It also looks for content DOM nodes and assigns points to parent and grandparent DOM nodes. It used to only assign points to the parent, which would give the wrong results in some cases.

In any case, I was just thinking that I would really like to get a python library that does the readability thing for a personal Google App Engine project I have in mind. If anyone knows of anything, I'd love to save some time. Otherwise, I'll probably start from Beautiful Soup and try porting readability on top.

Your Ruby code might also be useful if you end up open-sourcing it.

Are you saying that having a PhD will overqualify you for some positions? I have occasionally heard this claim, but I have found it to be pretty much utterly false. Almost everyone wants the most qualified employees they can get. I think this is becoming even more true as folks have seen Google's success in hiring PhDs.

When a hiring manager specifically excludes overqualified people, this is a pretty big red flag to me. Managers usually only say this when they have a very tedious or low paying job that they think a PhD-type will quickly abandon for something better. I wouldn't exactly call this a "closed door", I'd say it's more of a sign that there are lots of better opportunities for qualified people. If these other opportunities went away, then the tedious jobs would start raising their qualifications too.

PhDs also have many other "open doors" that other people just don't have. All those teaching and research jobs you mention are available to them.

I read the story. It claims to be "a product of a highly focused, laborious effort to write a song that was extremely simple to sing yet musically interesting and emotionally expressive, undertaken by a composer and an educator who happened to be sisters."

I still don't really buy that it was "laborious effort." And I don't think the song is popular because of some fantastic musical merits. If the song was still "good morning to all" then it would be just another song. The only reason it has any monetary value is because it became associated with birthdays.

If this is really the case, then it seems to be a loophole for a reverse scenario. You write a computer algorithm to generate vast collections of music. Since the computer, pretty much by definition, is ignorant of other music then you can claim copyright over everything it generates. Wait for it to produce "copies" of popular melodies and then you can publish cheap clones or license popular songs to people for a fraction of the cost of the originals.

If there is an objection that the computer isn't considered a person, then form a corporation and copyright the songs to the corporation. The corporation is equally ignorant of any other music. Human judgment is only exercised by a second corporation that searches the first corporations extensive database to find popular melodies to license.

I'm no lawyer, but that doesn't seem consistent with any other law in the US. Ignorance is never an excuse. Also, the first result from a google search for 'copyright infringement willful' yields this:

  http://www.ladas.com/NII/CopyrightInfringement.html

which says:

'Copyright infringement is determined without regard to the intent or the state of mind of the infringer; "innocent" infringement is infringement nonetheless.'

As with patents though, I think the intent does play a role in determining damages.

"...was the product of intense creative labor"

I don't mean to downplay the amount of work that goes in to writing a song, but this seems a bit over the top. Short little melodies like this are trivial to write. My pre-school age children come up with these all the time.

The tune of Happy Birthday doesn't seem particularly catchy to me. We've just heard it repeated so many times.

I wonder why there aren't copyright trolls similar to patent trolls. They could just release huge libraries of computer generated music with all of these interesting combinations of notes. Then do automated comparisons of popular songs to find "violations." Could also be another one of those cases of getting an absurd law revoked by exercising it.

This is very similar to Powerset (http://powerset.com). They were bought by Microsoft a while back for a fair chunk of change, so you might be on to something.