I think his point was that your idea was backwards. If you get attenuated vaccines (which I assume most of these are), you're effectively exposing yourself to several extra things - not less things. If the idea was priming immune systems through exposure, then attenuated vaccines would almost certainly be a positive. If these vaccines didn't do that, then they wouldn't work. And they do.

healthy from an evolutionary standpoint

I assume you're not suggesting that we should let people die (or be sterilized, as by mumps) by exposure to serious illness - thus to improve humans through evolutionary processes? I'm guessing you mean (and are saying in a roundabout way) something like "humans evolved with viruses around, so it's natural for people to get sick sometimes and something, something" (ie. you're making a general health argument, and you're couching it on some vague "evolutionary status quo" thing).

But, again, I'd say exactly the opposite: for most of primate history, we didn't have nearly the varied social contact and mobility that humans have now. All the mechanics of epidemiology have changed in a nano-second of evolutionary time. If we think of "priming the pump through exposure to a variety of viruses", I'd say that - vaccinations and hygiene or not - we are exposed to way more different strains than our ancestors would have been (because our social groups are vastly larger, more interconnected, and varied).

Yes, Facebook makes mistakes with features. But how many high profile platforms has it abandoned?

Yes, Apple makes mistakes with hardware and software features. Sometimes they burn a developer by not approving an app. But how many high profile platforms has it abandoned?

Having worked at places that make software, I bring you the bad news it's normal for most software projects to fail.

Wow - you worked at a place that makes software! Maybe you should do some kind of ask/tell thing?

I manage software R+D at a large company. Sure I've seen failed projects. But our clients don't see many of them. We do our pissing around behind closed doors, and when we launch something we support it. We're saddled with a number of legacy projects that we lose money on and our developers hate, but we don't burn them because that would burn our reputation. And when we pick software tools, we look at precisely this kind of thing - how can we know this vendor is committed to the product.

So some developers wasted their life on a failed project's API, you think that situation is new or only applicable to google?

No, it's applicable to a number of companies. Most of them are small, and nobody pays any attention to them when they launch something until it's proven successful. This makes their job a lot harder. They have a chicken/egg problem with everything they do, no matter how good their stuff is. Does Google want to be in that boat?

And, clearly, this new product dilemma is something that Microsoft is constantly fighting with, simply because of the space they're in. But they've learned to be careful with it. Google is not being careful with it. They benefit hugely from the reputation with developers, but that's really starting to sour.

And it's getting soured by stuff that shouldn't matter - they're letting their reputation be sunk by stuff that was never that compelling, and didn't have anywhere near the launch effort they should have got. If you let developers have time (which they do), they'll make all sorts of stuff. Sometimes it'll be diamonds. But sometimes it's coal, and you need to have enough control (and ego-management) to say "No, we're not releasing this outside."

Yes, what they have now makes money. But their new products keep failing to. That isn't a winning long term strategy.

Their failures are largely because they don't build out and commit to platforms. Every time they have a high profile product or service that gets launched too early, fails to grow, doesn't get supported, and then gets cancelled, they lose credibility with developers. Why be an early adopter for a new Google platform if they aren't going to put some time into making it work and grow? Why make your app work with a Google API that won't last through your product's lifetime? It isn't all about costs and benefits right now, it's about building relationships with people.

How many developers will swarm to any new thing from Apple or Facebook? Tons - and those companies are reaping huge benefits by supporting and growing their platforms.

Google? They're still well respected, obviously - but this kind of thing is hurting Google+, and it will hurt every new platform they launch.

No, uh... I'm right. There's a simple algorithm to sort them in an polynomial number of flips.

The hard part is computing an optimal set of flips (ie. not just a polynomial one, but a minimum count).

This is exactly the distinction I was trying to make in my initial post. Solving the problem is easy. Solving the problem optimally is hard.

Looking at every pancake every time would involve O(N^2) looks. That's polynomial in "looks" (N^2 is not exponential). And it's still linear in "flips".

And this is a completely separate from problem than computing an optimal pattern for minimum number of flips (which, again, I don't know - the naive computation there would be exponential).

Well, there's two problems here: calculating an optimal number of flips (which I'm not sure about) and "sorting the stack with a polynomial number of flips" which is what I think is trivial (and which the summary seemed to suggest was difficult). I was just trying to clarify that this second problem is not hard (but my post itself wasn't clear).

To further clarify, the naive algorithm for this second problem is simple and polynomial (in number of flips per pancake). Start at the bottom. If the largest pancake is not on the bottom, flip the stack starting at the largest pancake (so that the largest pancake is at the top). Now flip the whole stack. Now imagine the bottom pancake is part of the table and repeat the process. You'll flip at most twice for each pancake.

Clarification from the article, the actual problem statement is:

The question to be answered in both cases is, if the stack has n pancakes, what is the maximum number of flips needed as a function of n, i.e. f(n)?

With regards to actual doing this for a specific stack, it's fairly trivial to order the pancakes in a polynomial number of flips (any n log n sort algorithm would be fine - with the actual flipping taking at most 2 flips per pancake).

Whenever I hear about a Christian trying to prove the Bible or God's existence I know immediately they are simply using the Bible as a weapon

Meh? The Bible is fairly clear that reasoning about their hope and faith is a Christian's responsibility:

Peter 3:15: But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear:

The tradition of Christians defending their faith through reason goes back to the apostles (at least), most notably Paul's speech on Mars hill.

Obviously some people are going to be arguing in the wrong spirit - but reasoning in "good faith" is condoned and encouraged by the Bible. Someone attempting to prove the Bible is following a noble tradition of Christian apologetics that, again, goes back to the apostles.

instead of relying on sensors that are orders of magnitude more sensitive or precise than the human hand

The hand isn't a sensor at all in this context; rather, the manipulations of the hand are picked up by distinctly non-hand sensors. It's clear the current limit on this system is those sensors, computers, and software - all of which could improve quickly if this moved beyond research.

extremely low resolution hands

My hands have, uh... pretty high resolution. Are your hands kind of blocky? Do they show aliasing when you turn them? More to the point, humans are extremely adept at doing fine manipulation with their hands and these manipulations are extremely intuitive. If they could make this work very well, I see no reason it couldn't be used for a bunch of things: teaching and demonstrating, as an intuitive UI for controlling robots (that might actually be acting on smaller or larger or toxic or distant objects in real life), or for experimenting with possible approaches or designs.

It doesn't take much imagination to come up with possible applications for this.

That said, probably it will never come to anything (at least not in a similar form) or not for a while. But if you disapprove because you fail to see practical applications now, I think you're both wrong (in this case) and misguided (in the general case). I think it's cool MS is doing research that they probably can't exploit immediately. It shows foresight to be thinking about interface methods before they're really practical. Nintendo (or whoever they bought tech from) probably had some very crappy Wii-like peripherals in research long before they worked well enough to sell. It might take 100 ideas and prototypes like this to find 1 that is the next big thing. But that's how we get cool new stuff.

Disregarding all that, even if it was completely pointless (and I don't think it is) I think it's fun that we can see it and discuss it on a site that is about interesting technology.

I mean short of being a toy, what is the point?

Do you mean "beyond being a toy"? If so, you said the exact opposite thing. Or do you not think this would fall short of working as a toy? Because it seems to me like it works as a toy right now.

I think you've really misunderstood what he was after. I don't think he cared much about the poster, and calling his boss to quietly whine about it would be really pathetic. Rather, what he wanted was to call a bunch of attention to a really sad, stupid move by the security people.

Whatever he did seems to have worked.

Oh, and you don't fire your theater professor for being a little theatrical :)

So this is a new thing, it's optional, and it will probably bring the Internet to a reasonable number of disadvantaged children who currently don't have it.

That seems like a good thing.

Now I understand they are doing this as part of a previous deal, and that they could have done more, and that they still have horrible service or whatever. But this is still quite good news. I think this will really help some people - possibly really change some lives for the better - and it will help more people if the news gets around well.

Yeah, cool. I'll tell clients and unrelated businesses what software they "can" use.

I was reporting on the situation. Sure there's better options, but that doesn't stop "FTP is very common" from being reality.

No - the figurative sense of ossified is correct and common. Petrified is usually used figuratively to mean something like "scared stiff". Ossified, in common figurative use, means that something has become stiff and inflexible (often through disuse or rot) - like tissue that has become bone.

If you check a reasonable dictionary (eg. http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/ossify_1?q=ossified) you'll find this definition.

Variants of FTP are used widely in business to business transfers - sometimes secured with SSL, but often just by plaintext passwords, obscurity and/or IP whitelists. FTP is consistent between a large variety of platforms and lots of sysadmins like the simplicity of scripting, for example, a nightly FTP file transfer.

Is there better solutions? Of course. But FTP is still very common - and lots of businesses still employ much more arcane tech than it. For a lot of businesses, terminal servers were a real boon, because now they could all connect to a single old desktop (which in turn has a much more arcane connection to some mainframe in a basement that everyone's scared of).

It'll be a long time before FTP dies.

As for being original, many of the best Hollywood movies have been original, not derived from books or other places (like video games....).

Yes, there's many original screenplays that have done well - but I stand by what I said before: most great movies are adaptations. Look through any list of great films, I think you'll find I'm right (I tried this, and the list I picked was around 75% adaptations).

It really isn't that easy to translate a book to a movie; the formats are far too different,

Nor is it easy to write something original. In any case, there's plenty of book-to-movie transitions that have come out great - including, again, the bulk of the best movies of all time. The nice part about books is there's so many to choose from, and you can see which stories work and resonate with people before you start.

Hollywood doesn't care about making good movies; they only care about a return on their investment.

That's true to an extent, but perhaps more than any media movie success is tied to reviews - meaning even the business people are targetting quality. Of course there are exceptions (and there are other dollar drivers that are potent in different genres, like toys in kids movies) but almost everyone in film is setting out to make something they think people will like. Even creators in what was once the most cynical genre - again, kids movies - have discovered that doing quality is more lucrative than aiming low and hoping for toy sales. It's hard to look at "UP" or "Wall-E" and say they weren't risks - they defied most of the "kids movie" rules, focused on quality, and were successful.

there's a lot less great movies than there used to be

What decade had more strong movies than the 2000s? I strongly doubt you could make a case that any decade had a significantly better selection. This is an easy mistake to make - and I hear it all the time in the context of movies, video games, books, etc... but when you consider things fairly it's almost never true.

And, if anything, filmmakers take way more risks than they used to. You can find way more experimental film now because it's actually possible to shoot a quality, truly-low-budget film.

Conversely, if you want to find "low risk" crap, look at the neverending piles of crap from the 50s, 60s and 70s. Sequels like crazy, ripoffs, movies whose design started by making a poster and a title (or a star coupling and a vague genre idea). When movies were that expensive, studios had to bank more heavily than they do now on poster appeal, known stars, and non-threatening plot. Slow information travel meant they could get away with much worse films. And nostalgia makes old movies seem better than they were (as you'd expect - the pioneering techniques of the best directors, actors, and technicians have all been passed around and are now standard fare, so filmmakers have a huge wealth of ideas to pull from).

Just as an exercise, start looking through lists of the best films in each decade (or even year). You're going to see some depressingly short lists as you go further back. Of course there's exceptional times and years, but overall it's a strong upward trend in the number of good movies.