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Poilice say Harris wore a Miami-Dade Transit employee uniform, did not steal the fares, and returned the buses to the depot each night.

He's been charged with three counts each of third-degree grand theft and burglary of an occupied conveyance.

Man Stole Miami-Dade Buses, Drove Them On Routes (News4jax.com) (via Arbroath)

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

It's a pity the National Security Agency can't talk about its computational challenges, because it's leaving a lot of the boasting rights to Google.

(Credit: Paul Ford)

In a blog posting on Friday the company shared some detail about the challenges of one aspect of its search operation, the Web indexing and processing that must take place before the results are delivered to users. The short version: Google has no choice but to think big.

First comes surfing. "We start at a set of well-connected initial pages and follow each of their links to new pages. Then we follow the links on those new pages to even more pages and so on, until we have a huge list of links," said software engineers Jesse Alpert and Nissan Hajaj. "Even after removing...exact duplicates, we saw a trillion unique URLs, and the number of individual web pages out there is growing by several billion pages per day."

Next comes analyzing the "link graph"--the mathematical representation of what links to what. That's a key foundation of Google's PageRank algorithm, which brought the company's search engine to prominence by assigning importance to those pages that other important pages point toward.

In the early days of Google, computing PageRank for the company's collection of a mere 26 million pages took a workstation "a couple hours," and the results would be used for some unspecified period of time. Today, Google surfs the Web continuously and recalculates the link graph "several times per day."

"This graph of one trillion URLs is similar to a map made up of one trillion intersections. So multiple times every day, we do the computational equivalent of fully exploring every intersection of every road in the United States. Except it'd be a map about 50,000 times as big as the U.S., with 50,000 times as many roads and intersections," the engineers said.

Google likes to talk about how users have choice and competition just one click away, and that's a fair point. But the blog post also makes it even clearer just how high barriers to entry are in the search market. That's one of the reasons Yahoo's BOSS (build your own search service) program is intriguing: it lets search start-ups take advantage of Yahoo's crawling, indexing, and search technology in exchange for advertising or revenue-sharing partnerships.

Filed under: Peripherals

Mizanur Rahman is clearly sick and tired of traditional mousing devices. So sick and tired, in fact, that he's kicked out a rendering of the Project: Alien Mouse. In short, this decidedly gigantic mouse shoots for ergonomics by providing a place for your wrist, lower arm and maybe your elbow if you're a small enough person. We'll be honest, all those gel cushions sure look comfy from here, but the amount of brain energy that would be required to use it kind of puts a damper on the whole deal.

Filed under: Robots

Continue reading 'The Shining' gets remade with WowWee bots, cybernetically invades your soul

Random Acts is written in the form of the diary of Lola Hart, a twelve year old girl in a near-future New York City. As the book progresses she changes from being a sweet middle-class child to a robbing murdering street girl as society changes around her. Presidents are assassinated and money is devalued and martial law is declared as she worries about her sexuality and groans about being forced to read Silas Marner for school. At the start of the book she's writing in standard English with the occasional odd word choice, by the end she has progressed into a completely different dialect, and you have progressed step by step along with her and are reading it with ease. I can't think of a comparable linguistic achievement, especially as he does it without any made up words. (Random example: "Everything downcame today, the world's spinning out and I spec we finally all going to be riding raw.") I also can't think of many books that have a protagonist change so much and so smoothly and believably. What makes it such a marvelous book is the way Lola and her world and the prose all descend together, and even though it's bleak and downbeat it's never depressing.

So, why haven't you read it?