silentOpen

I hate those things too but why do we care if you do? Maybe provide some substance and stop whining about groupthink?

I love that it provides a systematic way of thinking about structures and proving properties of said structures that I am working with in code. It's amazingly powerful to say "type t defines a monoid with operation k: t -> t and identity Nil" because it comes with a whole slew of properties and theorems. It meshes very well with strongly typed functional languages that support algebraic data types (e.g. Haskell and OCaml).

I don't much care for theoretical abstract algebra (e.g. non-abelian groups of order 18) and I am by no means a master (or even an amateur!) but I find abstract algebra's concepts useful and I hope to learn more!

I've found that mostly it's just that mathematics is usually taught extremely poorly. Mathematicians and mathematics educators typically gloss over definitions and use terrible notation. Further compounding the problem, the mechanical aspects of mathematical computation are rarely formally defined -- talking about elementary operators and objects of a mathematical subfield is rare.

I've recently discovered abstract algebra and I love it. We need to find and celebrate good explanations of mathematics both to do better work and to give future generations the mathematical education we didn't get.

Sorry but this just isn't how the web works. Scraping is identical to crawling is identical to browsing is identical to caching.

Republishing someone else's work without their permission is probably copyright infringement but just downloading and parsing it is not.

This also greatly improves your and your fellow drivers' gas mileage.

This also occurs with semi-public services (at least in the US). For example, the MBTA ("T") in Boston serves largely those without cars: college students, tourists, people with low income. Unfortunately, due to extreme mismanagement, the T regularly decides to cut services and increase fares... and things just get worse from there.

If you're a private business, you have to find a way to escape the spiral. If you're a government service, you need a government that isn't incompetent, corrupt, and myopic.

While we're wishing for things...

I want a full-size e-paper display so I can edit code/use command lines outside in full sunlight. Think software development in a grove of trees from a hammock.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marijuana :

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime claims in its 2008 World Drug Report that typical US retail prices are 10-15 dollars per gram (approximately $430 per ounce).[76]

So $50/oz doesn't seem very high (ha) when the legalization would bring the price down more than $50.

Awesome!

You don't serve user loads from infrastructure that "follows the moon". Google does a ton of batch processing and it doesn't care where it computes so long as it has data (either migrating with it or available via tubes).

Without having read any docs or patents, I'd say some sort of bimetallic strip: two metals, different resistances/heat expansion constants. It's how they used to make turn signal timers.

While HTML is not a network protocol, it is still a data format that is standardized and to which many implementations need to conform -- a "protocol" in layman's terms.

Is XMPP a protocol? Yeah, it specifies a machine-machine communication system but it also specifies the structure and formatting of the messages it sends.

Where do you draw the line? If it were a technical discussion, you'd be right that HTML isn't a "protocol". From TFA, I got the sense that they didn't mean a network protocol but something more like a "standard" (without the nasty connotations of that term).

Why do you say that? After humans spread across the globe in hunter-gatherer societies, we were pretty unlikely to destroy ourselves.

Today we could easily destroy ourselves with nuclear war. It may not be likely but it's more likely than in prehistory.

I have to disagree with you here. I had a couple MP3 players before the iPod and it was obvious that they were pieces of crap. Very obvious. I didn't know how to make them better. I knew that they had unnecessary pain in syncing, control, and storage space.

I don't own any mobile Apple products now but the iPod really did make portable digital music players mainstream through its cachet AND the problems it fixed.

Except arbitrary URL shortening services are far more likely to shutdown than Wikipedia, Google, or Twitter itself. It's another level of indirection through another party which provides a service in a fast-changing, simple market.

Are all the URLs in your tweets going to be broken in 2 years? More likely than a Wikipedia or Google URL.

"Wow, @fermat says he's proved something amazing! Damn, it's too short to fit in 140 characters. Oh wait... there's this bit.ly link... oh yeah, bit.ly went out of business and took their URL map with them."

It's a bit hyperbolic but that's the basic problem, I think.

It is true that persistence is a default property of functional data structures but with a compiler or interpreter that isn't braindead you shouldn't get "pointless data copying" unless you hold and read both states after the transform. That is, it should be optimized away.

HDMI is digital and component (with "RCA" connectors) is analog. Why do you prefer analog to digital for video transmission? Unfortunately, yes, HDMI has HDCP. I try to use DVI or mini-DVI where possible.

Ironically, this is due to the lack of a text content industry service that crawls for copyrighted works -- like the ??AA.

They're having such a hard time because it's not automated yet and they care too much. Providing for free (or with attribution) is fine. Plagiarism is not.

In other words, RIAA shouldn't employ MediaSentry; MediaSentry should sign up content producers for cheap p2p checking and a MediaSentry analog for text should sign up content producers for cheap copy checking.

New model: bloggers and newspapers make money from ads, spend money on content checking. If your content can't support its own uniqueness via ads->anti-plagiarism, you lose.

Thoughts?

It's this premium that skews US labor and trade, though. A computer programmer in Poland can use Zlotys for everyday living and work USD contracts. A computer programmer in the US pretty much has to use USD for everyday living -- even though they don't need the extra global liquidity the dollar offers.

The primary problem seems to be trust and identity. Those people who are being reviewed will want their chance to speak or vote. They may even do so surreptitiously. Who would run the service? They probably have conflicts of interest if they are doing it for money.

I have hope that the uptake of social networking will see some smart people deploy a service like this in the next 5 years.

It would be interesting to try to map the group properties of MD5-space. Every 128-bit number would either be in a slide to a cycle or in a cycle (a fixed point is a cycle of size 1).

This still doesn't change the huge-normousness of the task, though.

Very interesting. I had not worked out or seen the math for this. I don't doubt that such a number could exist. I do question the speed with which one could find the number and the utility once it's found.

Isn't it strange that telephone numbers are segmented arbitrarily? Weird that you know what a "country code", "area code", and "exchange" are?

It's not madness. It's topological addressing.

He's also looking for an MD5 fixed point. Something is madness but it's not URL syntax...

"... the taking of entire Web pages by search engines, which is what powers their search functions, is not fair use but infringement."

Must... restrain... cluebat.

No low-level API yet! Maybe it's just for paying customers? I saw no indications of supported syntax (how do you group?) or data schema (what is the smallest fact I can extract and how?). If the natural language processing isn't good enough to read my mind, at least tell me how to speak to it effectively!

You'd need an interest function. Use historical data? Specify a regression? Have it try to calculate last average?

Even then, you'd need to have some objective value of worth to understand what $0.92 means. Right now, it only measures the value of the dollar. :-/