Links for 2011-06-21

“SETIstars is an initiative by the SETI Institute to recognize and rally support from the community to help fund the SETI Institute’s operations and that of the Allen Telescope Array. It serves as a place to galvanize community action with clearly defined fundraising goals as well as a place to engage with and recognize supporters and contributors to the SETI Institute — both financial and non financial. We are starting with a simple site with a clear mandate: raise funds from the community to help bring the ATA back on line. But this is just the beginning…”

“What I would like to get is a comparison of how much it costs to get your data for a mobile device. In this case, you can have three things: data (really they are all data), voice, and text messages. Typically, a service provider will charge you different for these different things.

I would love to get how much each data mode costs per amount of data ($ per GB). Is this easy? No. Why? Because you aren’t charged a rate like this. For instance. AT&T charges $25 for a 2 GB data plan. In this case, I could consider that the data costs $12.5 per GB. However, what if you don’t use all 2 GB of data? What if you just use 700 MB during that month? Oh, what if you go over 2 GB? What then?

So, maybe you see the problem. Here is my solution. I will look at several providers. For each, I will take a typical user and estimate how much they use and how much they pay. Then I will make a maximum data use scenario. Don’t worry, this might make sense after I do it.”

“There’s still a lot of greatness to be achieved. We’re still struggling with cold fusion and time travel. It seems like our ACLs are constantly tearing. Cats remain undomesticated. Many of the existential paradoxes originally raised by Gallagher continue to haunt us (parking on driveways, driving on parkways, etc.). To truly live, man must forever joust against himself. He must wage war against his own sexy demons. And I think we’d all agree that one of these demons looms larger than all others combined — we still haven’t figured out a way to arbitrarily turn art into math.

Well, that is about to change.

That is about to VORM.”