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lol, romney doesn't even register when compared to fb:

http://www.google.com/trends/viz?q=romney,+facebook&grap...

red=fb, blue= romney

The reason this is relevant in the discussion is that when you type in the url in chrome (arguably the top browser) the word in the domain and subdomain count as search words that show up in trends. So when you type "plus" for the g+ url it's added to trends. You can check that little fact by looking at the trends for "plus".

toemetochon Google+ grows 43% in June

Agreed.

According to one of Google's own services, google+ is pretty much dead:

http://www.google.com/trends/viz?q=google+plus&graph=wee...

compare with fb:

http://www.google.com/trends/viz?q=facebook&graph=weekly...

edit: thank you downvoters for illustrating the bias on HN. A fake stats piece promoting google as #1 on the frontpage? This place is turning into /. but with more google employees. I'm out.

toemetochon Micro-apartments next for S.F.?

I can relate to the friends "who feel sorry" bit. They don't seem to understand that different people value stuff in different ways.

If you want inspiration to make the best of limited spaces, google images for Japanese appartments. Lots of inspiration like using the steps of stairs as drawers, sliding furniture, efficient bookcases,... Here's an extreme example: http://unclutterer.com/2010/04/26/video-incredibly-efficient...

toemetochon [dead]

I agree.

But this case does raise an issue for NaCl (which I hope will become reality one day) where you have the granularity to mess with cache hits.

toemetochon How to Make a Metamaterial that Expands Under Pressure and Contracts In Tension

No. When you apply pressure on ice it becomes liquid. In other words: water doesn't lift things by freezing if that requires an amount of energy larger than what is needed to change state.

toemetochon Now we’re not even allowed to link to the Olympics website?

Part of me wishes this is reverse psychology. The rest of me hopes nobody will fall for it.

toemetochon [dead]

For the logo:

  <span style="border:1px solid white;color:white;padding:1px 3px;display:block"><b>Y</b></span>

but can't get the "Y" 100% right.

toemetochon Firefox: Can this Web browser be saved?

(where the hell is the bookmark button??)

It's the little star icon at the right inside the address textbox. If it's yellow it means the url is already bookmarked.

toemetochon Photo of $211,223.04 in cash The Oatmeal raised for charity

It's cotton and linen.

toemetochon Mars One Project: “Humans Will Live On Mars In 2023″

Fast-forward to the point of actual space colonization. Should mental stability be a factor in survival in space I can imagine that it'll introduce a rather strong darwinistic filter. It's difficult to fathom but realistic that folks with a short fuse have a severe disadvantage. Would it be required to undergo a psychiatric test before you can buy a ticket to an off-world colony and settle? Will people with a genetic predisposition be advised not to have kids? Will earth be a safe-haven for loonies?

toemetochon GlaxoSmithKline Pays $3 Billion Fine

The Mitsubishi check?

http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2011/06/12-money-shots/

Since this kind of money can disturb a bank (a bank lends a multiple of what it has floating) wouldn't it be "cleaner" if the government just opened an account at the same bank and had the money transferred there?

toemetochon Live CERN Higgs Announcement in 20 Mins

This just in: "Stephen Hawking on Higgs: 'Discovery has lost me $100'"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18708626

toemetochon Live CERN Higgs Announcement in 20 Mins

In December 2000, Hawking bet Gordon Kane $100 that the Higgs Boson will be discovered at the Fermilab Tevatron.

Since the funding dried up for the Tevatron and the first hints for the discovery of the Higgs boson come from LHC we can conclude that Hawking won the bet and Kane will be the one paying up.

toemetochon Facebook Blames Email Problems On User "Confusion"

I guess the FB cookies in your browser is a simplified version of the token. It's used to identify you not only on FB but also on other sites that load their javascript for comments & likes. There was some anger a while back about how fb could track you with cookies even if you're logged out - due to the ubiquity of their js on the web.

toemetochon How Google handle leap seconds

yes, I don't know about code but it's available in the form of an article that is detailed enough to implement it in any system.

toemetochon Facebook e-mail mess: Address books altered, e-mail lost

This is a very good explanation. But it also points out that the permission system is not really helping when you want background info on what's going on - you and I know this info from a background in development. Take a look at the permissions for google maps on android as an illustration.

toemetochon Launching Google +1 Recommendations Across the Web

Esoteric keywords in google work brilliant for my sites. Then came social and I added the +1 button because of the nature of circles in g+. Birds of a feather flock together, so +1 would bump results for my sites for people in someone's circle and my reach would expand a notch. So I'm disabling the button in anticipation of a js option to disable the mousehover menu.

toemetochon Launching Google +1 Recommendations Across the Web

The structure to link relevant content is already there. Same with the site's search engine. I work with namespaces, titles and content and local search does the job.

The issue at hand (and to answer your question) is that this mouseover menu doesn't add value. It moves attention to popular content - not must read content. Google claims to know what the next page should be, I claim to already have that functionality. And it doesn't involve likes, votes, +1s, keywords, tags or ranks - it's about original and relevant content.

toemetochon Launching Google +1 Recommendations Across the Web

when users hover over a +1 button, they will see recommendations for other great content on your site.

Which was not why I became an early adopter of the +1 button and put it on sites I own. I included it because I wanted to optimize my sites for "social search". I hate mousehover popups and I'm not going to hand over screen real estate to google on my sites. Another js include bites the dust.

edit to clarify. I own sites that deal with a niche subject. It's not tech or science related. The first google service I threw out were ads. Sites with a niche subject get very poor quality ads, some even slightly insulting to the kind of folk I want to reach. I also invested quite some time to interconnect pages across the site for relevance. I don't want people to think that page x is the next place to go to because of some google signals.

toemetochon Voice algorithms spot Parkinson's disease

Or combine it with other non-invasive techniques like this one:

http://spluch.blogspot.com/2007/09/face-scan-can-spot-geneti...

and this one:

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/amplifying-invisible-vide...

The first link dates back almost 5 years, anybody know what happened in that field?

toemetochon Microsoft Research make breakthrough in audio speech recognition

With audio fingerprinting the content provider must provide a way to fingerprint its own audio and have access to fingerprints of the internet's audio/video. This means a partnership between e.g. youtube and a studio. I'm fairly sure this involves studios above a certain size, resources for programming+API and a fair bit of paperwork and testing for robustness as there are ways to mess with the technique.

With this technique you just enter a few words and look at what comes out.

You're suggesting that the first option is easier?

toemetochon Microsoft Research make breakthrough in audio speech recognition

Pretty much all DRM content has unique patterns.

Want to prohibit videos of the Starcraft game? Simple search for a few sentences like "more vespene gas" and "require more minerals".

Want to find online copies of "Aliens"? Just enter a few catchphrases or part of a dialogue like "They come mostly at night. Mostly."

And even then, you can't filter conversations in real-time, only maybe 'flag' people with forbidden words.

Yes, that's really assuring to know it's not in real time.

toemetochon Microsoft Research make breakthrough in audio speech recognition

On a different note, imagine the power of this for DRM control and censorship.

But impressive and very useful.

toemetochon The Great German Energy Experiment

It was an addendum, not a rebuttal ;)

toemetochon Secure Boot: Who will control your next computer?

No, you want to be as close to bare metal as you can - and as soon as possible. Dedicated hardware is even better but you need to gain access to it as the first one.

toemetochon The Great German Energy Experiment

Both the 2003 directive [0] and the 2009 directive [1] state that member states may give priority - with notion of exceptions for security. Maybe priority was indeed the factor, but it's not mandated on a European level.

[0] http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2...

[1] http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2...

toemetochon The Great German Energy Experiment

- It's not just wind (turbines) but also solar.

- You don't have centralized access to all the facilities. E.g. small and medium-scale solar falls under the control of the owner AFAIK. Large scale wind also has other parties involved that don't want to miss out on income.

- Control of energy production on a national or regional scale follows prediction models, not only for demand but also price of resources such as gas and weather forecasts for renewables. So for a holiday they would shutdown a number of "classic" facilities to follow a day-ahead schedule. This probably increased the dependency on renewables for that day.

The big question "why didn't they shutdown wind farms": I don't know but I plan to find out.

toemetochon The Great German Energy Experiment

Please read again. Energy demand was lower because it was a holiday, nothing to do with air conditioners.

toemetochon The Great German Energy Experiment

>Inevitably, some hot July week will come when a high-pressure system stalls over Europe, stilling turbines just when sunburned Germans reach for their air conditioners

The summer in Germany isn't that hot. Middle europe, not california. Accordingly, we don#t have air conditioners (in general)

These scenarios do happen. They're not always as straight-forward as the one suggested (low production/high demand). A few weeks ago there was a sunny/windy holiday in Belgium (May 28th). Due to overproduction and low demand they had to avert a national blackout by paying France to sink the surplus energy. In Belgium, renewables account for 7% of energy. That weekend it was 3 times as much.

toemetochon Face.com acquired by Facebook

Could it be that the license to process the volume facebook has in mind is near or higher than the price of the company? I don't know the price model for the face API but it's not unreasonable to consider a tipping point.