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You're so right. Tech jobs, like jobs in general, have always been almost entirely about getting the right cogs for the corporate machine. Sure, if you do anything creative, they'll demand to own it, but even the richest corporations can't afford to actually develop or explore more than one idea in a hundred, and perhaps one in a hundred of those will actually make it to market. The problem is not coming up with good ideas, but getting the political and financial resources to develop them.

For every one of these "top engineers" there are ten others just as smart and more inventive who, for whatever reason, have never become known to the handful of people making high-level recruiting decisions. I know a guy, Quinn Tyler Jackson who developed the theory of adaptive, context-sensitive grammars and built a fast parser that could handle any language with no ad-hoc cruft. It can naturally parse ambiguous things like "time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana". Ten years ago, it parsed the Gospel of Mark starting with just a single noun in its tiny dictionary and only a couple of pages of rules. Is Google or Microsoft or Yahoo! knocking on his door? No, of course not. He doesn't already have a top spot in a top firm, so how good can he be, they figure... if they figure.

I have dozens of patentable inventions lying around. They are in various areas - no one company could use them all. I can't afford to patent a single one of them, and even if I could I couldn't expect to make any money from them without far more resources. Without a patent, I can't even tell anyone about them without giving up the rights. (Companies seldom will sign an NDA to see an individual's idea, and even if they did, how could I afford to enforce it if they broke the agreement?)

Companies don't hire inventors much - they want engineers. Inventors think up stuff, which is easy and fun for the inventor but risky for the employer; making it work is difficult and tedious for the engineer and indispensable for the employer. I'm just an inventive technician, not a top engineer who can not only invent but can get the resources or make the invention work all by himself if need be. So, basically, I'm screwed under the current legal and employment situation.

Some of these ideas could make a company with the right resources a lot of money; some already have. I wasn't the first to think of reconfigurable computing in the early '90s or maybe even the 4-bit lookup table as a "supergate", but I certainly did so before these things came on the market. Ultrasonic beat-wave sound projection, same thing. As an 11 year-old kid in 1983 I came up with an idea for a notebook computer design with two hinged flat panel touchscreens that I think is still better for some purposes than what is on the market now. In 1994/5 I invented a tree browser history which I still wish I could get in Firefox or IE. I have a whole class of interface ideas combining the control of the command line with the discoverability of a menu system. I've got all sorts of optic, acousto-optic, superconductor, magnetic, electrostatic, electronic, power-producing, energy saving, inflatable, legal, corporate, psychological, interface and social applications ideas - and unless something changes, no one will get any use out of them. I don't see any jobs out there for some one like me who doesn't want to sell his soul for a salary.

You can download and compile an EMACS that runs on OSX without an X Window client:

http://members.shaw.ca/akochoi-emacs/stories/obtai ning-and-building.html

yes, we have another source of high speed internet in Alberta. Shaw Cable

Telus and Shaw are the big 2 in these parts.

As someone from Calgary, and who saw Telus employees on strike this morning... yes, there are alternatives. Shaw Cable and 3web do cable internet and primus offers ADSL service in direct competition with Telus. In fact, it's law.

When Telus started up and bought out AGT (Alberta Government Telephones) part of the deal was that they couldn't squash out all competition, so they have to let Primus survive. Primus undercuts everything that Telus does and essentially resells the service, but there is an option.

Of course, they will have that website blocked as well. That's why you use Shaw, or 3web (same relationship as Telus with Primus).

I have Shaw Digital Phone in Calgary. It isnt technically VOIP since it uses traditional handsets and communicates seperately from my cable modem. However I do get VOIP pricing on long distance. The service is $55CDN/month which includes free unlimited long distance to North America, all of the typical calling features (VM, 3way, call display etc...) along with dirt cheap international calling and local 911/411 service.

Shaw is also considered a telco in Canada as a result and must maintain CLEC standards for their service. I have yet to have my phone service unavailable or even have sound quality that is any worse than my previous POTS service. Even the phone gateway they installed into my house has a battery backup in case of a power failure (not that it matters anyways my wife and I each have cell phones).

Shaw Digital Phone Website

Did anyone else go through the whole of hl2 (and hl1 for that matter - I didn't play any of the expansions) not realising the combine were a 3rd alien group altogether (apart from humans and the xen)?
Seems they could have explained it a bit more in the game (I always wondered why the vortigaunts were on your side all of a sudden)

Theres a great explanation at http://members.shaw.ca/halflifestory/timeline.htm

"Crippled" cell phones seems to be common.

For example I bought a LG 5450 from Telus, but Telus blocks downloading tones/wallpapers off the net, forcing users to download off Telus website only.

When I asked about the phone-to-PC data cable, the vendor said it didnt exist, when in fact it does

Today, I use Bitpim to download/upload photos, ringtones, you name it, using this guide. Enjoy!

The data on Richard Lynn's website shows a smaller range within western European countries, with the UK as a baseline of 100, but Holland and Germany still come out on top, together with Italy, at 102 each (this would be approximately 104 with the USA, which scored 98, as the baseline). France again comes out below average, at 98, but well above Ireland at 93 and Croatia at 90 (the same as Turkey).

Lynn's data show fairly large variations overall in other racially similar regions too, e.g. the averages in the Phillipines and Thailand are 86 and 91, compared to 100 for China, 105 for Japan and 106 for South Korea (it is notable that Japan and Korea are very homogeneous, without large ethnic minority populations). There's some variation in sub-Saharan Africa too, with Equatorial Guinea scoring 59, compared to 77 for Zambia.

All in all, it doesn't appear that broad racial groups are homogeneous in terms of IQ, with a great deal of overlap between Europeans and East Asians. Moreover, within each population there is considerable variation too. In general, the standard deviation of an IQ test with a mean of 100 is 15 points. According to the empirical rule in statistics, approximately 32% of observations are at least one standard deviation (+/-) from the mean, with 5% at least two from the mean and 0.3% at least three. Nearly all observations fall within four standard deviations.

In IQ terms, this means a population with an average of 100 would have roughly 16% above 115, another 16% below 85, 2.5% above 130, 2.5% below 70, 0.15% above 145, 0.15% below 55 and extremely few above 160 or below 40. This would have to be adjusted for the individual populations (assuming they are normally distributed) with means other than 100, but all in all, even with extreme differences in the means between two populations, there will still be high- and low-IQ individuals in both.

The minute you give up the physical artifact and rely on a digital representation of your data, you are at the risk of any company who wishes to exert some control over the format of that data.

Screenshots here and here

spammage! northsun@shaw.ca

it seems there's no place to discuss it "on-topic"

I grabbed a screenshot (look for the "Ask Slashdot box), and submitted it as a story, but it got rejected. Maybe I'll try again in 72 hours :)

I guess that /. should stop using "poorly implemented headline readers" on their site, eh?

Yes, TBE is the best thing for webbrowsing since sliced bread.

Ive got alll those settings tweaked PERFECTLY. Sent all my friends this and they agree

http://members.shaw.ca/anethema/tabextensions.js

put this in your application data type folder

(app data/firefox/ or whatever it is.)

or in nix ~/.mozilla/firefox//
make sure tbe is installed and moz is closed when you overwrite your current settings.

Once you use tab browsing the way it is meant to be used, you will never be able to go back.

Wow... thanks for the incredible linkage:
http://members.shaw.ca/sonde/index.htm

This guy is an uber nerd, but the glider project just blows my mind.

This site discusses the hazards involved on this page.

The excerpt of their short answer on the main page is as follows:

Is there any danger to aviation?

The short answer is no; there is very little risk to larger aircraft. According to an MIT study, the risk of a small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle such as this being hit by a jetliner is on the order of 1 in 1 billion per UAV flight hour. The risk to light aircraft, in a relatively busy area such as the Fraser Valley, is higher, but can be made easily below the risk light aircraft pose to each other. For the long answer, please read further.

This site discusses the hazards involved on this page.

The excerpt of their short answer on the main page is as follows:

Is there any danger to aviation?

The short answer is no; there is very little risk to larger aircraft. According to an MIT study, the risk of a small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle such as this being hit by a jetliner is on the order of 1 in 1 billion per UAV flight hour. The risk to light aircraft, in a relatively busy area such as the Fraser Valley, is higher, but can be made easily below the risk light aircraft pose to each other. For the long answer, please read further.

Since I can not RTFA, ican only speculate it will be much more fun that these guys, that lofted a package on a weathe balloon too, but let it return to the launchsite by using a glider. They got a few flifghts out of it until it presumably crashed into a mountainside.

If these guys are going for 100.000 feet, they will need a very big accesible area to recover their instrument package. given that winds up high may be a stong as 100 km/h, that leaves a pretty big oval your package could drop in.

It's a genius idea frankly. something Unique is needed to be part of the the next spec...RFID is the simplest thing to use. mold it right into the disc and the content could be keyed to accept only those numbers of RFID tags as keys. Nobody but certified people could have the RFID discs.

(1) I want to take a home video from my HD-DV camera and put it on an HD disc to give to family and friends. Are you saying I can't do that?

(2A) If you make an exception for (1), what stops me from doing the same with a movie rip?

(2B) If you don't make an exception, just how do you intend to get people to accept the format?

I don't like the "phone home" requirements though, that could be a real turn off for most people.

(3) Have you ever heard of DIVX (not the video codec, but the DRM scheme Circuit City came up with about 10 years ago)? More importantly, have these researchers ever heard of it? It would seem not . . .

To further debunk my silly statement, take a look at this Snopes listing. Might as well be complete.

I probably shouldn't have stepped into the issue of correlations with IQ. It seems to correlate very well with test taking, but not so well with factors such as happiness or income. That's my vague recollection when studying for my masters in biology education, anyway. I haven't kept up on the research lately.

For an amusing way to find your IQ based off your SAT score, take a look over here. Since mine is over 140, the intelligent thing to do would clearly be to mod me up.

Assume for the sake of argument that life is ultimately found on Mars or elsewhere other than Earth, what can we imagine happening to religious faiths based upon the Bible?

The Absolutely Certain Answer

Exactly what has happened every other time in the history of religion when its descriptions of the world, past, present or future, are demonstrated to be false: after a period of shock, and reflection, doctrine and interpretation of the founding literature are modified to maintain an ostensibly consistent lineage of belief, and the religion continues on. Examples of this are abundant in physics and astronomy. Despite Kansas, many Christians are quite comfortable believing in both evolution and a creative God. And even in light of innumerable predictions of the end of the world that belief persists (many scholars believe the early Christians thought Jesus would return in their lifetimes). In every case where people of faith worried that a scientific discovery would undermine them (and where skeptics hoped), the desire to maintain the faith permitted the alteration of dogma should adherence to the dogma prove fatal to the system as a whole. Imagine how much coverage the passing of the Pope would have garnered had he maintained the flatness of the earth?

The point is that religious belief is amazingly resilient, (and religious texts amazingly ambivalent and their meaning malleable) and as long as no decisive proof against the existence of God is devised (proofs either way are impossible IMO) religion will always be adapting to changes forced by the progress of science. It's a perennial monkey on our collective backs, probably due to some wiring in our brains

Don't forget the exhibit at the Olympic stadium in Rimouski

Chretien's friend submits bills for shows at fake Olympic stadiums: inquiry
at 19:46 on April 13, 2005, EST.
By BRIAN DALY

MONTREAL (CP) - Phantom Olympic Stadiums throughout Quebec were included in bogus bills that a good friend of Jean Chretien submitted while raking in $6.7 million in sponsorship income, an inquiry heard Wednesday.

The fake bills complete with non-existent stadiums were turned in by Liberal organizer Jacques Corriveau for a series of regional hunting and fishing shows that did in fact take place, promoter Luc Lemay testified at the inquiry into the sponsorship scandal.
&<---------&<---------&<--------&<------ ---
Laughter erupted when inquiry counsel Bernard Roy noted Corriveau billed thousands of dollars for working at the Olympic Stadium in Sherbrooke, Trois-Rivieres, Rimouski, Chicoutimi and Ste-Foy, a suburb of Quebec City.

Rimouski's entire population could easily fit into Montreal's costly 50,000-seat Olympic Stadium with room to spare.

Sidenote: You probably already know, but the person who did the OS X Gnu/Emacs port is also working on a new XEmacs port for OS X that is pretty functional - take a look here.

He also has an interesting OS X programming blog here.

It is nice that Google makes it so easy to create one's own Google homepage: http://members.shaw.ca/kenandcorey/go.htm

And it is XHTML compliant.

Hard drive mp3 players existed for a year before the iPod and they consisted of two models:

The Creative Nomad, 14oz, 5"x5"x1.5"
The PJB100, 10oz, 6"x4"x1"

Apple released the iPod and made it a consumer object, rather than a geek object. Apple changed the entire market! Before Apple they were:
Large (bigger than a paperback. Now all of them, LIKE the iPod, are smaller than a deck of cards)
Heavy (at 10oz or more. Now all of them weigh less than 6oz)
Slow (using USB 1. Now all of them, just like the iPod, use USB2 or FireWire)

They were good for cars, good for work, good for train trips, and good for airplanes, before Apple got a hold of them. After Apple they became good for walking, roller blading (yes I have rollerbladed with iPods), working out at the gym, anywhere.

It was like the difference between a desktop and a laptop, in mobility.

The same with music stores. Before the iTMS, there were NONE that let you burn to CD. NONE that let you upload to an mp3 player. NONE that let you listen on multiple computers. NONE that let you back the music up. You say, "In the works", and I say, "Quickly saw what Apple did and tried to match them."

The only other player besides Apple who has made any money off Open Source would be... IBM. Red Hat hardly makes money, GNU and Apache aren't profit centers.

Here's the initial announcement and response about Safari's use of KHTML, with positive response from developers.

This suggests developers haven't been able to keep up with Apple's changes, which makes sense; a handful of developers working full time on anything can outstrip hundreds of developers working part time over weekends and evenings.

As for gcc, the idea is to search gcc-patches and look for apple.com addresses. Searching Google shows over 6k hits, though I'm sure some of them are duplicates. Some Apple devs maintain special branches (for example, in implementing ObjC specific features) while others contribute fixes, or add Altivec/VMX specific patches.

Where do you get your info that Apple ISN'T contributing?

HOLY SHIT
-- The Onion

They already do.

Warning: They suck according to engadget .

Here in Vancouver we have Shaw selling Lite always on cable connections that are "up to 5x faster than dial up" for $25CDN ($20.29 US today) and Telus selling regular DSL for $30 CDN ($24.35 US today) if you sign up for a year. Sounds like what you're looking for. Too bad your local companies don't have something like that.

Hopefully prices will come down for you guys. Prices may come down for us now that Shaw (cable company) is offering digital cable phone services in cities like Calgary, Alberta to completely remove Telus from the loop. Competition is good :)

Here in Vancouver we have Shaw selling Lite always on cable connections that are "up to 5x faster than dial up" for $25CDN ($20.29 US today) and Telus selling regular DSL for $30 CDN ($24.35 US today) if you sign up for a year. Sounds like what you're looking for. Too bad your local companies don't have something like that.

Hopefully prices will come down for you guys. Prices may come down for us now that Shaw (cable company) is offering digital cable phone services in cities like Calgary, Alberta to completely remove Telus from the loop. Competition is good :)

No more little demon...

BSD Diva:
http://members.shaw.ca/zerone/img/BSDiva.png

nope

"That would be great, but for some of the same reasons Joe User isn't already securing his PC is because he doesn't know where to start, let alone how to finish.

So the ISP can supply a precofigured pack. Like Shaw.ca, Telus's competition, is already doing.

ShawSecure

Telus likely has something similar, or will very soon. All these big ISPs should, and very clearly they can.

Back when the nimda worm was running around, I wrote a home-grown IDS to watch web hits, identify nimda-type probes and, if I could find a reporting address for the offending IP email a complaint off to the responsible ISP.

We were being serviced by Shaw Cable at the time, and every once in a while, they'd misread my complaints, and figure that my box was the source of the attack, and they'd send a nasty email to my roommate (who the connection was registered to) threatening to cut off our internet if we didn't delete the viruses install a firewall, etc. (we each had our own BSD firewall).

I got to know one of the supervisors there reasonably well, modified the letter I sent out to make it all but impossible for the people who read the email to confuse the attacking box with the defender, and he even added a note to the file for our connection, which resulted in a period of quiet after which we got yet another threatening letter.

I responded with this letter. My roommate (who took this very seriously because he was paying business rates to be allowed to run servers on the line) thought that I was being a bit flippant about something so important (flippant?! It took me an hour to write the damn thing!), but the supervisor at shaw said that he got a bit of a chuckle out of it when he phoned me to apologize for the error and promise a fix. His explanation was that shaw had installed a new abuse reporting system and that the note about our account had been lost in the transition (but would be added back in).

If you read my letter, (which includes the original autocomplaint) then you'll understand just how far people are willing to go to misread log files.

But I don't see why overhead power lines need to be layed out. Why can't the existing infrastructure be adapted ? What am I missing here ?
I assume this refers to "Electrify city streets in..." etc.
With overhead power, you can run buses, trucks etc. as trolleys, so they won't need huge (several tons for a truck) battery packs. This may be more efficient.

Oh heck, I'm not so sure now. Apparently there's an auto-pitch trim function (mention about halfway down this page), but not much is said on how it works.

I guess one of the reasons us Canadians support it is this way we can keep those damn Russians and Danes from stealing Santa's mail. (You all knew Santa is Canadian, right?)

I know it's lame to reply to my own post, but here is an IQ normal distribution. You were proposing a theoretical sample distribution, and it would be interesting to run a random sample against the population to see how it stacks up.

can it make sense of square roots? Matthew Leung

As a side note... I found Linus' resume on the Internet..

Linus' Resume

Presumably they are happy to take a loss because the buyers can't then jump to satellite easily...

Anyway, the 6208 (and presumably it's higher-end brother, the 6400 both allow direct recording to a firewire port, al though one reviewer said it just wouldn't work for PC, only Mac). of the post-decryption bitstream.

As a computer engineer, I can usually draw better than my peers. Unlike picking up another porgramming language, I don't think artistic talent can be learned readily, because you need an eye for colors, shapes, and style that I notice my scientific peers just do not possess.

Ever since a kid, I would try and copy styles from mecha comic books. I worked very hard when I was little to draw something as close to the original as possble. Not to sound discouraging, but I don't think it is possible to "learned to be self-sufficient" before your contract is over. What you can do, however, is follow the numerous art tutorials on the net and try your best to duplicate the Photoshop effects to something usable.

As a side-note, here are some of my artwork:
deviantART or My Website

The drawings from my sketchbook are mostly redraw of original artwork by other artists. If you do decide to learn art for future uses, I think the best way to start learning art is to try duplicating a professional artist as close as possible. Once you get an eye for colors, shapes, and line distances, you should be able to realize art concepts in your head.

if I have a character named Ferro Man, who wears an armored suit, am I infringing on Iron Man?

No, you'd be infringing on Ferro Man

if I have an Asian character with claws named "The China Wolf"? Am I infringing [on Wolverine]?

No, but you might be infringing on Lady Deathstrike.

And yes, it is becoming much more difficult to come up with fresh superhero ideas as copyright terms get longer and longer.

I am surprised this has not been brought up more frequently on slashdot. Here in Canada, one of our largest cable companies (Shaw) has a movie on demand service, and has had one for over a year. Granted the selection has went from "slim", to "not bad". It is prohibitive in some cases because you must have there high-speed service, with there digital cable, but the quality of the picture and sound is surprisingly good, and it starts immediately, not tomorrow. https://secure.shaw.ca/sod/home.asp Shaw on demand

The following menu path will enable you to disable popups in the newest versions (from memory)

That is the "You have been disconnected" dialog, as well as the 'Unable to connect' dialog It's this one that serves no purpose, and can't be turned off without patching the source. If you are disconnected, or the MSN server is down or whatever, it will continue to harass you with those until you disable auto-reconnect.

Typically when those dialogs come up, I'm busy typing something and it comes up focused on the cancel button. So by the time I've had a chance to even see the thing, and realize its there, I've already cancelled it. Gaim updates the docklet to tell you when its connecting, why shouldn't the docklet suppress that dialog, at the very least until a connection succeeds. It doesn't even just come up once and reconnect them all. You get one per account usually about 15 seconds or so apart.

The following menu path will enable you to disable popups in the newest versions (from memory)

That is the "You have been disconnected" dialog, as well as the 'Unable to connect' dialog It's this one that serves no purpose, and can't be turned off without patching the source. If you are disconnected, or the MSN server is down or whatever, it will continue to harass you with those until you disable auto-reconnect.

Typically when those dialogs come up, I'm busy typing something and it comes up focused on the cancel button. So by the time I've had a chance to even see the thing, and realize its there, I've already cancelled it. Gaim updates the docklet to tell you when its connecting, why shouldn't the docklet suppress that dialog, at the very least until a connection succeeds. It doesn't even just come up once and reconnect them all. You get one per account usually about 15 seconds or so apart.

The following menu path will enable you to disable popups in the newest versions (from memory)

That is the "You have been disconnected" dialog, as well as the 'Unable to connect' dialog It's this one that serves no purpose, and can't be turned off without patching the source. If you are disconnected, or the MSN server is down or whatever, it will continue to harass you with those until you disable auto-reconnect.

Typically when those dialogs come up, I'm busy typing something and it comes up focused on the cancel button. So by the time I've had a chance to even see the thing, and realize its there, I've already cancelled it. Gaim updates the docklet to tell you when its connecting, why shouldn't the docklet suppress that dialog, at the very least until a connection succeeds. It doesn't even just come up once and reconnect them all. You get one per account usually about 15 seconds or so apart.

The following menu path will enable you to disable popups in the newest versions (from memory)

That is the "You have been disconnected" dialog, as well as the 'Unable to connect' dialog It's this one that serves no purpose, and can't be turned off without patching the source. If you are disconnected, or the MSN server is down or whatever, it will continue to harass you with those until you disable auto-reconnect.

Typically when those dialogs come up, I'm busy typing something and it comes up focused on the cancel button. So by the time I've had a chance to even see the thing, and realize its there, I've already cancelled it. Gaim updates the docklet to tell you when its connecting, why shouldn't the docklet suppress that dialog, at the very least until a connection succeeds. It doesn't even just come up once and reconnect them all. You get one per account usually about 15 seconds or so apart.

There are simpler ways.. like this parallel port interface (page is SNES, but the same design works for NES controllers too)

I've personally built several of these interfaces, and they work just fine, with one caveat: depending on your parallel port you might want to put a transistor in there, like in this design. I haven't had any problems with the latter design with any parallel port type, although you might need to change resistor. (or just skip it altogether)

(Yes, there are drivers for Linux, Win95/98/Me and 2000/XP)

with this one you don't have to wait, it's instant...

only thing is I believe there's only a limited selection but i'm not sure...

https://secure.shaw.ca/sod/home.asp/

The movie should immediately start playing on your TV. Sit back and enjoy the show! Remember that you can stop, pause, rewind or jump forward at any time using your remote control.

You may be interested in the Fujitsu Lifebook P series of laptops. In particular, there is the P2120 - heres how it stacks up to your requirements:

1. 10.6"(w) x 7"(d) x 1.59"(h), only 3.4 lbs with combo drive and main battery
2. Internal max: 1280 x 768 resolution, 16M colors, External max: 1600 x 1200 resolution, 16M colors
3. All of these things, except for the Wifi is 802.11b
4. ATI Mobility Radeon graphics controller
5. Everything works in Linux!

Click here to see the type of attack that causes a grape terror alert.