Yup, they sure do. Not only is HTML5 video in ads happening a lot more these days, some sites insert the ads in-line with the article making it difficult for adblock software to distinguish them from graphs and other things that are part of the article.

I've got adblock installed in chrome, but not firefox yet. For some reason some sites think I'm on a chromebook when I use chrome, instead of DragonFly, which I find hilarious. Adblock in firefox is next.

No flash for ages. Last thing I would ever do. HTML5 or nothing, baby! I complain to sites like Pandora that still have flash requirements for certain browsers, but not for others.

-Matt

We finally get video and sound working properly and it's just been driving me BATTY when I have 30 firefox tabs open and can't figure out which one is making all the noise.

My absolute favorite is actually when a video site has video ads on the side bars that play over the video in the article. Sometimes more than one at once.

On the bright side, it finally caused me to get off my duff and map the mute and volume keys into X.

-Matt

Well, particularly because beekeepers are fighting actively to keep their hives alive. Hives that collapse are gone, but the hives that remain are, unsurprisingly, very well tended to. Then the hives that collapsed are replaced by getting a new queen from somewhere else and starting over.

In the wild, I could see aggressive parasites (and combinations of parasites) wiping out much greater swathes of the population, but in this case, human intervention is providing an additional buffer.

I'm still more worried about wild bees. They don't have anyone looking after them, but they're still important.

Yeah, okay, I can buy this as a position. This is a much better explanation of why to be neutral than the comment I responded to.

Yes, it's important that the ads be clearly labelled as ads, and not as editorial content. The brilliance of the Digg model is that everything is basically just a link, a picture, and a small bit of explanatory context. Even if you were to mistake it as a real story, it would become obvious instantly that you weren't getting any news from the site you went to.

And since the advertisers are curated, you're also not going to have any trouble where going to the site is going to be some sort of miserable spam-fest with popups and terrible auto-play videos. The Digg model is currently the best one. Unobtrusive, but obvious. It's good brand advertising, and it keeps their lights on. It's a really good compromise.

First, Wente is the least believable so-called journalist at the G&M. I ignore her articles out of hand because she's usually so wrong that the articles are hard to read without getting angry.

But published in the Washington Post yesterday is similar information about US hives: http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

The conclusion? Beekeepers are working hard to keep hives alive and keep populations up. Their livelihood is at stake here, after all.

Interestingly, I think this might serve as a long-term selection for more robust bees. Bees that are just strong enough to survive under ideal circumstances probably will, since the beekeepers will be trying to make sure that the conditions are right for their bees to last to another season. If a hive collapses, they buy a queen and replace the hive. (This is my hypothesis; it isn't backed by anything other than my intuition.)

So while we're probably having a massive impact on honeybee survival, it probably swings both ways.

The REAL issue is how populations of non-cultivated bees are doing. Bumblebees and all the other sorts of bees that we don't use to commercially produce honey or pollinate farms are also important, even if no human is directly making a dollar from the bees' work.

They were probably just making a reference sample.

You can be a lot more subtle - tell them that your host is xbcd.com

I always keep an "atashi" or "eg" subdomain on my sites configured thusly ;)

Um... read the paper, page 10.....

Voltron [33] is a language designed for distributed mobile sensing. Voltron allows the developer to specify the logic to be executed at several locations, without having to dictate how the robots must coordinate to achieve the objectives...

Why did you create a brand new programming language rather than just a library? I looked at the examples and I don't see any functionality in there that can't just as easily be accomplished with current programming languages and a simple library.

Google should interpret Universal's request to delist "127.0.0.1" as "We want you to delist us" and promptly oblige ;)

127.0.0.1 is clearly unresponsible to DMCA takedown efforts; legal approaches simply won't suffice. I recommend that Universal Pictures launch a coordinated effort hack into it using as many computers as possible, gain root access, and write over its hard drive.

That actually doesn't sound that bad:

"For example both alcohol (ethanol) and water produce large peaks on an IR spectrum and from the video it would seem that the user provides some background data on what the sample is via the app, so that saves a lot of work. It would be easy for the algorithm to say, 'the user says this is drink and I can see that about 40 per cent of the total spectrum is ethanol so I should give a reading of alcoholic beverage with 40 per cent alcohol content'. Or 'this is a plant and 70 per cent of the spectrum is water so it must be 70 per cent hydrated'. This could also be done with total sugar content for common sugars such as sucrose and fructose," he said.

"Similarly, it would be possible to get a spectrum good enough to recognise something like fruit or Tylenol and then send back generic data (easily found via Google)

That would hardly be useless. I presume that the person knows whether what they're looking at is a fruit or an alcoholic beverage. It's not a big deal to ask the user to do whatever degree of categorization that they can to help it out. And being able to pick out common drugs? Definitely not useless.

Thanks for your insights. Still trying to decide whether something like this should go on my wish list ;) (see above for my potential uses).

How accurate, exactly, do you think such a device could be? Obviously it's not going to be pulling out the sort of precision of a professional spectrometer. But you mention, for example, being able to identify the signatures of herbicides and pesticides. Do you mean, for example, "This contains imidacloprid", or more like, "This contains a nicotinoid of some variety"?

How useful do you think it could be on identifying mineral species - say, distinguishing between different zeolites? Or, back to food, if given, say, a mango, to get readings of, say, water, sugar (in general, or specific sugars), fat (in general, or specific categories of fats, or specific fats), protein (in general, or specific categories of proteins, or specific common protiens... obviously it's not going to be able to pull out 5 ppb of Some-Complex-Unique-Protein), common vitamins (generally found in dozens of ppm quantity - some more, some less), minerals (likewise), etc?

Smartphones are still drastically slower than individual PCs, let alone cloud services.

I know they're overstating the case, and that it's a near-IR spectrometer, not a mass spectrometer. That said, I still like the general concept. Does anyone know whether near-IR spectroscopy can be used for identifying mineral species (for example, between different types of zeolites and the like)? I love rock hunting but many species have similar visual appearances.

And even on the food standpoint I find it interesting... I'm a tropical plant nut, and lots of people I know over on the forum breed unusual varieties of common fruits as well as rare fruits (some of which don't even have scientific names). It's be neat to be able to get a basic compositional profile - no, not "this fruit contains X ppb of this gigantic-complex-unique-protein", but just the major constituents. It'd help, for example, the mango breeders to know if their fruits are compositionally different from the fruit of the parent cultivar.