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bmunro

576 karma · joined November 3, 2008

benjamin.munro@gmail.com
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bmunro··on June 8th: the day your phone won’t stop ringing
In Australia, Internode has made IPv6 available to its customers.
bmunro··on Sony Encourages Linux On Their Phones
Whether you void the warranty or not may depend on the laws concerning warranties in your country/state.
bmunro··on Osama bin Laden Is Dead
Restrictions on liquids on international flights have been eased a bit, at least on Australian airlines.

You can have a few small containers - up to 100mL in each. I was able to fly with toothpaste, deodorant, insect repellent and sunscreen in my carry-on luggage on a recent trip. Nail clippers are allowed too.

Funnily enough, there are no such restrictions on domestic flights.

bmunro··on Researchers have successfully teleported wave packets of light
Why are people assuming that 'teleportation' means instantaneous travel?

To me, teleporting has always meant transferring the information that describes an object to another location, where the object is reproduced. This transfer of information occurs via light/radio waves or similar.

bmunro··on At work? Try this Hacker News homepage inspired by Node [SFW]
Where I work, we have to ssh tunnel. Our cvs, bug tracker, internal websites and other servers are all located on the other side of the world, and only accessible through a tunnel.
bmunro··on Color
precipice
bmunro··on Student-designed solar car smashes world speed record
I think that this is a record for a car using silicon based solar cells. The car came first in the silicon section of the 2009 world solar challenge, and fourth overall.
bmunro··on Brave New World banned from High School curriculum
But it doesn't take place entirely in London.

The reservation is in New Mexico. Two of the characters go on a trip there and meet a white man that lives among the native americans, but is not fully accepted by them.

TThe above is just another comment by someone that does not appear to have read the book.

bmunro··on Pong written in both flash and HTML5. Left side is flash, right side is HTML5.
The html5 side has a nice smooth movement for me. The flash is more jerky, and changes speed. This is on Chromium 9.
bmunro··on Facebook Down, Like Buttons Vanish, Internet Implodes
It's cornflour, not flower
bmunro··on Dropbox is hiring a Web Engineer
No, someone actually offered him a sysadmin job. He wasn't very impressed.
bmunro··on The effects of the internet: Fast forward
The Eloi are the more unthinking group.
bmunro··on Google Blasts Apple's New iPhone Advertising Terms
To avoid the paywall, copy the title of the article and paste it into google. The google link will give you the full article.
bmunro··on Freedom In Fashion: No IP, No Patents, No Licensing
The comments for this video are a lot more intelligent than usually found on Youtube.
bmunro··on Southampton, UK to Edinburgh, UK - Google Maps
Google's directions from Sydney to Hobart take you to Hobart, IN, USA via Japan and ask you to "Kayak across the Pacific Ocean", twice.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...

bmunro··on Apple & HTML5
Everything except the VR seems to work in Chromium (daily build). VR requires hardware acceleration.
bmunro··on Touristiness heatmap by number of public photos
Not tricky at all. Winter is in June, July, August
bmunro··on Wikipedia's new look
This doesn't work for me. (Chrome/Linux)

Sound quite cool though.

bmunro··on Wolfire open sourcing Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD, and Penumbra Overture
Only the code is being open sourced. I presume this means that the graphics, sounds and other resources will stay closed. Thus, if you want the games, you will need to buy them.
bmunro··on Is The USA Heading For Third World Status? (2007)
Note that the article is three years old.
bmunro··on Why Aussie groceries cost so much
And banks. A lot of the biggest companies in Australia are banks.
bmunro··on NYU Professor Scott Galloway: Ouch
The professor is the founder of redenvelope.com. Potentially relevant to mixergy, but I'm not sure how interesting an interview it would be.
bmunro··on Firefox fades in popularity
The address bar in Chrome works so much better than the separate address and search fields in Firefox. This is the main reason that I switched to Chrome.
bmunro··on Canada’s Marvelous Mortgage and Banking System?
Canada remains the only industrialized country in the world that has survived the last two years of financial and economic stress without a single bank failure.

Australia hasn't had a bank failure since the early 1990s

bmunro··on Search Engine for Hackers
I tried the country search, but the country part was ignored:

'country' filter ignored. Please login to use the 'country' filtering option.

bmunro··on Bloom Box Fuel Cell Device is Revealed
The box also produces carbon dioxide as a byproduct--a potential downside depending on how much it generates.

The amount it generates is of little concern - what matters is where the methane (or other fuel) comes from. If the methane is produced from fresh biomass then the box is carbon neutral. But if the fuel comes from oil then it won't be carbon neutral.

bmunro··on Artificial Flight and Other Myths
which was the whole point of the article I think - our current technology can easily make many different things that can fly, but we are still incapable of making something that really flies like a bird

I read it differently. The aim is to make something that can fly. But we, from our position as birds, don't accept flying as anything other than bird-like flying - with wings and feathers.

Leaving the analogy, I think the article is saying that humans generally don't accept anything as artificial intelligence unless it exactly mimics a human, or is indistinguishable from a human. Thus the attempts to work out exactly how the brain (or wing) works and to replicate it.

In reality, AI research has progressed considerably - visual recognition, autonomous navigation, question answering etc. But these are only 'gliding', and are only leading towards 'other flight-like phenomena' such as bat and insect flight. We don't accept them as parts of an artificial intelligence because we think (rightly or wrongly) that there is something more to intelligence than just a set of special algorithms and feed back loops.

bmunro··on Why Poor Countries Are Poor
So the reason that poor countries are poor is Corruption
bmunro··on [dead]
For those that are wondering what Elvises are; they are large helicopters that drop water on bushfires.
bmunro··on Anic: Faster than C, safer than Java, simpler than *sh
And it doesn't actually do any code generation yet.
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