Relevant quote from the movie Moneyball:

...I know you've taken it in the teeth out there, but the first guy through the wall. It always gets bloody, always. It's the threat of not just the way of doing business, but in their minds it's threatening the game. But really what it's threatening is their livelihoods, it's threatening their jobs, it's threatening the way that they do things. And every time that happens, whether it's the government or a way of doing business or whatever it is, the people are holding the reins, have their hands on the switch. They go bat shit crazy. I mean, anybody who's not building a team right and rebuilding it using your model, they're dinosaurs...

Related quote:

Get the kids involved in an ongoing operation whereby books are acquired, digitally scanned, and then re-donated to other schools/libraries/etc. Store the digital copies in some offsite database that can be shared amongst other schools/libraries/etc. Provide terminals where the students can peruse the scanned books and allow access to the digital library for students at home.

Can't think of a better way to keep a library as a place to learn new and relevant skills and be exposed to gobs of information and knowledge at the same time.

I'm sure this all falls apart when the copyright lawyers get involved, but I would love to see the publicity the publishers get when they sue a school library :)

Looks like they took a crack at it, interesting read:

The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma

...but IMHO the curiosity landing makes anything like this that I read about seem like a cake walk. Still in complete awe of the team(s) that pulled that off.

Excited to see what Rosetta sends back!

That's great. It's amazing the level of interest that people express when they are presented the opportunity to view these things with no effort or cost associated.

When the Venus transit happened I set up my little orion in the driveway and projected the image onto a sheet of paper and within 10 or 15 minutes a mob of people from my neighborhood (most of whom I'd never met) had gathered around - parents on walks with their kids, dogs, or out jogging, what have you - it was great. They were all talking about it, asking questions about it, generally marveling at the image.

The best part was explaining it to the kids - I would explain what was happening, they would turn to the image again, and a few seconds later you could see on their faces the realization of the scope of what they were witnessing. It was really great. I can see why he did it.

I always wanted them to do this for gymnastics/ice skating/diving at the olympics and such - the subjective nature of the judging for these sports leads to all sorts of controversy.

They could require the athletes to wear sensors, or just stickers of some kind on their joints and then have the computer judge how close their movements come to the "ideal" movements for their size of frame. A perfect 10 would really mean perfection. They could still have a human panel to judge artistic merits or whatever, but particularly for diving and gymnastics it seems mainly technical.

"Don't say 'murder,' don't say 'kill' It was destiny, it was God's will"

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Pretty sure they were referring to the device/setup itself, not the effect.

If you have a mac (or any Unicode able terminal) try out my sig. Saw the c64 code in someone else's sig, linked to a book about the phenomenon (maybe too strong a word)

I'll check that out. Agreed that shitloads of nested anonymous handler functions is ugly as hell... and seems to be were most complex javascript leads. I'm not a huge proponent of node or anything, but I do think it has its uses.

Interesting - it has occurred to me that a lot of these "new" fangled frameworks and such really are just a return to concepts and practices from the past - didn't know what the historic analog of this nodeJS (and the like) stuff was. Thanks.

No multi-threading is kind of the point with nodeJS. It's a different approach than your normal "servlet" where you're firing up new threads for every request and sharing a pool of database connections between them. In this model you run a nodeJS listener and it uses a simple event loop, just like in the browser. If you want to scale you spin up 50 more node instances and slap them behind a load balancing proxy. They are all typically hitting a highly scalable nosql datasource on the backend, which can also easily spin up another 50 instances if needed.

I've dabbled, it is definitely fun for little side projects but I haven't tried to do anything major league with it - in any case, don't knock anything until you try it. For giggles try creating a large searchable data set using elasticsearch and nodejs running behind apache proxies, one hour into it when you have a working site you'll see the appeal.

I thought they were already doing this in Boston, maybe not... In any case I always assumed this was a way for the states to make money. They own the highways, therefore the exclusive rights to put these sensors up, and therefore exclusive access to hyper-accurate realtime traffic data that they can license out to the likes of google and apple for their map applications. I suppose it could simply be used to provide information for the "X minutes to airport" signs they have on most highways now.

All seems pretty harmless to me, they could just as easily hire human beings to stand along the highways with walkie talkies and monitor average traffic speeds, would people throw a shit fit then?