Just back from WWDC17 and I have this takeaway: leave the creating/training/designing/refining machine learning models to the academics and companies with deep pockets. You're not going to catch up with the PhDs that have a head start on you, especially without a unique authentic problem at hand that nobody else is working on yet. Instead, USE the models that exist. Maybe train 'em with new/different data if you feel compelled, but mainly learn what models exist (natural language processing? Sentiment analysis? Image recognition? Speech recognition? Real-time identification of objects in video?). Learn how to use those models to solve the problems you're working with, or another team is dealing with, or that isn't even being considered for technology and humans are still doing it. The PhDs will keep creating new and better building blocks, just like we started out with basic web tools and now we have WebRTC. Our jobs will be to apply them. And that requires a lot less linear algebra. I think we can all say amen to that.

I agree with Kozz. I would also add that while a comment submission form or the like might not need or even benefit much from the use of JavaScript, there's plenty of other things that do. Putting out a request such as "we're launching a campaign to demand that companies, governments, and organizations make their sites work without proprietary JavaScript" seems so baseless and ill-conceived that when I first read it I checked the date on the post to see if it was April 1st. What's the proposal for the alternative? The web platform is built on open standards, the majority of which (more than in any other ecosystem), is driven by open source implementations. For those hackers among us, the web is our oyster and it has fostered a great deal of innovation in the exact way that the FSF has worked to foster it in other ecosystems (e.g. Linux). Assuming that there is a noble and sane goal behind this call to action (which I'm still having a hard time believing), the way this article is written does it no justice. I imagine that this article has become the laughing stock in offices across the country and the world this morning. Presumably not the effect the FSF was looking for ...

I completely agree. I work in computational neuroscience, and the memristor was basically the last thing left that brains can do that can't be implemented in silicon. Neuromorphic analog VLSI circuits are going to benefit from this a lot. However, there are still a number of issues that might not be trivial to implement, such as competition between different synapses in the same neuron, which are mathematically necessarily to prevent instabilities from occurring. I think the main point is that solving the nonlinear ODEs in the brain numerically, on a digital processor, is very inefficient compared to the brain. However, instantiating them in an analog circuit with internal state variables (i.e. memristor-like devices) will actually be much MORE efficient than the brain. Given that the rate-limiting steps in brain computation are basically stray capacitances dictating the membrane time constants, those stray capacitances are much easier to reduce in analog circuits, so these circuits should be able to operate orders of magnitude faster than biological ones. We'll make great pets someday.

Short answer, No. TCP doesn't back off until packets are lost. uTP looks for latency increases which happen before packet loss (and therefore, before TCP congestion control kicks in) and throttles itself preemptively. Put another way, TCP treats all senders as having an equal right to bandwidth. uTP doesn't want to assert an equal right to bandwidth, it wants to send and receive in the unused portion of the available connection.

As they say [citation needed].

According to their 07-08 annual report the NPG had an annual revenue of 16.6M pounds, liquid assets of 7.5M pounds, and total assets of 69M pounds.

Relevant bits start around page 40.

"Hacked" is rather misleading.

The NPG made high res images viewable online as a series of tiles, i.e. you might deliver the full image as twenty smaller images each showing a portion of the total.

His "hack" was to download each of these tiles individually and reassemble them into a coherent whole.

Nothing was done to gain unauthorize access or compromise their systems in any way.

No, no, no.

Berne requires that the US protect foreign copyright holders if and only if equivalent works published in the US by US citizens would be protected.

If a work is intrinsically ineligible for copyright in the US then the US does not and will not honor any foreign laws that say otherwise.

The flip-side is that, on some issues, it is quite common to refuse to accept any explanation that _isn't_ grounded in science - a religions explanation isn't scientific, ergo it's wrong. I (largely) agree with what you seem to be saying, but the follow-on reasoning from that of many is decidedly suspect IMO.

They think they're not aiming at me, but I'm still on their radar. It's absurd that I should have to buy an expensive 'professional' model to achieve something the cheap model would be quite capable of doing were it not given an artificial restriction - assuming this is even offered as an option. Buying laptops with XP Pro rather than Home got difficult enough and I don't want to end up having to jump through fifteen hoops to achieve something that should be perfectly normal.

Linux returns of netbooks have been far higher than Windows, from what I've seen. People have got used to running lots at once and, if they're suddenly told they can't, I'd expect Windows returns to suddenly climb as well.

(Assuming of course that the netbook market doesn't go the way of the PDA market. I _love_ having proper portable computers again - I was an old-style Psion user and having that sort of thing at my fingertips is just brilliant. Kinda worried that we might have an overhyped market that promptly dies because it can't sustain the hype though...)

That's about it, really (though I've written quite a lot of code in a freezing office on the weekend - huge motivation boosts productivity for obvious reasons).

What kills productivity? Colleagues interrupting my train of thought, either by requesting my input or simply by doing something that inherently distracts. Sharing an office with sales staff can be a killer, simply because they're so often on the phone or running round assembling information. Music can help with the happy place but isn't even always on at home (and I love music, have far too many albums at my fingertips :-)) - its benefit for work is partly comfort but mostly for me in providing a background noise I can predict and so tune out. It might as well be a white noise generator in some ways.

I've been in offices where you shivered all morning, or where every last movement caused sweat to drip off you - neither was very productive. I can type just as easily on a laptop (heck, I've written a fair bit of code on a 9" netbook) but accept I'm unusual in that way :-) - but a machine that gets in your way is never ideal.

What can be the biggest killer though? Motivation. You tell me you code as efficiently when presented with a task which will achieve almost nothing of benefit if it ever goes live and involves large-scale maintenance on a poorly-built legacy codebase. We do our best work when there's a reward of pride, and when we know that our best work is still only polishing a turd, it's far harder to summon the energy.

Yes, but this surely presupposes that there are no observable phenomena with unobservable causes?

I confess I'm not remotely an expert in the field, but my interested observer perception is of a bootstrap problem in pretty much all scenarios. If we believe all matter was formed in a Big Bang of which we detect traces that match current hypothesese, what was the cause of the Big Bang event? I love and value science, but am deeply uncomfortable with the quasi-religious assertions from some that if it can't be measured then it isn't real. We've learnt to measure a great many things which we previously couldn't.

In all honesty though, if you wish to oppose intelligent design, let it be taught. The underground, opposed, rebel argument that They don't want you to hear will always have power - if you honestly believe it's rubbish, teach its tenets and then teach why you believe they don't match the data. If you're a good teacher with good information and the students are intellectually up to the argument, they'll likely agree and the rest weren't likely to have their minds changed either way in any case.

I've got a netbook, which gets used heavily as an ultraportable machine. As long as you're sensible, it's fine. It's far from unusual for it to be running:
* Visual Studio
* OpenOffice showing some documentation or notes
* Web browser
* DB program of some description, usually SQLite Admin. ...and I'm already over the limit while very plausibly doing a single task (albeit not a typical one for a netbook, but one that is surprisingly usable from experience). I'm working on some graphics software at present - perhaps I'm checking something in Paintshop Pro or similar. I use the Windows calculator a lot (lazy I know :-) - that would suddenly become unviable.

Why, why, why? Anyway, as has been pointed out, plenty of apps seem to have already found ways round this. Annoy your customers in their day-to-day use and they'll find ways to stop the annoyance - if that means you're creating a group motivated to hack your security, that's just a terrible idea.

Stay out of your users' way and let them work the way they want to. If I'm daft enough to want to try to host a commercial website or want to do serious software development on a netbook, that's my problem.

Television shows like House, M.D. always make me chuckle, having been too close to the subject matter for suspension of disbelief to work. When something serious goes wrong with one's body that cannot be diagnosed with first-line test results and (revenue-generating) treatment prescribed in 8.5 minutes, you are no longer an asset to the healthcare industry. You are a liability. There is no genius physician who will ponder over your case in his or her downtime. There are no attractive residents who will hold conferences in well-appointed conference rooms where they will discuss your case and argue over the possible diagnoses on whiteboards and through video teleconferencing.

I'm sorry that your experience with medical care has left you so jaded, but the truth is that this sort of thing happens a lot more than you know, especially at academic hospitals. Most people who go into medicine are interested in the mystery cases, and if anything, I feel like the truth is the very opposite of what you're saying: people with simple presentations that look like routine cases often aren't given enough attention, and the mystery cases are ruminated over far beyond the point where anything productive results from it. The thing about House, MD that makes me chuckle is how bad the physicians on the show are. I guess that's part of the plot, though, that they can't make the diagnosis in the beginning, or else there wouldn't be a show.

As a physician, I agree with you that learning good people skills is a critical skill for most physicians. However, I think the whole situation is more complicated than you seem to acknowledge. First, there can be technically incompetent physicians who miss diagnoses or prescribe outdated treatments, but they're loved by their patients. On the other hand, I know a few technically excellent surgeons who are total jerks. So I agree with you that people skills and clinical skills are not totally separate and distinct, but they're not totally inseparable either. However, technical incompetence is a more serious problem than poor people skills. I agree, a doctor with poor people skills will never be truly excellent. But a technically incompetent doctor kills people.

A second, more subtle, issue is that sometimes being a good doctor requires you to do things that will make your patient unhappy. For example, a good primary care physician will bug his/her patients to quit smoking and lose weight. Those are things that annoy people, and I can tell you from first-hand experience that sometimes it's easier to make the patient happy than it is to do the right thing and come off looking like a bad guy. For example, people come in all the time demanding antibiotics for viral upper respiratory infections. Giving those patients antibiotics is doing them a disservice, as it breeds resistant organisms, but doctors that do it will be more popular, and primary care physicians do it all the time for that reason. Another example is building false hope in patients with a poor prognosis. As far as I'm concerned, that sort of pandering is cowardice pure and simple, but physicians are human too, and it's hard to be the bad guy.

Finally, posting random stuff on a web site is just not a reliable way to evaluate anyone. Mostly you'll just get a few posts from a tiny, disgruntled fraction of the patients a doctor sees. And in most of those cases, the complaint says more about the patient than the doctor. In fact, having more complaints most likely reflects the fact that the doctor is willing to accept more difficult patients, the same way that many surgeons with low success rates are the ones willing to accept the toughest cases. I agree that it's silly to try to make patients sign agreements that they won't post online, but it's even more silly to take online posts seriously.