thefool

Its funny in an ironic way.

Hopefully he'll be fine though. The criminal "justice" system doesn't take kindly to pranksters like this.

The thing here is that this is the start of a different way of doing science, and as such you want to be careful of the precedents you set.

It's a good thing that someone is thinking about how all this stuff is going to be protected.

The protocol there is one of ensuring anonymity for people that want to remain anonomous. Making sure that that sentiment is retained moving forward is not a bad thing.

Its also that a lot of things that have been discovered have fallen out of use because they are no longer patentable and thus do not get any investment from drug companies.

Even where you have a lot of cheap water, sewage still has to be proccessed.

The supreme court only sees the cases it wants to.

Though if they did take it, that would set a lasting precedent.

Either way, its a victory.

Not really.

They will probably give you at least as much control as facebook as they will be able to target you by the apps you own. If this is the case then its not that hard to target ads to exactly one person. See here: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/05/a-fb-ad-targeted...

What irritates me is that they say that the data is "anonymous" but it is clearly grouped to develop a targeting package to you, so how anonymous can it be when you log into the store from your house every few days.

The foot in the door principle.

They don't spring the hours on you, they increase them gradually.

First its - well 45 hours a week isnt so bad. Then after a few weeks its 55, and eventually, you get to working 85 hour weeks and not really knowing how you got there.

I'm a college student thats looking into going down this path, and am pretty apalled about the ratio of cool stuff to playing the game that academics seem to have to endure.

I'm pretty sure I don't want to spend 80% of my time stressed out about grants and 20% actually doing work or teaching. Unless thats not what the reality is, but from the jaded sources I've read, that seems to be the case.

I really like the idea of awarding grants to institutions based on aggregate performance, and then awarding funding within a department based on internal metrics.

Getting rid of some of the direct competition might make people more compelled to share thier ideas with one another as well.

This depends on how you define "of our choosing".

There are a number of practical social situations where an understanding of divisibility can be useful.

For instance, say a group of social animals of equal rank stumble upon some berries and split them amongst themselves. It would be beneficial for them to understand that if the number of berries is relatively prime to the number of them, then an even distribution is impossible and they should accept that.

I'm sure more compelling examples of grouping in social animals arise all the time. Now if these animals begin to study numbers abstractly, one of the first things that they will practically need to understand is the rules that govern groupings. This will lead them immediately into the idea of prime numbers (and by extension relatively prime numbers).

I can't really think of a technique of grouping or looking at numbers that wouldn't at least implicitly require prime numbers.

It may be that higher level analysis of primes (like in this article) is somewhat artificial, but I'd maintain that the idea that a number is prime, or at least the concept that two numbers are relatively prime, is one that is fundemental to having any understanding of a number system.

Humans may have invented them, but they are a pretty natural concept.

Once you have a system of numbering, one of the first things one does is to see which numbers can be arrived at by simply adding other numbers to themselves a bunch of times.

I have a pretty limited knowledge of number theory, so I may be completely off mark, but I don't know that people have yet arrived at a nice fundamental theory that can encapsulate the way that primes arrange themselves along the number line.

Honestly, why is it such a bad thing when a company with absurdly high profit margins delegates some of the income back into improving the general standard of living for everyone.

Call it what you like. Write it off as them improving their image with the public, or as getting more users into the ecosystem, or becoming more vertically integrated.

But fundamentally, why is doing something that is good for people looked at as such a bad thing. From what I understand the public don't even have the majority stake in the company, and don't really have to get a say in how it is run. If they don't like that they can buy other companies stock.

If ones goal is to maximize happiness (or some other equivalent metric), there will be times at which the decision to maximize profit will diverge from this goal, and the ethical decision will be to spend money (which you have from profits in other sectors) to develop something at a net loss because you think its right.

(I'm not affiliated with google, this is just a broader point that irritates me).

As a 19 year old kid thats trying to learn web programming right now (After becoming reasonably proficient in java first), I can tell you first hand that there is a pretty big barrier to entry. It's frankly just hard to know what all the moving parts that you are supposed to include as padding actually do.

And it goes without saying that the "black boxes" or function calls that make OO programming or functional programming so efficient to do in groups are hell on someone learning to code.

In order to get people involved, its much better to make it easier instead of telling people to try harder.

So like the cassettes are just like 3D models of boxes with a skin applied?

And the phone and laptop are also rendered in 3D, and then rotated and skinned?

It seems like it would be quite a bit of work to make that cell phone in 3D max (mostly the keys would be annoying to produce).

There isn't any clever way of doing the background though right?

Thats cool, but I wasn't able to figure out how to turn on the feature within bing maps.

Also, its frustratingly buggy, and asks for silverlight to get many of the cool features natively available in google maps.

You could do it exclusively on newegg initially.

Their service and selection is great, and prices are pretty fair.

Sure, but generally money is given to people when they do some sort of service for other people.

If you have a cook, you pay them to cook you food, and you got the money from some other place cause you performed some other service for someone else.

If you paid him to go shopping, thats because he was creating value for you (in saving you time) and you were paying him for it.

But this is different. Sure he is benefiting himself, but he isn't creating value for anyone else. The whole point of society to a certain extent to create a system which encourages people to help one another. This man is essentially getting food in exchange for shuffling papers around. What I don't understand is who else in society is benefiting from his paper shuffling.

Were these "hand" illustrated? Or is there some easier way to make graphics look this awesome?

The given enough time part is the logical flaw i think.

It's kinda like saying that a man who can only run 15 miles per hour will eventually be able to run 30 miles and thus even if he creates a machine to do it faster, he was still capable of doing it.

Oh ok, now it makes sense.

You might want to say like storage device instead of cache, that would have made it less confusing for me to understand from reading the wiki.

It also seems like the system is just begging for caches to go missing (though I understand that as all the files are encrypted, it should be hard in theory to actually get data if you arent authorized access to sneakernet).

Are you hashing the files all the time to make sure that files aren't getting corrupted in transit or when taken from someones external cache?

Gurufi.com

The team telecommutes from LA, New Haven and Buffalo/Ithaca.

Its an essay editing site poised to make admissions essay editing more of a commodity by connecting applicants directly with editors.

The alpha is approaching positive cash flow, and we are crafting the beta right now. We are a very early stage startup and are looking for people that can do both front end and back end development and are interested in equity.

By "magic" do you mean "through the internet" or is something cleverer going on?

Also, by cache are you generally referring to some place where files are stored? Or does it mean something else?

I understand the system I just described doesn't really scale well, I'm just not really understanding how it does work from the documentation in the wiki.

By attacking ourselves even more.

I don't really understand.

So the goal of this is for the program to tell the person with files to load them up on a hard disk and then give them to the person requesting the files, who then picks them up from the dropbox, loads them on her computer, and then puts the flash drive back into the dropbox?

If so, then I guess all this really does is gives you a nice way of understanding who has which files, right?

If this is how it works, then I don't really understand what the external caches do for anyone.

yeah but in working for his groceries, it doesn't seem as though he created any value to anyone in the process.

I guess he was brand loyal, but it seems like the work didn't benifit anyone else in society, which is in contrast with actual work.

What actually more interesting is that he is able to make money from coupons: http://www.grocerycouponguide.com/articles/eating-well-on-1-...

same happened for me on xp, firefox 3.0.19

The article should make it clear who should be contacted to express negitive opinion about such a bill. Its not immediatly obvious as it is.

Yeah, but if you do it wrong, then it just feels as though the program talks down to you.

I agree that designing the architecture to be easy to explore and learn is a great idea, to me it seems that the best application to a help interact was if one added the option to play with things before the instructions for how to do them. Not if one removed the instructions entirely.

You don't want to be doing something, and then be distracted by the help screen and come back to the initial thing an hour later forgetting what it was you wanted to do.

Sometimes less engaging functionality has a greater capacity to engage.