bOR_
Joined 18 years ago
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112
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40
Member since
May 15
Recent submissions
Comment · 12 years ago
Comment · 14 years ago
Because many programmers are not in the website business. I'm a scientist, working with long-term simulation models. My problem is trying to find a good model representation of the data that I observe. I keep my eyes open towards probabilistic relational programming languages (such as http://www.openbugs.info ), but so far I haven't found a way to apply it to my work.
Lisp is useful to me (more useful than ruby or C was), predominantly because I can work with emacs/swank/slime and change and query my program while I'm observing its output.
Comment · 14 years ago
He's a big data consultant, and all he has is a hammer :-).
Comment · 14 years ago
Isn't it actually the reverse?: don't the EU actions actually stop the previous practice of Telco's to subsidize the calling behavior of the majority by adding additional fees to a smaller group that heavily uses roaming?
I'm not sure what the free-market theory on that is (it is an interesting topic though) - making a smaller group of customers pay (and have limited alternatives but to pay) to be more competitive in other parts of your market.
Comment · 14 years ago
I understand the the telco's are very competitive, but for some reason, free market competition appeared to fail to have an effect on prices like texting or data roaming. Oddly enough, you roam through various network using the internet, and there free market seems to have worked between fiber providers into keeping the prices low and efficiency high.
It seems that Kroes only launched the inquiry into telco's as part of her commision on competition. The price regulations came after her time there (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commission_roaming_reg...)
Comment · 14 years ago
She's great (or at least the dutch think she is), and did a good job as well when she was commissioner on competition, handing out some big fines to business cartels. see
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a854010e-dd84-11db-8d42-000b5df106...
I think we first were a bit disappointed that she was no longer keeping businesses on the straight and narrow, when she moved from competition to the digital agenda: it seemed like she was rearranged to a position where she would be less dangerous. In retrospect, that impression might have been wrong, and she might have just decided that keeping the digital world from being corrupted (by roaming fees, broadband prices, copyright agreements) was a more important thing to go after now than business cartels :-).
Comment · 14 years ago
Wish there were a bit more instructions on how to get it running using lein2 / project.clj. Maybe that happens this weekend :-). I am a bit at a loss how to start the webserver used by c2 (and if its even included) from within emacs/slime/swank.
Comment · 15 years ago
So, can google put a patch in Chrome that whenever it runs at VUPEN, everything VUPEN has on that computer is shipped over to Google? :-).
Google has/had the 'do no evil' in their philosophy, and disabling a scheme that misuses their software for cyber-warfare sounds like a good thing.
Comment · 15 years ago
They test a few different schemes, but it is sort of embarrassing that in their final summary graph (figure 9), they use the arrowheads again to indicate which representation performs best.
Comment · 15 years ago
http://www.hiv.lanl.gov/content/index
For sentimental value: HIV sequence data (and other data) from 1980 till now. Did my thesis on these ;-).
In general, there is an enormous amount of gene sequence data around, not just HIV.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/
Whole genome sequences of eukaryotes (including humans): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genomes/leuks.cgi
Comment · 16 years ago
In my perception the wikileaks of iraq / afghanistan / cablegate got far more tv-news exposure throughout the year than facebook did. It is true that wikileaks itself became only an issue until nov/dec, but its leaks before that had high news value.
Comment · 16 years ago
Its tricky to answer, as I am limited to browsing wikipedia pages on these topics and no more knowledgeable than you are on the topic :-). One obvious alternative to your line of thinking is that the matter+anti-matter that is created in a vacuum is not 'normal' (using your position on normal matter), and has no mass.
One of the wikipedia pages seems to support that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_particles "As such, virtual particles are also excitations of the underlying fields, but are detectable only as forces but not particles."
It seems to have something to do with normally existing only for a very short time, and affecting the universe only on a very short range that these virtual particles get away with appearing to not having a mass from the point of view of the rest of the universe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_particles
Comment · 16 years ago
I am not a physicist either, but your concept of vacuum does need updating.
The idea of matter and antimatter particles popping up out of vacuum has been around for some time, and appears to be the driving force behind black hole evaporation (hawking radiation) . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation
According to wiki, there's a few other natural processes where we can detect particles forming and disappearing again in vacuum, but my understanding of these processes is nihil :-). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_fluctuations#Virtual_par...
Anyway, to me the article is exciting.
"Do we know the exact locations of our servers, and, if so, do we have physical access to our servers?"
"We do not know the exact locations of our servers.We do not have physical access to our servers."
"Rest assured that we do have something in place that will destroy our hard disks in a matter of minutes and turn them into little more than coasters."
Those two answers seem contradictory.