sigmaxipi

Note that the NewEgg's refusal is based on the original OS being missing rather than a new OS being installed according to that email. My guess is that the user formatted the HD before installing Linux. Most OEM PCs now come with a recovery partition which is used to perform a factory reset. If the user erased this partition, then NewEgg would be unable to reset the device to its initial state for testing. It would be similar to the user returning the device by not returning important CDs.

This appears to be another reactionless drive [1] that sci-fi authors and crackpots come up with every few years. There are many variants of these designs [2] and a drive based on the Casimir effect is just one of them. However, they all tend to violate a critical law of physics or depend on a custom theory of physics [3]

BTW, the original article at http://www.onislam.net/english/health-and-science/science/45... goes into slightly more detail about her invention and mentions that it's related to a differential sail.

[1] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ReactionlessDrive [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Propulsion_Physics... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertialess_drive

Why? Android, Chrome, Firefox, etc have app stores and are still open. App stores are orthogonal to openness.

Customers not on a contract and willing to avoid AT&T, Verizon and Sprint can avoid quite a bit of fees. E.g. T-mobile has a $30 plan for 100 minutes, 5GB of 3G (and EDGE after that), and unlimited SMSs. The 100 minutes is problematic, but I use Google Voice so I can just use my computer for phone calls at home. And at $0.10 per minute overages, it's still cheaper than any of the contract plans.

There are also other carriers in the US with cheap plans if you're willing to shop around.

What I find really peculiar is how the colors after composition and postprocessing are so different from the other images of Earth at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Marble It seems similar to the problem of determining the 'true' color of the Martian sky: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/spotlight/spirit/a12_20040128...

>Women's life experiences are thus characterized by a constant and unending fear of sexual assault. >When you ask men the same question---to list what they do to protect themselves in their daily life... --> the answer is just about nothing.

Why is this fear a bad thing for women? Interesting fact: men are more likely to be victims of violent crime[1] and this has been pretty much true throughout history[2] though it is getting better. That fear is probably quite useful in keeping them alive since women are only half as likely to be victims of assaults by strangers[3]

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20060926004448/http://www.ojp.usd...

[2] http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...

[3] http://web.archive.org/web/20060927115258/http://www.ojp.usd...

Windows does a good job of abstracting the hardware away and preventing the OEMs from tweaking the APIs so this isn't an issue in most cases. The major exception is for the large game developers who have to buy tons of various configurations of GPUs and motherboards in order to test various configurations. Basic hardware accelerated graphics works well across platforms but AAA games use complex shaders and heavy optimizations which are based on the incomplete and broken implementations of GPU vendors.

Why not? 'This' is just like 'me too' or '+1'. By itself, it's a waste of a comment, but since harlanlewis elaborated, the "This." was just a prologue to the rest of the comment.

FYI, he original link has the actual images: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/transit-mir...

>if you lived at the right point in time and weren't a slave You've just excluded the majority of Athenians[1]. If you generalize "slave" to "bottom Nth percentile of the population, the conditions are much better now than they were before. While someone low on the social pyramid in ancient Greece probably had no chance of contacting someone like Plato, many more people in modern times would be able to write a letter (or email, tweet, forum post, etc) to someone famous and actually receive a response.

[1] "According to the Ancient Greek historian Thucydides, the Athenian citizens at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War (5th century BC) numbered 40,000, making with their families a total of 140,000 people in all. The metics, i.e. those who did not have citizen rights and paid for the right to reside in Athens, numbered a further 70,000, whilst slaves were estimated at between 150,000 to 400,000.[7] Hence, approximately a tenth of the population were adult male citizens, eligible to meet and vote in the Assembly and be elected to office." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Athens#Geographical_...

In some cases, it's even worse. Low end netbooks running Chrome will load the page and then the entire machine locks up as the WebGL starts rendering and takes over the weak GPU. Easy way of DOSing someone is to send them a WebGL link if they're on a weak computer.

Augmented vision technology makes perfect sense for blind and vision impaired users. For example, the latest version of Google Goggles (http://www.google.com/mobile/goggles) performs image recognition on the live camera feed and speaks out the results as it recognizes items such as banknotes. Running the same software on a headset would allow the user to receive an aural interpretation of text or images around them.

All you need to do is put quotes around the phrase. Or if you want pages that must contain all the words in any order, place quotes around each word. Or just use Verbatim Search: http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

FYI, if you want to read a comic about modern soldiers going back in time to fight in Rome: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Romana_(comics)

A gTLD has an initial price of "$185,000, with an annual fee of $25,000". Someone who wants to run a piracy website will probably opt for a cheaper domain. And anyone who can shell out tham much cash can probably afford a lawyer or some other level of indirection to hide their true identity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level_domain#June_2...

Regarding #2, there is also the possibility that if a civilization converted its light cone into computronium, we would not notice. Maybe because they used exotic matter as a substrate and that matter did not strongly interact with the rest of the universe. Or maybe they figured out how to "escape" this universe by creating a computer that can perform and infinite amount of computation without affecting its surroundings. This idea is explored in Greg Egan's Permutation City where the main plot involves creating a new pocket universe for simulated beings with access to an infinite amount of computation but can be bootstrapped on a normal computer.

There is an interesting rule in COPPA that is the cause of this bad experience: http://www.ftc.gov/privacy/coppafaqs.shtm#teen

For sites that choose to age-screen, age information should be asked in a way that does not invite falsification. See Question 39, below. In addition, we recommend that sites that choose to age-screen employ temporary or permanent cookies to prevent children from back-buttoning to change their age in order to circumvent the parental consent requirement or obtain access to the site

...

However, as described in Question 38, above, should you choose to block children under 13, it is important that you design your age collection input screens in a manner that does not encourage children to provide a false age in order to gain access to your site. If you take reasonable measures to screen for age, then you are not responsible if a child misstates his or her age. For example:

...

Not encouraging children to falsify their age information, for example, by stating that visitors under 13 cannot participate on your website or should ask their parents before participating. In addition, a site that does not ask for neutral date of birth information but rather simply includes a check box stating “I am over 12 years old” would not be considered a neutral age-screening mechanism.

FYI, you can still log into a Chromebook with a Anonymous/Incognito/Guest account and use it as long as you don't care about persistence. Chromebooks are designed to be orthogonal to a Google account so changing the accounts that are attached to a given Chromebook is trivial.

Brin is not the CTO of Google: "Sergey Brin co-founded Google Inc. in 1998. Today, he directs special projects. From 2001 to 2011, Sergey served as president of technology, where he shared responsibility for the company’s day-to-day operations with Larry Page and Eric Schmidt."

http://www.google.com/about/corporate/company/execs.html#ser...

Eric Schmidt is no longer a programmer, but he was one of the authors of lex: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_(software)

FYI, this is a reference to a previous Google bomb where Microsoft was the target: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb#History

I guess there are teams at MS that are lucky enough to be able to avoid the policy against Easter Eggs: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/larryosterman/archive/2005/10/21/483...

There is a difference between being a plaintiff in a patent case and using patents offensively. In the Skyline case, it looks like Skyline sued Google over Google Earth: http://googlecopyright.blogspot.com/2007/03/google-prevails-...

If you have Chrome, open the link in Incognito mode and it will let you read the entire article.

Compare this with two python solutions. The first was when I was learning python and is similar to how I would solve it in C. The second is a copy of that haskell solution:

  tri = [[75],[95, 64]...]
  maxes = [x[:] for x in tri]
  for y in range(len(maxes)-2, -1, -1):
    for x in range(len(maxes[y])-1, -1, -1):
      maxes[y][x] = maxes[y][x] + max(maxes[y+1][x], maxes[y+1][x+1])
  print maxes[0][0]

  print reduce(
    lambda y, x: map(
      lambda(t): t[0] + max(t[1], t[2]),
      zip(x, y, y[1:])),
    tri[::-1])[0]

I find the first one much easier to comprehend even though they do the same thing and use the same general algorithm of reduce()ing the rows. In general, I find procedural code much easier to read when I take a look at it months down the line.