nimai

It's because eleven notes is the maximum that fit "nicely" into the harmonic series our eardrums pick up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_series_(music)

I'm expecting everyone to just go completely insane within the next few years - custom-tuned computer systems synchronized with each other will make people feel "lucky" enough that they go completely manic and need to be hospitalized.

How do people decide what language, platform, engine, etc. to use these days? It's articles like this that make me want to give up tech and start working as a musician or artist.

Oh come on. Intel, you're no fun anymore. Also, your opcodes are complete shit. In case someone's actually reading.

Why? What problems would prosecuting them solve, beside the reactionary need for "justice"? It's not like they're ever working in big data again.

If I ran a motel in the middle of nowhere, and I was using wireless security cameras, it might make sense to have a separate, secured network in addition to the open network guests use. In this situation, hiding the network would make sense for purely aesthetic reasons - guests connecting to the internet would only have one SSID to choose from. As the article points out, any other uses of SSID hiding are either useless, or create additional problems.

They're a non-profit tutoring organization focusing on creative writing skills. This is one of their fundraising methods.

http://www.826la.org/about/

Fructose has proven to be particularly harmful - your liver shuts down while it's being processed, leading to all sorts of fun side effects.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fructose#Liver_disease

I think the point is, stop arguing about these things and get coding.

You're joking, right? The only people HDCP has been affecting have been legitimate customers. Pirates have had HD video for years.

I thought "smart fingers" would be another "measure your own hands" hack, perhaps with improvements and tips of some sort.

Who exactly would buy these things? They're clearly not designed as a precision measuring tool, but how often do casual users need to measure things? Enough to give up a socket or two to the wall-wart this thing will require?

"In other words, the only thing that will change about computing is the shape of the tail fins."

This article seems geared toward older people, explaining things that frighten and confuse them in terms they can easily understand.

Nothing new or interesting here.

I noticed this gem in the "Programming Scientists" section:

"Putting worcestershire sauce on volume 1 of Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming and stabbing it with a fork until pudding-like."

"For his valor during that October 2007 mission, the White House announced Friday that the 25-year-old sergeant, of Hiawatha, Iowa, would become the first living service member to receive the Medal of Honor, the military’s most prestigious award, for action during any war since Vietnam."

I think a better question is, what intelligent, tech-savvy person still gets their phone from their carrier?

This appears to be a common scam: http://www.mysears.com/Vizio-32-in-Diagonal-Class-1080p-Eco-...

This is absolutely disgusting. The product page: http://www.sears.com/shc/s/p_10153_12605_SPM1880500503P?mv=r... has only a tiny indicator that this is offered by a third-party seller, and searching for the seller's email shows numerous other frauds.

Bald eagles aren't pathogens, or vectors for disease. They generally stay out of our way.

If your content really is that good, having a single social person start reading it is more than enough attention to get the word out. Not a single one of the blogs I subscribe to have ever promoted themselves beyond selling merchandise or showing up at conventions - and these are entirely the result of demand, not any initiative on the part of the author.

The only thing promotion does is skew search results in favor of your blog, at the expense of other blogs which address the same problem. If your writing really is better, this is completely unnecessary.

It seems like you crave attention more than anything, which is certainly a nobler goal than blogging strictly for money, but in the long run, you're only going to attract readers who also crave attention. Once you're no longer capable of giving them that attention, they will go somewhere else.

There is a "wall" between blogs like yours and the ones that really take off, and it's entirely based on the author's motivations.

Why not extend that logic to malaria itself? Or cholera, HIV, or any other pathogen? Perhaps start selling "Save the plague!" bumper stickers?

Let's say you are a member of X community - vintage cars, death metal, whatever - and your interest in this is completely independent of reputation or profit.

You actively pursue this interest in your free time, and find that many of the problems you encounter have already been solved, and solutions are already available on the internet.

As you develop your skills, the problems you encounter become more and more situation-specific, and you find it helpful to ask questions on forums related to what you are doing.

At some point, you get annoyed at the disorganized nature of the forum. You end up repeatedly linking people to other threads, which are usually poorly formatted, and difficult to find. You decide enough is enough.

You set up a blog. Your only motivation is to solve common problems rapidly - any monetization merely helps offset the costs of web hosting. This is your hobby, after all.

As time passes, your blog begins to develop its own unique "voice" in your community - you have a specific set of problems related to your community that you are very good at solving, and you have built up a significant amount of reference material that others find very, very helpful when they are starting out.

When the blog reaches a certain critical mass, you end up with users who are intimidated by the amount of information on your site. Not everyone has time to browse through your entire archive, but they still want a decent "baseline" of expertise to work with.

At this point, enough people will want a printed version of your content that it wouldn't make sense not to offer it. If the demand for your skill set is great enough, you could make a career off of it.

Professional writing is paid research, more than anything. Why do you need to convince people that the research you've already done is worth reading? Why can't you help people with their own research instead?

Even if your SEO skills are garbage, a basic wordpress install gives Google more than enough information for people to find you when they need help. You shouldn't be writing anything that is already available through a Google search. Why waste your time repeating someone else's work?

If you feel a real need to replace someone else's work, because you feel it can be done better or more completely, why aren't you talking to this person, or even actively working with them? If this really is your hobby, and you really are an expert, why should they feel threatened?

Sorry for the long rant, but I really, really, really find the blogosphere completely disgusting right now.

There should not be competition among people who are genuinely interested in the same topic. Especially on the internet - there is just no excuse.

Imagine you're doing a sector-by-sector scan of a massive, corrupted hard drive taken from a crime scene, trying to find out who the owner of the drive was. It makes no sense to do a rigorous analysis of the first possible file fragment that turns up - the odds are, it's just some random data file that could be found in any system. How many people have memories of Denver, yet have never been there in person? How many people have been to Denver, with no records remaining of their visit?

There is no reason to believe this man ever had anything to do with Denver, especially given the reliability of his "memories" thus far. How could someone be named "benjaman", yet not turn up in any written records, anywhere?

I have very vivid, intense memories of Las Vegas, that are tied to emotional experiences I have not had elsewhere. I spent only a week there, and paid for everything in cash. Would it be useful to start the search there?

The only reason the method I suggested would work, is because it relies entirely on weighted statistical analysis of what region-specific symbols this man has been exposed to. You can't fake strong recognition - it reflects changes to neural structure over long periods of time, and has a very low probability of false positives.

I would go with an FMRI, while showing photos of symbols from different areas - unique street signs, fast food restaurants, anything identifiable and strictly regional. Start with a broader scope to get a calibrated reading of his recognition - show signs and brands from across Asia, Europe and the Americas, and narrow things down gradually as recognition happens.

Once this is narrowed down to a region of the country (i.e., if the In-N-Out logo triggers a strong hunger response, you could narrow things down to the west coast), start working with landmarks, TV station logos, commonly used community areas like highway exits, streets, and eventually houses. I wouldn't be surprised if they could pinpoint an exact address using this method.

The problem with AI translation isn't that the AI isn't working, it's that humans don't express their thoughts as clearly and consistently as they'd like to think they do. Even a human can't create a 100% accurate translation of a text without knowing exactly what the author was thinking, and language is a very poor mechanism of conveying thoughts, based on the author's expectations of what different words correspond to in other people's minds.

I do expect language to become obsolete, i.e. showing someone an illustration of something instead of describing it to them. English might be the last language in use, but its vocabulary is only going to decrease.

That's only using the older variant of hangman where you start with the first and last letters. I think the article is pretty clearly discussing the more modern, "wheel of fortune" variety.

Most of the times I've read something and had my "mind blown", it was something written respectfully and humbly, with the author taking their time to explain each of their supporting points. With this nonsense, if a layperson wanted to ask someone more knowledgeable what these things mean, they would have a very difficult time, and would probably get laughed at when it is actually understood what they are talking about, leaving them with a bitter taste in their mouth and a lingering distrust for intellectuals.

Evolution was an epic kludge. Good biology professors already teach this.

Also, if more people thought of stupidity and bad behavior as software problems, education might actually get the funding it deserves.

This is exactly what I mean when I say the right to privacy is obsolete - by itself, it's no longer capable of protecting the freedoms it was originally intended to preserve. We need something better.

I think this is a good indication that the right to privacy is obsolete. If an investigator can hear a conversation you're having in your house using amplification technology, who needs a warrant?

The whole point of the right to privacy, as I understand it, is protection against over-zealous police forces enforcing unjust laws. If you're doing something in private, and it doesn't affect anyone, you should be allowed to do it, regardless of the law.

We need a right to anonymous private activity, regardless of where or how it takes place.

This is based on the assumption that the car is only ever used on public roads. It's usually a safe assumption, but data is still being transmitted from private property whenever the car is parked.

102 paragraphs with no sections, organization, or even an introduction to the article?

A title that immediately puts you on the defensive?

Quotes like this? “I don’t know anyone I would say is smarter than Nathan,” Gates, an investor in IV, once observed.