This is what gift cards are for, available from numerous outlets (Safeway, Office Depot, Wal-Mart, and similar places). You can get prepaid VISA and Mastercard giftcards, which work great for purchasing porn, or other questionable things of an online nature, where you can't trust the vendor. A $50 card will typically cost about $55.
After you buy it, you go to a web site from the card vendor, enter the card number and security code, and then set the user name and billing zip code. Then go wild (well, to the extent that you can go wild with $50...). Here's one such card that is available at a lot of places.
There are also cards that you can refill from your "real" credit card, but then you are easier to trace. Might as well use a non-refillable card, purchased with cash. That way, if "all models 18 or over, proof on file" turns out to not quite be true, no credit card that can be tied to you will be in the site's records.:-)
If that's not a concern, though, and you are just trying to limit exposure of your real credit card, then go ahead with the refillable cards. In fact, there are even some that are purely online. They don't provide a physical card. You just go to their site, sign up with your credit card, and they give you a credit card number to use online, with a limit of whatever you want to transfer from your credit card. Here is one such virtual card.
NOTE: some gift cards cannot be used for porn or gambling, so choose appropriately. And some can be so used, but add a surcharge for porn.
A communication link is not a toy. They can learn to read and write and pledge allegiance to their flag, but they previously only could learn what was fed to them. Now they can read EVERYthing
So their education will be what they randomly find on the internet? That doesn't sound like a recipe for success.
The internet is a great educational tool, with guidance. But is that guidance going to be provided in Peru, or are they just throwing hardware at the problem of their poor educational system and hoping that it magically does something?
Heat a bulb puts out is heat that a furnace won't have to provide. In places where no AC is used, there won't be any net efficiency gained
You need to further qualify that to be in places with no AC, and where resistive electrical heating is used to heat the house. My house is heated by a heat pump, which is supposedly more efficient that resistive electrical heating, so presumably I would come out ahead replacing heat from my bulbs with heat from my heat pump.
Will you have a drive capable of reading the physical medium? Will you have a compiler for the language in which the emulator for the cpu chipset was written?
It depends on whether I'm a non-idiot or not. If I'm not an idiot, I'd remember that I had archived valuable information, and periodically I'd check all the copies, making sure I can handle them. If any are failing, they would be replaced by a copy made from one of the good copies. Also periodically, I'd note whether the media and technology of my archives is still well supported. If it was not, I'd copy the archives to something newer. I would not have to bother emulating old CPUs because, being a non-idiot, my archives would always be in a format easily used by current systems.
Many people have small, battery-powered analog TVs as part of their emergency gear. I bet a lot of people will forget about those. Maybe one station in each area should be subsidized to keep analog broadcast equipment functional, for use in emergencies.
Or don't you find that your usual reaction on reading a patent is, "huh, someone found the time and money to file this" rather than "wow! I wish I had thought of that!"? I know I do. At least when I'm not thinking, "I wonder why they are doing this in such a stupid way? Has someone already locked down the obvious method?"
If that's your usual reaction, then it is just hindsight talking. Most things seem a lot easier once someone tells you how to do them.
Heck, I've seen cases where there is a problem that is known to be a major concern in the industry. Many of the brightest engineers work on it for years, and fail to solve it. Then someone solves it and gets a patent, and the patented method is not complicated--it is pretty easy to understand. And all those people, even the ones who tried for years personally to solve the problem and failed, immediately proclaim that the solution is obvious.
Obvious as far as patents go does not mean "I understood it pretty easily once someone showed it to me".
Don't get me wrong. There are a lot of patents that should not have been issued due to obviousness, but that is not as common as most people think, because most people are fooled by the hindsight effect.
Yes, you are reading it wrong. They are saying those are technologies in Microsoft products that came into the Microsoft products via Microsoft Research. The implementation of IPv6 in Windows came from a research implementation that MS Research did back around 1998, to further network research, for example. They didn't invent it--they implemented it to use for network research, but the product development side of the company got to benefit from that. They are including that as an example of why it is worthwhile to fund researchers.
As for the other things you list, some of them did originate at Microsoft, or Microsoft was among the first. Spam filtering, for example (no Paul Graham was not first with statistical spam filtering--he was the first to popularize it). And they have indeed invented quite a bit of photography analysis tools.
Microsoft Research is basically an academic research lab. The place their results usually go are peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings (which is why most people here never hear of them). But they also work with the product development side of the company so that the products can include this stuff, whether it was something invented at Microsoft, or something that was invented somewhere else and MS Research simply contributed advancements to the original investment.
Actually, if you look into the history of Clippy, it started out based on very serious research in machine learning and human/computer interaction. Researchers developed a very awesome system that watched what you did, learned your work habits, and could figure out when you were having trouble, and then make useful suggestions. The product development people took this research and made Clippy, and explained to the marketing folks how great this was (and it was great).
The marketing folks decided it wasn't coming up enough (who want's a revolutionary feature hidden away most of the time?), and so made the development people dumb Clippy down, so it would think you were in trouble at the first sign of anything slights wrong, and pop up.
I suspect that this happens a lot with Microsoft products. The research version of Clippy was probably one of the best online help aids ever--way ahead of, and far more useful than, anything you'll find on Linux or Mac. Then marketing turns it into a joke.
The thing about the Kindle is that it has a lot of eBooks available that are
not mostly old things that are public domain
not too expensive
The Kindle appears to be the first eBook reader for which someone who is a reasonably avid current reader has a chance of satisfying most of the reading needs with, without spending a lot more money (other than the initial cost of the device itself). As far as the device cost, note that this is offset somewhat by the reduced storage costs. For someone who buys and keeps a lot of books, the savings in not needing to buy as many bookshelves could actually be more than the cost of the unit!
For those looking for an eBook reader that also lets you read your own files, and things like that, the Kindle isn't there. But for those looking for something that is an alternate way to deal with books, it looks like the best so far.
They don't have to. The source is opened and what ODF is has been released to the community at large
That's not quite correct. ODF is covered by Sun patents. They have made those patents available for free under a license that covers ODF 1.0, plus any future versions whose development Sun participates in past the point where OASIS would require a patent license. (You can find the complete text of the license at the OASIS web site if you want to see for yourself). So, future versions have to have Sun participation, and if Sun really doesn't like the way things are going, they can take their ball and go home and everyone else has to stop playing.
It's not clear to me how this can be called "open", at least in the sense we usually use the term around here. What if I want to base a new document format, for my internal use at work, on it? Can I? Nope. That would use Sun's patents, and not be covered by the ODF patent license. So, no freedom to modify for my own use (and, of course, no freedom to share modifications with others).
ODF and OOXML are both just calling themselves "open" because that buzzword is all the rage now, but until I can fork them if I don't like the direction Sun and Microsoft go, respectively, then they aren't open.
So when is Sun going to turn control of ODF over to a standards body? (There is a difference between letting a standards body approve a particular version, and turning control over).
There are zillions of things wrong with OOXML, so why do people keep picking things that are ALSO problems with ODF? It would be a lot more effective to pick those areas where ODF is actually different and better, and push those.
Refer to government open standards, how OOXML isn't a stable standard and is ungoing massive changes at Ecma
The problem with that is that ODF is also undergoing massive changes. The version currently working its way through standardization adds the OpenFormula spec to ODF, which is something like 25% of the size of ODF. That's a pretty massive change!
Any suggestions for how to phrase it if you're not a New York resident?
How about this?
Dear CIO;
I'm not from New York, but I'm on the Internet. The same Internet that thinks Ron Paul, lolcats, and "2 girls 1 cup" are great, so I obviously know more than anyone technical.
I don't know anything about your actual requirements, but you should pick ODF, because OOXML is from Microsoft. ODF 1.2 is in committee right now, and it will plug all those holes in ODF, like spreadsheet formulas not being specified, so don't let the fact that you can't do anything useful in the current version without lots of vendor-specific non-standard extensions bother you. Vote for Ron Paul!
Suppose the key itself is incriminating? For example, if you are encrypting your child porn stash, make the key "I like kiddie porn, and personally made sure none of the models in these photos are over 12". If you are encrypting you mafia records, make the key an admission of whacking Hoffa and give the location of the body. And so on.
That would make revealing the key self-incriminating, regardless of whether or not the encrypted files are incriminating.
Nasdaq replaced aging Tandem mainframes used to disseminate market trade data with a SQL Server 2005 system that handles 5,000 transactions per second and 100,000 queries a day and can scale up to 8 million new rows of data per day, according to Ken Richmond, vice president of engineering for the stock exchange.
Richmond praised the integration of the latest editions of Visual Studio and SQL Server, which he said increased the productivity of his programmers by allowing them to write database applications in the easier C# or Visual Basic code rather than the increasingly esoteric T-SQL language.
Why dual boot, as opposed to running Ubuntu in Parallels? I can see dual booting with Windows, for games that need good 3D performance (the DirectX support under Parallels is still limited), but for Linux, Parallels should be fine, and a LOT more convenient.
Show your evidence or we're just going to dismiss your opinion
RTFPL. (PL == "Patent License").
The license EXPLICITLY says it only covers 1.0, plus any future versions that Sun participates in sufficiently to require, under OASIS rules, for them to provide a patent license. If Sun pulls out, there is no patent license for subsequent versions.
Actually, if you read the document, I think you'll see that it says making MP3s and putting them in the shared folder is unauthorized. It doesn't say it would be unauthorized to make MP3s and put them in a non-shared folder.
In other news Microsoft is making claim that odt is proprietary
Well, it's covered by Sun patents. The patent license Sun has granted for those patents only applies to 1.0 of the standard, and future version that Sun participates in. That means that if Sun doesn't like the way the standard is going, they can drop out and kill it. The license does NOT cover forked formats, so you couldn't come up with your own document format based on ODT.
That sure sounds proprietary. Open and proprietary are not opposites.
Re:Couple Thoughts
on
Where are Wii?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I might as well get a 360 with some games or a PS3 that can play all those PS2 games out there
Be careful with the latter option. Sony has made quite a few changes to PS3 backward compatibility with PS2, ranging from supporting it in hardware on some models, to supporting it by software emulation in others, to dropping it completely in still others.
Slashdot Mirror
After you buy it, you go to a web site from the card vendor, enter the card number and security code, and then set the user name and billing zip code. Then go wild (well, to the extent that you can go wild with $50...). Here's one such card that is available at a lot of places.
There are also cards that you can refill from your "real" credit card, but then you are easier to trace. Might as well use a non-refillable card, purchased with cash. That way, if "all models 18 or over, proof on file" turns out to not quite be true, no credit card that can be tied to you will be in the site's records. :-)
If that's not a concern, though, and you are just trying to limit exposure of your real credit card, then go ahead with the refillable cards. In fact, there are even some that are purely online. They don't provide a physical card. You just go to their site, sign up with your credit card, and they give you a credit card number to use online, with a limit of whatever you want to transfer from your credit card. Here is one such virtual card.
NOTE: some gift cards cannot be used for porn or gambling, so choose appropriately. And some can be so used, but add a surcharge for porn.
So their education will be what they randomly find on the internet? That doesn't sound like a recipe for success.
The internet is a great educational tool, with guidance. But is that guidance going to be provided in Peru, or are they just throwing hardware at the problem of their poor educational system and hoping that it magically does something?
I didn't hear a lot of the notes from Jingle Bells in there.
You need to further qualify that to be in places with no AC, and where resistive electrical heating is used to heat the house. My house is heated by a heat pump, which is supposedly more efficient that resistive electrical heating, so presumably I would come out ahead replacing heat from my bulbs with heat from my heat pump.
Maybe his disk drive was broken, so he could not take the sensitive data off it?
It depends on whether I'm a non-idiot or not. If I'm not an idiot, I'd remember that I had archived valuable information, and periodically I'd check all the copies, making sure I can handle them. If any are failing, they would be replaced by a copy made from one of the good copies. Also periodically, I'd note whether the media and technology of my archives is still well supported. If it was not, I'd copy the archives to something newer. I would not have to bother emulating old CPUs because, being a non-idiot, my archives would always be in a format easily used by current systems.
Many people have small, battery-powered analog TVs as part of their emergency gear. I bet a lot of people will forget about those. Maybe one station in each area should be subsidized to keep analog broadcast equipment functional, for use in emergencies.
If that's your usual reaction, then it is just hindsight talking. Most things seem a lot easier once someone tells you how to do them.
Heck, I've seen cases where there is a problem that is known to be a major concern in the industry. Many of the brightest engineers work on it for years, and fail to solve it. Then someone solves it and gets a patent, and the patented method is not complicated--it is pretty easy to understand. And all those people, even the ones who tried for years personally to solve the problem and failed, immediately proclaim that the solution is obvious.
Obvious as far as patents go does not mean "I understood it pretty easily once someone showed it to me".
Don't get me wrong. There are a lot of patents that should not have been issued due to obviousness, but that is not as common as most people think, because most people are fooled by the hindsight effect.
As for the other things you list, some of them did originate at Microsoft, or Microsoft was among the first. Spam filtering, for example (no Paul Graham was not first with statistical spam filtering--he was the first to popularize it). And they have indeed invented quite a bit of photography analysis tools.
Microsoft Research is basically an academic research lab. The place their results usually go are peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings (which is why most people here never hear of them). But they also work with the product development side of the company so that the products can include this stuff, whether it was something invented at Microsoft, or something that was invented somewhere else and MS Research simply contributed advancements to the original investment.
The marketing folks decided it wasn't coming up enough (who want's a revolutionary feature hidden away most of the time?), and so made the development people dumb Clippy down, so it would think you were in trouble at the first sign of anything slights wrong, and pop up.
I suspect that this happens a lot with Microsoft products. The research version of Clippy was probably one of the best online help aids ever--way ahead of, and far more useful than, anything you'll find on Linux or Mac. Then marketing turns it into a joke.
The thing about the Kindle is that it has a lot of eBooks available that are
- not mostly old things that are public domain
- not too expensive
The Kindle appears to be the first eBook reader for which someone who is a reasonably avid current reader has a chance of satisfying most of the reading needs with, without spending a lot more money (other than the initial cost of the device itself). As far as the device cost, note that this is offset somewhat by the reduced storage costs. For someone who buys and keeps a lot of books, the savings in not needing to buy as many bookshelves could actually be more than the cost of the unit!For those looking for an eBook reader that also lets you read your own files, and things like that, the Kindle isn't there. But for those looking for something that is an alternate way to deal with books, it looks like the best so far.
That's not quite correct. ODF is covered by Sun patents. They have made those patents available for free under a license that covers ODF 1.0, plus any future versions whose development Sun participates in past the point where OASIS would require a patent license. (You can find the complete text of the license at the OASIS web site if you want to see for yourself). So, future versions have to have Sun participation, and if Sun really doesn't like the way things are going, they can take their ball and go home and everyone else has to stop playing.
It's not clear to me how this can be called "open", at least in the sense we usually use the term around here. What if I want to base a new document format, for my internal use at work, on it? Can I? Nope. That would use Sun's patents, and not be covered by the ODF patent license. So, no freedom to modify for my own use (and, of course, no freedom to share modifications with others).
ODF and OOXML are both just calling themselves "open" because that buzzword is all the rage now, but until I can fork them if I don't like the direction Sun and Microsoft go, respectively, then they aren't open.
There are zillions of things wrong with OOXML, so why do people keep picking things that are ALSO problems with ODF? It would be a lot more effective to pick those areas where ODF is actually different and better, and push those.
The problem with that is that ODF is also undergoing massive changes. The version currently working its way through standardization adds the OpenFormula spec to ODF, which is something like 25% of the size of ODF. That's a pretty massive change!
How about this?
Dear CIO;
I'm not from New York, but I'm on the Internet. The same Internet that thinks Ron Paul, lolcats, and "2 girls 1 cup" are great, so I obviously know more than anyone technical.
I don't know anything about your actual requirements, but you should pick ODF, because OOXML is from Microsoft. ODF 1.2 is in committee right now, and it will plug all those holes in ODF, like spreadsheet formulas not being specified, so don't let the fact that you can't do anything useful in the current version without lots of vendor-specific non-standard extensions bother you. Vote for Ron Paul!
They do have access to the programming, on their TV.
That would make revealing the key self-incriminating, regardless of whether or not the encrypted files are incriminating.
Why dual boot, as opposed to running Ubuntu in Parallels? I can see dual booting with Windows, for games that need good 3D performance (the DirectX support under Parallels is still limited), but for Linux, Parallels should be fine, and a LOT more convenient.
RTFPL. (PL == "Patent License").
The license EXPLICITLY says it only covers 1.0, plus any future versions that Sun participates in sufficiently to require, under OASIS rules, for them to provide a patent license. If Sun pulls out, there is no patent license for subsequent versions.
Sharing MP3s with Kazaa is fair use? That seems rather unlikely.
Actually, if you read the document, I think you'll see that it says making MP3s and putting them in the shared folder is unauthorized. It doesn't say it would be unauthorized to make MP3s and put them in a non-shared folder.
Well, it's covered by Sun patents. The patent license Sun has granted for those patents only applies to 1.0 of the standard, and future version that Sun participates in. That means that if Sun doesn't like the way the standard is going, they can drop out and kill it. The license does NOT cover forked formats, so you couldn't come up with your own document format based on ODT.
That sure sounds proprietary. Open and proprietary are not opposites.
Be careful with the latter option. Sony has made quite a few changes to PS3 backward compatibility with PS2, ranging from supporting it in hardware on some models, to supporting it by software emulation in others, to dropping it completely in still others.
It's annoying to click on a link and have a print dialog pop up. Link to the regular page, please.