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RK

2,568 karma · joined March 31, 2008

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RK··on Fight bike theft with the open source bike registry
How is this different/better than already established bike registries?

My bikes are registered here (for free):

http://www.bikeshepherd.org/

RK··on Misconceptions about evolution
Evolution is not true. It's not false either and any discussion about it being that is missing the point. Evolution is the best model we have to explain how life and species interact and evolve.

I think you mean that the "theory of evolution via natural selection" is the best model we have to explain the observed phenomena of evolution. Analogous to the Newtownian theory of gravity explaining the mechanics of observed terrestrial and celestial gravity. Gravity and evolution are simply there, how they occur requires a theoretical explanation.

RK··on Next for Nest: A Smoke Detector
Is this a satire piece?
RK··on How to Hire
Don’t limit your search to candidates in your area. This is especially true if you’re in the bay area; lots of people want to move here.

At first I thought I misread this paragraph, because I'm so used to people advocating remote hires at this point. I was expecting it to say "Don’t limit your search...lots of people don't want to move here."

RK··on Masao Yoshida, Nuclear Engineer and Chief at Fukushima Plant, Dies at 58
I just grabbed my radiobiology textbook off the shelf (Radiobiology for the Radiologist, for those keeping score). It claims that the latent period between radiation exposure and the appearance of a malignancy is years. The shortest is for leukemia, which averages 5-7 years. Solid tumors can take decades to appear.

This is certainly in line with the doctors' claims.

RK··on Is Wine Bullshit?
I've also noticed that people who don't like wine tend to gravitate towards white wines.

Why are they drinking wine if they don't like wine? What's the context for that?

RK··on Automating Card Games Using OpenCV and Python
Is this for cheating at cards with Google Glass? :)
RK··on Maps That Show How Americans Speak English Differently From Each Other
Seems the answer is to learn International Phonetic Alphabet.
RK··on Maps That Show How Americans Speak English Differently From Each Other
You got me there!
RK··on Maps That Show How Americans Speak English Differently From Each Other
What is the difference between "cray-ahn" and "cray-awn"?

Note that I pronounce "dawn" = "don".

Also, I say crayon as "crown", which either isn't very popular, or they just chose poor colors for the heatmap.

RK··on Zynga to Lay Off 520 Employees and shutter NY and LA Offices
Or it can be a great. Severance packages can be quite lucrative.

YMMV. I was part of a "10% workforce reduction", which included no severance packages. They gave us advanced notice, but I would have preferred the cash equivalent for that time instead.

I'm sure there's a rant about at will in there somewhere...

RK··on A 17 Year Old with Severe Autism and His Six Completed Coursera Courses
My take-away wasn't that MOOC's will "save" autistic people, but rather that MOOC's have the potential to offer a lot to people who struggle for various reasons in a typical classroom environment. This happens to be an extreme example.
RK··on PhD vs Startup
When I was a grad student there were a few people who couldn't pass the PhD qualifying exams. They basically were allowed to complete enough work for a masters degree, but not allowed to continue for a PhD. This is being forced out.
RK··on Eleven people across UK arrested for racist comments on Twitter
I think part 2 of the Article is what people worry could easily be abused, especially when you include wording like "for the protection of health or morals". "Morals" in particular being something that is subject to very wide interpretation.

Viewing from the lens of an another American political issue: separation of church and state, an aspect of freedom of religion. There are people in the US who strongly believe that we should have state sanctioned prayer in schools and feel this doesn't conflict with religious freedom. What they fail to take into account is that at some point their children could be in the school holding prayers for Not_Their_Religion. The point being that separation of church and state is the only policy that protects everyone's religious freedom. Analogously, you can argue that allowing all speech is the only way to protect everyone's freedom of speech.

I really am not an expert on this. This is more of a dorm-room, after-hours student discussion level of understanding on my part and likely more a cultural reflection than a strong reflection of legal foundations, etc.

RK··on Eleven people across UK arrested for racist comments on Twitter
I think the author of the article is probably someone an average person might consider an "activist" or the like, but I (an American) also feel like the report is alarming. It sounds like the kind of thing you'd expect from Saudi Arabia, rather than a democratic society.

I suppose in the US we are more in the all-or-nothing camp when it comes to free speech (at least idealistically).

Edit: Most people in the UK would support this action - the police are arresting people who have made hateful, racist or threatening comments. Why is that bad?

The concern is that what is perfectly fine one day (and really truly legitimate) can be "bad" the next. Better not to have a category of "bad" speech at all. Otherwise you may be at whim of political fashion.

RK··on Student's self-driving car tech wins Intel science fair
Everytime I see a news report from a field that I'm familiar with, I get disappointed...

The Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect

http://seekerblog.com/2006/01/31/the-murray-gell-mann-amnesi...

RK··on Why do professional photographers charge so much?
EDIT: Changed my mind. What I wrote below is not the argument the OP was making and your criticism stands...

Though, if the photographer holds copyright they can still charge per digital copy (per use?) of the same photo.

---

You're missing the point. Unless they retouch the photo before every subsequent digital "reprint", there's no reason to charge per digital copy of the same photo.

The OP is saying "charge what you're going to charge, but don't keep charging for each subsequent copy".

RK··on Why do professional photographers charge so much?
The photographer still holds the copyright to those photos because they took them.

That's only by custom. Legally the photographer holds the copyright as soon as they take the photo, but they could just as easily assign full copyright to the person hiring them as a matter of course.

Most photos of people at weddings, family portraits, etc have little commercial value, except to the people who are in the photos. So you can see how this feels like double/triple/n-times charging, as it has suddenly become a monopoly backed by federal copyright law.

RK··on Why do professional photographers charge so much?
When I got married I put an ad on Craigslist seeking a photographer willing to do "work for hire" so that I would have the copyright. This is how photographers hire other photographers (e.g. for multi photographer shoots). I got many more responses along the lines of "how dare you ask for work-for-hire" than actual offers.

I had to spell out explicitly to the photographer that I hired that only I would own the copyrights to the photos and they she could not use them on her website, etc.

This was a few years ago. I think it's more common today for people to include the digital copies in the price or sell them to you for an additional fee.

RK··on Boxfish: Realtime Index of Every Word Spoken on TV
Sounds similar to SnapStream. "Monitor everything said on TV"

http://snapstream.com

RK··on Show HN: Automatic weekly meal planner, also plans your leftovers
Some of the recipes call for 0.13 cups or 0.06 cups, etc. I assume you can convert that to other units like tablespoons / teaspoons for the non-metric inclined?
RK··on Banyan, the "GitHub of Science", is now in public beta
Are you planning on releasing a Linux client?

When you say science, git, and LaTeX, Linux is often the next word in the sequence...

RK··on Elsevier Has Bought Mendeley
How do I cancel my Mendeley account?

Edit: If you log in to your account and go to account details there's a "delete your account" link at the bottom. When you click the link you get a dialogue box that says this:

We're sorry you want to go, but if you must... Deleting your account will remove all of your personal data from Mendeley Web, and limit the functionality of Mendeley Desktop. Your data is still present in Mendeley Desktop so it can be archived or exported.

If your profile is visible to search engines then Mendeley may show up in relevant search results until the search engines re-index the site (this is an ongoing process but should occur within a couple of weeks.) Until this occurs, clicking on the search result link will load a Mendeley page stating that the profile cannot be found.

RK··on A less lonely elderly
I'm fortunate that I'm able to email and skype with my 90 year old grandmother.

I do think it's interesting to see how this will play out with people who are used to being online. My grandmother is probably able to function online at the level she does because started on AOL 15+ years ago. Of course she still uses an AOL email address. So in someways she's ahead of the tech curve, but in others, she's quite behind. I'm sure this will be much the same story when we are that age.

RK··on Bitmessage - a P2P communications protocol to send encrypted messages
I was just recently wondering if you could use the bitcoin-style blockchain concept to implement encrypted "email". It looks like this does exactly that...

Their white paper seems to address some issues such as proof-of-work, spam, and scalability (you'd likely have a much larger blockchain than with bitcoin).

I remember a proposal from a while ago by someone else that was essentially a PGP-encrypted RSS scheme. You encrypted each message for the intended recipient and recipients would subscribe (or choose not to) to a sender's feed.

Bitmessage seems to have the advantage of being peer-to-peer, so RSS broadcast is not an issue.

RK··on Father of all humankind is 340,000 years old
Just a side note: They quote a person from the Ronin Institute, which is a virtual research institute for independent academics. They've received a fair amount of press as an alternative model for scholarship / academia.

http://ronininstitute.org

RK··on Poll: If you're in the US, What State Do You Live In?
My impression from talking to people in the area is that the investor money is in Santa Fe, but most of the programming jobs are in Albuquerque. Of course Albuquerque is about 10X the size of Santa Fe.
RK··on Harvard Forced Dozens to Leave in Cheating Scandal
I think it's pretty common at "elite" schools in the US to have unsupervised, take home tests. Where I went to college we often had closed book, timed take home tests and I think compliance was actually extremely high.
RK··on There's no avoiding Google+
Why not just use IMAP for gmail access?
RK··on NY newspaper runs interactive map with names, addresses of gun permit holders
In the spirit of "using words correctly", assault rifles are incredibly tightly regulated by the US federal government and various states. Assault rifles are fully automatic weapons (technically select-fire) and have not been legally manufactured for sale since 1986 and require a special federal permit. The rifle used by the person in Connecticut was not an assault rifle, but is categorized as an "assault weapon" by the government (essentially a crippled version of an assault rifle or, as others put it, a scary looking version of a basic semiautomatic rifle).

The short answer is yes, assault rifles are on a separate registry, but NY states appears to essentially ban both assault rifles and assault weapons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_rifle#United_States

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_New_York

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