Posts by Steve Knox 1972 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jul 2011
I'm a little disappointed with all of the "could be"s. You'd think that with an undertaking this huge, there'd have been some long-term planning involved.
Something like "These switches have been earmarked for educational use after the Games" or "We have a tenant lined up for this building next year."
And what exactly is it that you feel you can do with icons that you can't do with the tiles on Metro?
1. I can fit more - or less - than 20(-ish, depending on which size Microsoft decides the tiles should be) on one screen.
2. I get to decide what size they are.
3. I can put them anywhere on the screen, not just have them flow in an orthographic grid. So I can, say, put them on the far right side of the screen and set my background picture to use the left side of the screen, or center the background and put them on either side, or even spell out naughty words with them.
4. I can hide them entirely and use pop-up menus to navigate to what I want.
...That will be prohibited – point one. Point two – if you do, you will be a criminal. That’s what will happen.”
So he has two points -- and they're the same point. I actually agree with what this judge is trying to say, but the way he says it makes our position sound stupid. He sounds like he doesn't understand the basics of logic, let alone law.
Region encoding props up the antiquated cinema industry at the expense of the consumers for whom the content is ostensibly produced. Strict enforcement makes criminals of many people who often just want to watch content that the producers don't bother encoding for their particular region.
Was that so hard to say?
...it is insane to expect users to constantly be upgrading their distribution every 6-ish months to keep up with the latest bleeding edge distributions.
You don't pay much attention to the PC game market, do you? Developers expect gamers to be upgrading their hardware every six months to keep up.
PS. How can you "constantly" be doing something at a intermittent interval?
...except that I can't use a retina Mac at it's native res because my eyes won't make out pixels that small from a reasonable distance.
Ummm... that's the point of a retina display -- if you could make out the pixels, it wouldn't be one. Same with larger screens. To make out the pixels on a 24" retina display, you'd have to sit closer than the recommended distance. What you want is not a retina display, but a high-resolution display.
But, there are times, like at 4AM when the bars close, when you have had 6+ pints of beer plus water and are walking home for 30 minutes, that things become unfortunate.
So you stay up til 4AM, you have 6+pints of beer and water, you don't make plans to get to a rest area within a reasonable time frame considering your self-imposed condition, and you think that makes it acceptable to piss all over everyone else's stuff?
I'm sorry, but I for one think the stupid selfish dickishness that leads to calling such activity "unfortunate" rather than "the completely predictable result of a course of action which illustrates a severe deficiency in common sense" is what should be illegal. I think you'll find that attitude is at the core of most if not all "real" crimes.
Those of us who have brains and can use them know how to appreciate alcohol, without wasting it on others' walls.
88 per cent of all registered .com and .net domains resolve to an active website;
17 per cent were one-page sites (indicative of “parked” or speculative domains) and
69 per cent had multiple-page websites.
That leaves 2% of those domains resolving to active websites that cannot be said to have one page or multiple pages. Since zero pages or "unable to determine" would logically fall under "inactive" and you can't have a negative number of pages, I can only assume that these sites are in a state of quantum superposition, serving up both one-page sites and multiple-page sites at the same time.
If you consider these an acceptable number of errors, then you are part of the problem. *I* don't.
Let me guess. You wouldn't consider 1 error in a million an acceptable error rate. Well, some of us have to live in the real world. Let's break the numbers down, shall we?
Total Requests: 494,078
Requests With Errors: 895
Errors That Led to False Arrest: 2
Request Failure Rate = 895/494,078 = 0.0018 = 0.18%
Request Success Rate = 99.82%
False Arrest Rate 1 (% of Errors) = 2/895 = 0.0022 = 0.22%
Mitigated Error Rate 1 (% of Errors) = 99.78%
False Arrest Rate 2 (% of Total) = 2/494,078 = 0.000004 = 0.0004%
Success or Mitigated Error Rate (% of Total) = 99.9996%
I would call this good, with room for improvement.
Welcome to The Register, and thank you for that excerpt from what I am sure was a very expensive color branding analysis produced by a very prestigious marketing firm.
It might help you to know that the Register and its associated forums are populated primarily by engineers, geeks, nerds, and jerks like me. Using marketing language is likely to earn you disdain, dislike, disgust, and ridicule, respectively, from those groups.
Now if you want to get on our good side, start talking about the internal mechanisms of the drive, any remotely related quantum effects (we love quanta!), or how many episodes of Doctor Who can fit on the drive.
Just don't pick a side in the tablet OS wars. You have been warned.
(Hint: No, you don't get to arbitrarily assume I "don't need" a particular feature. It must be AT LEAST as good as the iPad 3. Including the display.)
Translation: I am a fanboi who actually believes than an insane resolution is an absolute necessity. Apple told me to think different, so I think exactly what they tell me. I'm different!
From the video: "It is yet scientifically unproven that this clap sound is related to aurora borealis"
(I think they mean 'not yet scientifically proven', but I'll let that pass).
I should hope you let that pass. 'Yet scientifically unproven' is the same thing as 'not yet scientifically proven'.
'Unproven' means 'not proven', as opposed to 'disproved', which means 'proven false.'
So carbon dioxide has the same effect as hydrogen cyanide? Seriously? A tiny amount of a very strong poison is not the same as a tiny amount of a life giving gas.
I never said that. I used HCN as one example of how the levels we were discussing could be significant, not as the only example. Read up on analogies and how they work. As for that last sentence, in some situations they're exactly the same. One man's poison...
In fact a too small amount of CO2 will cause plants to stop growing. At levels below 30ppm plants do not grow.
Since we're already talking about levels an entire order of magnitude higher than that concentration, I don't see how that's really relevant to the discussion.
As for amount. All you are doing is making the figure look massive in the billions of tons. At that size the brain finds it hard to visualise and thinks it scary. To bring the figures down to manageable levels and to make them understandable you use ratios.
Yes, ratios are good. But when you use ratios, you need to understand ratios. The fact that you called a ratio an amount does not instill confidence that you have such an understanding.
Your own figures show a ratio of approximately 1.8:1 between current and pre-industrial CO2 levels. That's an increase of 80%. Yet you consider that insignificant. That is another indicator that you have trouble understanding ratios.
As for the logarithmic relationship, it's discussed quite in depth here: http://www.skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-co2-enhanced-greenhouse-effect-advanced.htm The net result: even the most conservative estimates mean a change on the scale we're talking about would mean at least a 0.5K increase in Earth's surface temperature; most put it at around 1.5K.
Skyrocketing? You call a change in CO2 levels to from 300ppm to over 550ppm is skyrocketing? Note that the figure is parts per million. So a tiny figures doubles. It's still a tiny amount.
300ppm (or 550ppm, or 250ppm for that matter) is not tiny amount, for two reasons. For one, it's not inherently tiny. It only takes 270ppm of airborne hydrogen cyanide to kill, for example. So 300ppm can be a very significant figure.
For two, 300ppm is not an amount. It's a ratio. To get the amount, you'd have to multiply the ppm figure by the size of the earth's atmosphere. Then you'll have an amount.
At any rate, an increase of over 80% may not be skyrocketing, but it certainly seems significant to me.
There is one very important piece you're missing. In order for this type of appliance to work, the user's browser has to be configured up to accept the appliance as a root certificate authority.
You can't just put this box on a network and steal everyone's traffic. You have to convince them the box is trustworthy (or hack their browser) as well.
If you inhale air from your top, and exhale air from your bottom*, you should be taking in lighter air and expelling heavier air. The difference may not be much, but if you're large enough and move enough air, plus have an internal mechanism to filter the heavier parts from the lighter parts, it might work.
* WHAT IS all that sniggering!? This is a serious scientific discussion!
That all modern society works thanks to these kind of experiments
Incorrect. All modern society works because of the physical realities that these kind of experiments prove in greater and greater detail. We could do exactly the same things we have been doing, except not doing these experiments, and still have the same results. The majority of modern technology is based on principles so much simpler than these experiments that we were able to design the prototypes for modern systems decades before the sites these experiments were conducted in were even built.
(Yes, your computer works because Quantum theory was proven using these kinds of experiments)
No, my computer works because it was designed with principles of physics much simpler than quantum theory. The consumer technology closest to the bleeding edge of physics today is GPS, and as I understand it, that's affected primarily by relativistic, not quantum, effects.
or that they are the most vital part of the next step in our evolution as a specie
Are you alleging that these experiments are creating biological side effects, or just misusing the term evolution?
is hard to grasp for them as well. After all, evolution's "just a theory"
Evolution is just a theory. And it's a damned good one. And those of us who understand what a theory is recognize that it's the best one we've got for the question of development and differentiation of life on this planet.
These experiments are incredibly useful to help us understand how our universe works. They pave the way for amazing advancements in all sorts of fields. But the benefits of these experiments for the average man in the street are decades away. Over-hyping them now does nobody any benefit.
I guarantee that there are individuals (most likely some in high office) in your country who are even more ignorant than your stereotypical view of us "Yanks". From your post, it seems quite possible that you are one.
Oh, and by the way, the singular of species is species. Specie is a term coined by ignorant people who don't understand science or Latin.
Richard 51's point was clearly about the original granting of the patent, and the subsequent upholding of the patent, not about allowing infringement. Your translation algorithm is worse than Google's.
"[S]o important that it warrants banning the sale or distribution of another companies [products] across the USA" should be the bar to which a technology rises in order to be granted a patent to begin with. That is, as you ask, the point of the patent system: to provide exclusive rights over a certain technology.
Since this technology is not that important (at least in the minds of the sane), the correct action would be to invalidate the patent. But that is almost impossible in this country, as mind-numbing obviousness is not considered a legal basis for invalidating such things, and the burden of proof is entirely upon the individual seeking to invalidate the patent.
I don't blame Apple, (or Motorola, etc.) They're businesses, and morality is not in their dictionary. Their sole purpose is to make money within the framework of their legal environment. It's not their fault that the legal system w/r/t patents is so broken in the US that something as obvious as this could be patented, upheld, and used to justify an import ban.
For these studies, number of page views or visitors are not as important as
1. The number of sites tracked, and
2. The nature of the sites tracked.
This is because the sites themselves will select for specific types of users, For example, one would expect a much larger percentage of Apple devices visiting Apple's site. But it's not that black and white. Shopping sites, for example, might attract a different mix than technical reference sites, which could attract a different mix than media-sharing sites, etc.
I have trouble believing 40,000 would be a broad enough sample of sites to balance site selection bias. By having so many more sites, StatCounter protects against this somewhat, but without knowing the nature of the sites they track, we don't know how well. Ironically, this is where weighting would actually be useful -- weighting the results of each site by the relative popularity and level of general appeal of that site would help offset the site selection bias.
People who realize that doing it during the week is likely to cause even more business disruption.
As for your other two time references , it's always "at night" somewhere, and there's pretty much always a popular sporting event going on. So those references are moot.
The problem with the hype about the y2k bug is evidenced in your post:
planes did not fall from the sky, boats did not crash into harbours, the nuclear arsenal didn't launch itself, reactors didn't go into meltdown
Exactly zero of those was a likely consequence of the y2k bug. The most likely consequences were services (such as electricity, gas, etc.) being shut off due to date-related billing errors -- and there were a few of those.
The bug was serious, and a lot of people worked hard to fix it, including myself. But it was overhyped, and it existed solely because our industry failed to plan properly to begin with. We made big mistakes in the decades leading up to the nineties and then scrambled to fix them, and for the most part we did.
Would you give a surgeon an award for removing a scalpel he left in the patient earlier? Would you award a General who came up with a masterstroke in a war, which was only still happening because he screwed up strategically earlier on? How about a football player who wins the game in the last minute with a goal that offsets an own-goal he made in the first minute?
If we didn't fix the problem, we'd have been rightly hated as the incompetents we would have been, When we did fix the problem, we got a sigh of relief, and some of us got bonuses we didn't deserve. What we deserved was a "Now, don't do it again!"
Ah, Lewis.
One can always count on you to appeal to rationality and then be completely irrational. Your numerical analysis has one major flaw. Let's take a quick look, shall we?
In other words the difference between the high-meat future and the low-meat one is just 12 parts per million. The OECD thinks that atmospheric CO2 is likely to climb from present levels of 394 ppm to 685ppm on that timescale, a rise of nearly 300 - 25 times the saving Mr Powell is offering. There is a notional aspiration to hold the level to 450 ppm, but this is widely acknowledged to be a lost cause and much modelling in recent times has sought to predict the consequences of a doubling in CO2 to say 780 ppm.
If the goal, as you say, is to hold the level to 450ppm, then we have an acceptable rise of 56ppm. So the "magic number" is not 291ppm ("nearly 300") but 235ppm. 12 ppm is just over 5% of than number. Now that's not that great -- it's almost exactly 1% more than the 4%+ you get if you use 291ppm. This may seem like splitting hairs, but I do it to show that the way you adjust and round the numbers is consistently to marginalize the results. This directly relates to the significant flaw in your logic.
To be fair, regardless of which side of the climate change debate a given commentator is on, they tend to make this same mistake. It also happens quite frequently in other fields.
The mistake, of course, is to expect any single proposition to be "the answer" -- in this debate especially. No-one who's read the science believes that one single aspect of human society is responsible for the entirety of the carbon emissions we have generated. So to expect one single change to reverse all of it is equally absurd.
No, we need to look at multiple solutions, carefully considering those which rise above a certain threshold -- something around 5%, I think...
The power to pick and choose which legal requests to abide to?
EVERYONE has the power to pick and choose which legal requests to follow, and which to not follow. If request is proper and is not followed, the legal body has the right to impose penalties.
While these two (the propriety of the request (call it R) and the imposition of penalties (call it P)) are not directly related, research indicates that R tends to vary directly and P tends to vary indirectly with a third variable L, which represents the individuals' access to legal representation in the given jurisdiction.
...I imagine that a bit of googling would show that the disaster you refer to has happened hundreds of times already...
Heresy! The faithful do not leave this site for tech news!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/20/acobe_flash_webcam_spying/
Pay no attention to the typodeliberate misspelling in the article path! El Reg's Staff Are Infallible!
The fact is, as unbelievable as it sounds, there are more people alive on the surface of the planet today, than people who have lived and died from the start of human history all added together.
Speaking of hyperbole...
According to Wikipedia:
"As of today, [world population] is estimated to number 7.018 billion by the United States Census Bureau."
"An estimate of the total number of humans who have ever lived was prepared by Carl Haub of the nonprofit Population Reference Bureau in 1995, and was subsequently updated in 2002; the updated figure totalled approximately 106 billion."
Now these numbers are from Wikipedia, which is not a primary source, but the good thing about Wikipedia is that they provide references: you can validate the numbers at the US Census Bureau and the Population Reference Bureau. You can check their methodologies, assumptions, etc. But I'm pretty sure you won't be able to find a plausible estimate which is significantly different. So I'm pretty confident in saying that current population is only roughly 7% of the total past populations.
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