Yes, they're exempt, but MOST of them use and honor the DNC registry (or utilize lists that have already been scrubbed of individuals on the registry).
Wow, this guy has far too much time on his hands. I can understand the desire to sue annoying telemarketers and politicians of an opposing part, but your own candidate or... nonprofit organizations? "Sorry Mr. Smith, we can't provide your insulin shots this month because we've been sued while looking for contributions." This seems a little sick.
His essay reads like a scam or an advertisement. Starting out with "Do you HAVE what it TAKES?" makes me think this guy wants something in return, or makes a TON of money from his lawsuits and just wants to exclaim to the world he's hot stuff. This is probably the type of guy who posts his telephone number all over the web then sues the people who innevitably call him.
My suggestion is that if you dislike telemarketing calls so much, get listed on the National do-not-call registry. Not perfect, but a lot better than getting wrapped up in petty lawsuits against NPOs.
Uhhh... OK. So while we're at it, let's get rid of copyright law, patent law, and restrictions on identity theft. Based on your logic, I should legally be able to dress up like George Bush, talk like George Bush, and try to pursuade others to do my bidding... as long as I tell them my name is George C. Bush. Or, I should be able open a company called Wallmart with their same colors, logos, products, bad jingle music, etc., right?
The method of conflict resolution system you choose is really dependant on the type, and value, of the product you are selling. If your startup is mediating resolutions for transactions in the thousands of dollars, a live mediator is possibly your best bet. However, if you're like eBay and primarily setting small value mediations, a simple automated solution is far better.
Would rock/paper/scissors or similar solutions work? Sure, if you're settling a dispute that's for $5, or a non-monetary dispute amongst friends. But any type of 'random' solution would reflect negatively on your company's image for high ticket items.
In any case, there should be recourse for both parties entering mediation... e.g. negative feedback, a fee, some loss of 'karma' or something similar. This incents both parties to negotiate a settlement prior to official conflict resolution.
The nice thing about Intellopedia is that it's easy to see a history of all changes. For instance, check out this document from the Intellopedia based upon the UN's mid 1990's estimate of their capabilities. You can see all the changes made by the CIA (deletions on sep lines, adds in bold) prior to our Executive branch using it as a pretext for war:
Iraq, an evil empire, is a country of
highly educated people
vast oil fields ruled ruthlessly by Saddam Hussein. Since the first Gulf war,
the various embargos, sanctions, and oil for food program has stripped Iraq of much of it's wealth and industrial capacity
Saddam has been working tirelessly to destroy us and take away our freedoms. Our estimate is that Iraq, under such conditions,
could not have possibly
has resurrected its evil nuclear, or even chemical weapons, capabilities.
Hopefully politicians don't have access to such a system!
$200 for a tiny laptop with a crank for charging still isn't a very good deal. Look on ebay and you get can far more powerful used laptops for the same price, or you can get $50 desktops (again, used of course) that would run circles around this odd device.
If not a single industrialized or developing nation would support creating the devices, why should we? The concept was pretty decent, but laptops are not going to solve third world problems. Depending on the African nation, they need teachers who won't get shot, kids who won't go hungry, parents who won't die from AIDS, and/or textbooks that won't be burned for fuel. Spending 6 month's salary on a windup laptop sounds rather absurd next to settling some of the bigger issues.
Google is trying to maintain the appearance of being innovative, and doing a good job of it. Every time they release a new product, even if they downgrade its importance or ditch it later, it gets tremendous buzz. Buzz is where it's at, and everytime they generate more buzz they drive more advertisers, searchers, and AdSense publishers to their site.
Another advantage to developing TONS of new products is that it keeps their folks busy on cool/fun new products. Most software engineers want to be able to go home to their families and have something fun to show them as an example of what they do. Showing your kid GoogleMaps or GoogleEarth will impress the heck out of them, and they'll think you're a genius.
If Google didn't have the 70/20/10 development principal, these engineers would be going home and answering their friends' prompts with "Ummm...if you want to know what I do, check out the results of searching for Mexican Pizza now vs. 2 years ago, the results are so much more relevant". Fun.
There's certainly a case for performing the test for hiring security related positions. Considering that the CIA (not sure about the FBI) uses the polygraph simply as one of their many 'weed out' tools, the test is certainly not going to contribute to hiring deceitful spies (although it likely turns away potentially good ones).
The illegitimacy of the test is most apparent in the private sector, where companies used it decades ago (up until 1988 when congress basically banned it) as part of the standard hiring practice. Some corporations still require this for top executives, although they try to keep the practice quiet and make sure execs sign waivers stating the test is voluntary and does not influence the hiring decision (yeah right).
That's pretty interesting that the basic blood pressure based lie detector that William Marston created formed the basis behind the Wonder Woman comics (e.g. he "proved" in his tests that women are more honest than men).
Strange that the FBI now relies so heavily on polygraph's when their initial assessment of the device was so negative, and most current research shows them to be relatively inaccurate.
What strikes me is that 20 years later, voice synthesis still sounds like a Commodore 64:
"Hello, I am Dr. Sbaitso. How can I help you?"
Otherwise, this pumpkin is pretty cool. Hopefully they take the parts out pretty quickly, it could get pretty messy. Imagine a computer stuck in this pumpkin!
Yep - and when I signed up and accepted the e-mail, it still kept everything locked... and this was before he was slashdotted. Oh well, others are right - he doesn't have much of a chance.
One commentor posted a link to Pete Ashburn's wiki, so I was excited to add a link back to slashdot on it (and figured Pete and his supporters would be happy to know he was featured on a popular national tech site).
However, on page after page after page, I continually received "this page is locked" warnings. I still e-mailed Pete, but even so... to disallow members from editing seems against the purpose of a Wiki and Pete's collaboration goals.
Given the tech savvyness of the younger generations, Politicians like Pete Ashdown are sure to become more commonplace over the next 10-20 years. Unfortunately, the vast majority of voters and capital hill aren't ready for the reform. Remember Ross Perot's "revolutionary" voting ideas? He wanted to enable people to vote in elections (and even on every congressional act) from their computers or at government kiosks. Everyone laughed at the idea, but his kooky vision is getting closer to reality.
In politics, it never seems to pay to be a visionary... while they may eventually effect great change in how our government functions, their lack of mainstream appeal never gets them very far in the election.
I couldn't agree more... the unfortunate thing is that any time I make similar suggestions to Linux programmers or just tech groups in general I get responses like "PEBKAC, not my problem", or "If you can't do XYZ, then you're not smart enough to be using a computer", or even "if Linux were easy to use, there'd be less jobs for support guys like me". These are REAL responses I've received from legitimate Linux developers.
As backwards as it sounds, I really think the Linux world needs to find some investors to plop down BIG money for PR, Marketing, and Focus Groups just for increasing desktop penetration. These may all sound like swear words to a techie, but I think they're essential to increasing Linux adoption.
Finally, someone who is addressing the root cause of why Linux continues to trail market leaders in desktop share. In addition to making it "beautiful", developers need to continue adding out-of-the-box widgets/features to prevent someone from ever needing to modify a script or enter a terminal window if they didn't want to. If they could address both of these 'issues', Linux would have a fighting chance against Windows desktops.
IMO - Microsoft doesn't dominate because it is better, it dominates because of great marketing and ease of use (even for groups such as the disabled). My grandmother can use XP Home, but if I have Linux up, she completely freezes. Sure, there's some grandmas that know perl scripting, but who wants to jump in and start compiling code just so they can play bridge with their friends over the net?
"Roughly 90% of web content consists of discussions of software patents" - so all this time I thought I was browsing blogs, news stories, gaming sites, and tech articles I was really just learning about software patents? And I always thought that 90% of the web was made up of porn and spam...
These development tools look great. Particularly Interface Builder and XRAY. I've never used Mac development tools, so it's possible that looks can be deceiving... but seeing this really makes me wish that MS would start to push their IDE forward rather than adding minor enhancements with each.NET release.
Another thought is to look far outside of Silicon Valley/California. Here in Baltimore, it's relatively easy to find great developers, and the going rate is FAR lower than on the West Coast. Maybe you can setup some type of remote contractor arrangement?
OK, so I can concede that physical gigapixel cameras may be unrealistic, but couldn't effective gigapixel cameras exist? For example, if a single pixel camera as referenced this past week on/. could take high resolution shots, couldn't they stretch out the technology to work for ridiculously hi-resolution photos?
I'm not an optics expert, just a tech optimist. 10 years ago I interviewed at IBM when they were working with Cyrix to match Intel chips. The engineering Director that interviewed me went on and on about how it would be impossible to create chips below 100nm (or.1 micron as he said) due to some type of Quantum interactions. Yet today Intel is testing 45 nm chips, and Cyrix is forgotten.
Someone will always find a work-around to push a technology's limits well beyond the end point demarcated by yesterday's experts.
The site is pretty slow to load up initially (understandably with the flash), but it's worth taking the time to view this fantastic work. The clarity and detail are superb, you can see every brushstroke, chipped paint flake, and any little imperfection (all in a Google Maps-esque viewer). I've never seen such detail firsthand at a museum!
What's amazing is that in 20-30 years, it wouldn't be unreasonable to believe that consumer cameras would be capable of taking the same picture at the same 13 gigapixel resolution, and still have enough room left over to store 1000 similar pictures.
Oh, I DEFINITELY agree that robots are better... and think we should be sending much bigger and better robots to Mars instead of people. But if we feel we must send people, the moon seems like a pretty silly place to put them.
I can understand why we'd want to go to Mars, but why try to scrounge up existing resources to get to the Moon? Sure, saving $35 Billion sounds great, but that's $35 Billion out of an estimated $108 Billion, which really means $200 Billion. The first time we went, we gained an unprecedented amount of technical knowledge, global press, and renewed patriotism from our people. The second time, we're planning on reusing parts to duplicate what's already been done. Who's going to care? And who's going to benefit other than the defense contractors?
This whole thing feels like when my wife comes home and says "look, I just saved $30 on this new pair of shoes"... yeah, but you still spent $120 to make an addition to your 27 pair collection.
20% is a lot, when the compression/decompression is fast. gzip/WinRAR/WinZip all compress this file to the 22-24MB mark in a minute or two on my desktop (which is comparable to their test machine). The winner's algorithm compressed the data to 16.9MB, but spent 5 hours and 900MB of RAM doing so. The contest would be far more interesting if it added a reasonable time/RAM restriction (e.g. 10 minutes and 500MB of RAM).
It turns out that Alexander Ratushnyak was the only person to even meet the challenge's guidelines, and one of only 3 people who submitted entries. Seems like a strange thing to award up to 50,000 Euro for... his compression was only 20% smaller than what I just quickly did with gzip. I'm rather surprised that more people didn't try though... it's not like people are throwing money at data compression researchers.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, they're exempt, but MOST of them use and honor the DNC registry (or utilize lists that have already been scrubbed of individuals on the registry).
Wow, this guy has far too much time on his hands. I can understand the desire to sue annoying telemarketers and politicians of an opposing part, but your own candidate or ... nonprofit organizations? "Sorry Mr. Smith, we can't provide your insulin shots this month because we've been sued while looking for contributions." This seems a little sick.
His essay reads like a scam or an advertisement. Starting out with "Do you HAVE what it TAKES?" makes me think this guy wants something in return, or makes a TON of money from his lawsuits and just wants to exclaim to the world he's hot stuff. This is probably the type of guy who posts his telephone number all over the web then sues the people who innevitably call him.
My suggestion is that if you dislike telemarketing calls so much, get listed on the National do-not-call registry. Not perfect, but a lot better than getting wrapped up in petty lawsuits against NPOs.
Uhhh ... OK. So while we're at it, let's get rid of copyright law, patent law, and restrictions on identity theft. Based on your logic, I should legally be able to dress up like George Bush, talk like George Bush, and try to pursuade others to do my bidding ... as long as I tell them my name is George C. Bush. Or, I should be able open a company called Wallmart with their same colors, logos, products, bad jingle music, etc., right?
The method of conflict resolution system you choose is really dependant on the type, and value, of the product you are selling. If your startup is mediating resolutions for transactions in the thousands of dollars, a live mediator is possibly your best bet. However, if you're like eBay and primarily setting small value mediations, a simple automated solution is far better.
... e.g. negative feedback, a fee, some loss of 'karma' or something similar. This incents both parties to negotiate a settlement prior to official conflict resolution.
Would rock/paper/scissors or similar solutions work? Sure, if you're settling a dispute that's for $5, or a non-monetary dispute amongst friends. But any type of 'random' solution would reflect negatively on your company's image for high ticket items.
In any case, there should be recourse for both parties entering mediation
No crank! Take my name off the list then, I was hoping at least to get a little exercise.
Iraq, an evil empire, is a country of vast oil fields ruled ruthlessly by Saddam Hussein. Since the first Gulf war, Saddam has been working tirelessly to destroy us and take away our freedoms. Our estimate is that Iraq, under such conditions, has resurrected its evil nuclear, or even chemical weapons, capabilities.
Hopefully politicians don't have access to such a system!
$200 for a tiny laptop with a crank for charging still isn't a very good deal. Look on ebay and you get can far more powerful used laptops for the same price, or you can get $50 desktops (again, used of course) that would run circles around this odd device.
If not a single industrialized or developing nation would support creating the devices, why should we? The concept was pretty decent, but laptops are not going to solve third world problems. Depending on the African nation, they need teachers who won't get shot, kids who won't go hungry, parents who won't die from AIDS, and/or textbooks that won't be burned for fuel. Spending 6 month's salary on a windup laptop sounds rather absurd next to settling some of the bigger issues.
Google is trying to maintain the appearance of being innovative, and doing a good job of it. Every time they release a new product, even if they downgrade its importance or ditch it later, it gets tremendous buzz. Buzz is where it's at, and everytime they generate more buzz they drive more advertisers, searchers, and AdSense publishers to their site.
Another advantage to developing TONS of new products is that it keeps their folks busy on cool/fun new products. Most software engineers want to be able to go home to their families and have something fun to show them as an example of what they do. Showing your kid GoogleMaps or GoogleEarth will impress the heck out of them, and they'll think you're a genius.
If Google didn't have the 70/20/10 development principal, these engineers would be going home and answering their friends' prompts with "Ummm...if you want to know what I do, check out the results of searching for Mexican Pizza now vs. 2 years ago, the results are so much more relevant". Fun.
There's certainly a case for performing the test for hiring security related positions. Considering that the CIA (not sure about the FBI) uses the polygraph simply as one of their many 'weed out' tools, the test is certainly not going to contribute to hiring deceitful spies (although it likely turns away potentially good ones).
The illegitimacy of the test is most apparent in the private sector, where companies used it decades ago (up until 1988 when congress basically banned it) as part of the standard hiring practice. Some corporations still require this for top executives, although they try to keep the practice quiet and make sure execs sign waivers stating the test is voluntary and does not influence the hiring decision (yeah right).
That's pretty interesting that the basic blood pressure based lie detector that William Marston created formed the basis behind the Wonder Woman comics (e.g. he "proved" in his tests that women are more honest than men).
Strange that the FBI now relies so heavily on polygraph's when their initial assessment of the device was so negative, and most current research shows them to be relatively inaccurate.
What strikes me is that 20 years later, voice synthesis still sounds like a Commodore 64:
"Hello, I am Dr. Sbaitso. How can I help you?"
Otherwise, this pumpkin is pretty cool. Hopefully they take the parts out pretty quickly, it could get pretty messy. Imagine a computer stuck in this pumpkin!
Yep - and when I signed up and accepted the e-mail, it still kept everything locked ... and this was before he was slashdotted. Oh well, others are right - he doesn't have much of a chance.
One commentor posted a link to Pete Ashburn's wiki, so I was excited to add a link back to slashdot on it (and figured Pete and his supporters would be happy to know he was featured on a popular national tech site).
... to disallow members from editing seems against the purpose of a Wiki and Pete's collaboration goals.
However, on page after page after page, I continually received "this page is locked" warnings. I still e-mailed Pete, but even so
Given the tech savvyness of the younger generations, Politicians like Pete Ashdown are sure to become more commonplace over the next 10-20 years. Unfortunately, the vast majority of voters and capital hill aren't ready for the reform. Remember Ross Perot's "revolutionary" voting ideas? He wanted to enable people to vote in elections (and even on every congressional act) from their computers or at government kiosks. Everyone laughed at the idea, but his kooky vision is getting closer to reality.
... while they may eventually effect great change in how our government functions, their lack of mainstream appeal never gets them very far in the election.
In politics, it never seems to pay to be a visionary
I couldn't agree more ... the unfortunate thing is that any time I make similar suggestions to Linux programmers or just tech groups in general I get responses like "PEBKAC, not my problem", or "If you can't do XYZ, then you're not smart enough to be using a computer", or even "if Linux were easy to use, there'd be less jobs for support guys like me". These are REAL responses I've received from legitimate Linux developers.
As backwards as it sounds, I really think the Linux world needs to find some investors to plop down BIG money for PR, Marketing, and Focus Groups just for increasing desktop penetration. These may all sound like swear words to a techie, but I think they're essential to increasing Linux adoption.
Finally, someone who is addressing the root cause of why Linux continues to trail market leaders in desktop share. In addition to making it "beautiful", developers need to continue adding out-of-the-box widgets/features to prevent someone from ever needing to modify a script or enter a terminal window if they didn't want to. If they could address both of these 'issues', Linux would have a fighting chance against Windows desktops.
IMO - Microsoft doesn't dominate because it is better, it dominates because of great marketing and ease of use (even for groups such as the disabled). My grandmother can use XP Home, but if I have Linux up, she completely freezes. Sure, there's some grandmas that know perl scripting, but who wants to jump in and start compiling code just so they can play bridge with their friends over the net?
"Roughly 90% of web content consists of discussions of software patents" - so all this time I thought I was browsing blogs, news stories, gaming sites, and tech articles I was really just learning about software patents? And I always thought that 90% of the web was made up of porn and spam ...
These development tools look great. Particularly Interface Builder and XRAY. I've never used Mac development tools, so it's possible that looks can be deceiving ... but seeing this really makes me wish that MS would start to push their IDE forward rather than adding minor enhancements with each .NET release.
Another thought is to look far outside of Silicon Valley/California. Here in Baltimore, it's relatively easy to find great developers, and the going rate is FAR lower than on the West Coast. Maybe you can setup some type of remote contractor arrangement?
OK, so I can concede that physical gigapixel cameras may be unrealistic, but couldn't effective gigapixel cameras exist? For example, if a single pixel camera as referenced this past week on /. could take high resolution shots, couldn't they stretch out the technology to work for ridiculously hi-resolution photos?
.1 micron as he said) due to some type of Quantum interactions. Yet today Intel is testing 45 nm chips, and Cyrix is forgotten.
I'm not an optics expert, just a tech optimist. 10 years ago I interviewed at IBM when they were working with Cyrix to match Intel chips. The engineering Director that interviewed me went on and on about how it would be impossible to create chips below 100nm (or
Someone will always find a work-around to push a technology's limits well beyond the end point demarcated by yesterday's experts.
The site is pretty slow to load up initially (understandably with the flash), but it's worth taking the time to view this fantastic work. The clarity and detail are superb, you can see every brushstroke, chipped paint flake, and any little imperfection (all in a Google Maps-esque viewer). I've never seen such detail firsthand at a museum!
What's amazing is that in 20-30 years, it wouldn't be unreasonable to believe that consumer cameras would be capable of taking the same picture at the same 13 gigapixel resolution, and still have enough room left over to store 1000 similar pictures.
Oh, I DEFINITELY agree that robots are better ... and think we should be sending much bigger and better robots to Mars instead of people. But if we feel we must send people, the moon seems like a pretty silly place to put them.
I can understand why we'd want to go to Mars, but why try to scrounge up existing resources to get to the Moon? Sure, saving $35 Billion sounds great, but that's $35 Billion out of an estimated $108 Billion, which really means $200 Billion. The first time we went, we gained an unprecedented amount of technical knowledge, global press, and renewed patriotism from our people. The second time, we're planning on reusing parts to duplicate what's already been done. Who's going to care? And who's going to benefit other than the defense contractors?
... yeah, but you still spent $120 to make an addition to your 27 pair collection.
This whole thing feels like when my wife comes home and says "look, I just saved $30 on this new pair of shoes"
20% is a lot, when the compression/decompression is fast. gzip/WinRAR/WinZip all compress this file to the 22-24MB mark in a minute or two on my desktop (which is comparable to their test machine). The winner's algorithm compressed the data to 16.9MB, but spent 5 hours and 900MB of RAM doing so. The contest would be far more interesting if it added a reasonable time/RAM restriction (e.g. 10 minutes and 500MB of RAM).
It turns out that Alexander Ratushnyak was the only person to even meet the challenge's guidelines, and one of only 3 people who submitted entries. Seems like a strange thing to award up to 50,000 Euro for ... his compression was only 20% smaller than what I just quickly did with gzip. I'm rather surprised that more people didn't try though ... it's not like people are throwing money at data compression researchers.