When Pigs Fly: Apache Pig, Open Source and Understanding Systems
Topic: Technology
3:55 pm EDT, Jun 24, 2010
But more than that, this is an important time in computer science, and unlike many previous technical revolutions, this one is happening completely in the open. Like the integrated circuit before it, MapReduce is producing a paradigm shift that opens broad opportunities to produce new kinds of products from our massive collective backlog of data to help people in new and unprecedented ways. At LinkedIn we’ve amassed the world’s premiere data-set on the labor of professionals, and it is the mission of LinkedIn Analytics to leverage that deeply meaningful data to provide insight and value to our users. At LinkedIn Analytics data processing is both personal and meaningful, as the features we create enhance the working lives of tens of millions of people.
The Integrated Circuit solved the Tyranny of Numbers and unleashed Moore’s law, enabling a computerized, networked society. It did so with the considerable overhead of patent licensing and litigation. MapReduce is solving the Tyranny of Threads, enabling any company to process data at scale in parallel to extract real value from our most abundant and underutilized resource: information. It is doing it in the open, through free and open-source software, through the Apache Foundation, Hadoop and its sub-projects. We’ve gotten more efficient organizationally this time around.
This is what happens when you blog after midnight and you haven't eaten all day, so you write unintelligable goo and then try to glue it together, but it won't quite stick.
Scientists say dolphins should be treated as 'non-human persons' - Times Online
Topic: Science
2:38 am EST, Jan 4, 2010
What Marino and her colleagues found was that the cerebral cortex and neocortex of bottlenose dolphins were so large that “the anatomical ratios that assess cognitive capacity place it second only to the human brain”. They also found that the brain cortex of dolphins such as the bottlenose had the same convoluted folds that are strongly linked with human intelligence.
Such folds increase the volume of the cortex and the ability of brain cells to interconnect with each other. “Despite evolving along a different neuroanatomical trajectory to humans, cetacean brains have several features that are correlated with complex intelligence,” Marino said.
Marino and Reiss will present their findings at a conference in San Diego, California, next month, concluding that the new evidence about dolphin intelligence makes it morally repugnant to mistreat them.
Thomas White, professor of ethics at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, who has written a series of academic studies suggesting dolphins should have rights, will speak at the same conference.
“The scientific research . . . suggests that dolphins are ‘non-human persons’ who qualify for moral standing as individuals,” he said.
Dolphins have culture. Screw the whales, save the dolphins.
Boeing: Commercial Airplanes - StartupBoeing - Starting an Airline
Topic: Miscellaneous
1:58 am EST, Dec 16, 2009
Prepare for takeoff Starting an airline is tough. Running a profitable airline is even tougher. From startup airlines to established industry leaders, the process involves constant learning and adaptation. Few businesses have as many variables and challenges as airlines. They are capital-intensive. Competition is fierce. Airlines are fossil fuel dependent and often at the mercy of fuel price volatility. Operations are labor intensive and subject to government control and political influence. And a lot depends on the weather. But the intrepid entrepreneur is not alone. The StartupBoeing team assists entrepreneurs in launching new airlines. From concept through launch, StartupBoeing offe
Chris Klaus founded Intenet Security Systems in 1994, while he was a sophomore at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Chris’s product, the Internet Scanner, offered well being to companies connecting to the internet as the world wide web emerged, and it did so under a freemium model. Beginning as a side project in his dorm room where $1,000 checks started showing up, Chris asked a professor where he could find a good lawyer for his business, and that lawyer introduced him to Tom Noonan. Chris dropped out of Tech to pursue the business full time, John Imlay and Sig Mosely invested, and Internet Security Systems grew rapidly in an emerging market. ISS’s rapid growth culminated in its initial public offering on NASDAQ in march of 1998 and in an acquisition by IBM for $1.3 billion in October, 2006.
If you guys know of any additional nodes/edges, please shout them out :)
- Install latest Mac OS X R build 2.10 - Install latest tcltk - In R, execute: install.packages("igraph"); install.packages("twitteR"); install.packages("ggplot2");
Erickson and Balée belong to a cohort of scholars that has radically challenged conventional notions of what the Western Hemisphere was like before Columbus. When I went to high school, in the 1970s, I was taught that Indians came to the Americas across the Bering Strait about 12,000 years ago, that they lived for the most part in small, isolated groups, and that they had so little impact on their environment that even after millennia of habitation it remained mostly wilderness.
The 'sacred' rainforest concept is invented by postmodern new agers, who mourn its destruction - when in fact its a product of european contact/decimation?
Dunno if its true, but gold star. Amazing article in the Atlantic.
EFF representing Memestreams again DMCA attack from TI
Topic: Miscellaneous
3:07 pm EDT, Oct 14, 2009
The EFF is representing Tom against TI their DMCA takedown filed against Memestreams.
The crux of this letter from the EFF to TI was the same point many of us were discussing on Memestreams the very day the DMCA notice was served: The TI signing key that was cracked does not protect access to copyrighted material. This is not the same thing as using DeCSS to decrypt the contents of DVDs on a unauthorized and unlicensed devices. That would be circumventing an encryption method (CSS) used to protect copyright material (the film on the DVD). That *would* be a violation of the DMCA. Just go ask 2600 about that...
But that's not whats happening in this case.
The TI signing key allows software written by anyone to run on TI hardware that someone owns. The TI hardware checks the signature (created by signing key) of any software it tries to run. Now that the signing key has been published anyone can run new, non-TI software on TI hardware they have ownership of.This is not a copyright issue in anyway, shape, or form. The DCMA does not apply. This (among other things) is what the EFF is asserting.
Frankly, that's fairly obvious, cut and dry. Having been on the receiving end of a DMCA threat and the countless other cases where baseless DMCA claims are used to shut smart people up, I'm optimistic that the EFF will prevail.
But that's not what's interesting.
What *is* interesting are the legal issues around private keys. Is a private key a trade secret? A 3rd party, through no illegal act, who independently discovers the a trade secret can utilize or publish that secret. Only we aren't talking about the Coca-Cola formula here. Public and private keys are mathematically linked. You can derive a private key, given a public one. It just can be very very (infinite grains of sands on a beach) hard. Or not. As in the TI case. You can't patent a private key, that kind of makes it public. ;-) So what do we do? Does there need to be some new kind of IP protections beyond traditional ones like patents, trademarks, and trade secrets? Are massive efforts to compute a mathematical value legal? Is it based on what that value protects or unlocks? Is it based on the intent of the people who derive the value? Homebrew software developers vs. Blueray crackers?
While I hope this matter is resolved quickly for Tom's sake, I would like to see some of these other legal issues addressed.
