One factor when dealing with these things is whether it is a point source or not. So for instance, nuclear energy is produced in one place and the waste (hopefully) is contained there, instead of being spread out amongst all consumers. If the plant that makes these uses clean energy and can contain any of their own wastes(CO2 sequestration, etc), then even if these are net losers CO2-wise they can be a useful tool since their own wastes might be more easily containable. Not saying they are here, just that they could be.
:) Ditto... I used to work for that company Google is buying, heh.
Tho, of course, after I posted I actually looked around and found SafariBlock and PittHelmet or something, so ad blocking does exist for Safari...just not sure if there is anything for windows.
So I just tried it out, and while it is fast, where the hell is the home page button? Sure I can customize, but damn. It also crashed when I went to change the search field from google in the toolbar. And it doesn't have adblock, which hurts the overall 'speed' of the browser. Looks like it could be promising though.
As an aside: One thing I would like to see in more browsers is the ability to duplicate buttons on the toolbars. Ie. I would like to have 2 search fields, one for Amazon and one for Google for example (this might be possible with an addin on firefox, haven't looked).
Another key feature I want is for better 'minimum font size support'. When I load a page, I want the font to be at least a certain size...but if I discover the site is unusable at that size, I should just be able to use my font size hotkeys to resize that one tab/window below the minimum, not have to go and undo it for every site. It would be nice if it remembered per page and per domain settings for font size as well. Maybe a second set of hotkeys for 'whole domain font size increase/decrease'.
Um, that wasn't the point. The point is that they are 850nm thick which is less than a micrometer. In no way is any dimension (of the usual 3:) of your car less than 1 micrometer.
I hear you, but in this case, I think because it lies within the range of nanometers ( ie. less than 1 micrometer) that it is an accurate and valid usage.
Not sure how you got on the brainwash tangent. I'm not sure how my statements could be construed as being 'steeped in political rhetoric'. Pot, meet kettle.
'Peace is the only way forward'... great. That's helpful. My point was you have to first understand what is motivating people away from the state of peace. Is it biological (monkeys chasing others out of their trees)? Politically historical (Sunni versus Shiite ideological schism)? Abject poverty? Ideological/religious indoctrination (White supremacists, some 'radical' Islam)? A combination of many of these?
In general, I would say that the main difference between war and terrorism is the 'hate' component. I don't think that the Pentagon as a rule 'hates' the people it chooses to bomb. I think it is done for current political or territorial or even altruistic purposes at times. I am not saying these are 'better' reason, just that they are different. Attacking Iraq to push back the Kuwait invasion was not terrorism. Trying to prevent Lebanon's government from falling to civil war was not terrorism. Supporting Israel is not terrorism. Toppling the Afghan government was not terrorism. You might say any of these are ill advised, didn't accomplish their goals, or that not everyone agrees with them, but saying that the US government is 'terroristic' is ridiculous.
I'm not saying that it couldn't be better. Guantanamo, water boarding, historical CIA support of insurgents, the current Iraq mess, NSA wire tapping, etc. are not high points of our governments decision making.
Dune? rofl
When 'Peace' for one group is the right to stone to death or rape women who happen to be walking around with a male friend, or to deny others the right to technology or freedom of speech or press, or the right to kill Sunni's or Shiite's because for hundreds of years there has been tension, or to prevent blacks from marrying whites, or to hang homosexuals, then 'peace' is not that at all.
As another poster mentions, this is a fairly simplistic view of things. The reality is that many of these conflicts are based on ideologies and historical anamosity going back hundreds if not a thousand years. US support of the Jewish state isn't 'bombing' people into being terrorists. There is just a subset of people who have extreme animosity towards Israel, and will do anything they can to get rid of it. Or, historically, the Crusades, or British Imperialism, or Dutch Colonies, etc. controlling vast parts of the world for hundreds of years causing animosity.
But it isn't as simple as that either. You don't see a lot of Africans hell bent on destroying the US because we enslaved millions of people (and the many thousands more that died on the way). Or South Americans going after Spain and Portugal. It takes a special blend of adversity, historical animosity, and indoctrination to breed terrorists. And don't confuse what is going on in Iraq with terrorism. That's just a civil war that's been going on for dozens of years, and guerilla warfare tactics bent on getting rid of an invading army.
Yea, he means the Tandy Model 100/102. I built a full scale Point of Sale/Inventory Control application for one in the mid-80's, while I was in high school. That was sort of the project that started it all for me.
In the end this project involved me: * Writing the application on a 2 720k disk drive IBM compatible 'portable' computer in C running Digital Research's CPM OS. * Cross compiling the application for the 8086 processor on the M100 * Burning the app and what I called 'overlays', or memory swapped pieces of the application, to EPROM because only 24k RAM was available. * Building a 1MB RAM expansion board from scratch (wire wrapped, static ram chips) to store the inventory data, that plugged directly into the system bus * Writing a quick sort and binary search in assembly for performance to read from the RAM expansion * Figuring out the UPC bar code's checksum feature so I could print bar codes for certain products that didn't have them (more common than you might think in 80's and 90's)
They used it until 1999 (15 years total in a liquor store, through robberies, etc), when the Y2K bug would have started causing problems for the M100, and the hardware was simply getting long in the tooth.
But it is amazing what 24k program RAM, 32k of EPROM, 1MB of storage RAM, 1 MHZ, 8 bit, 3 pound portable computer built in 1980's could really do when you put your mind to it.
I don't know about anymore, but traditionally GMail only allowed people to invite a few of their friends occasionally, thereby limiting the effectiveness of getting one hacked account. For those without an invite, a cell phone number was required to receive your invite code, again limiting this.
I haven't looked at gmail's sign up anymore, but those were obviously pretty good techniques to limit the ability of spammers to get new accounts.
First, I want to agree that I think SMS service costs too much, and I think being charged for receiving a message is ridiculous...
But one of the main costs is transaction cost. I worked at a large internet ad delivery company back in the day and we had an anecdote describing what we were trying to do with our business. This is from a few years ago, so just take the numbers as approximate:
Take the stock exchanges. They have millions of transactions a day and they try to keep the transaction cost down below $5 per transaction. Hence the $5 transaction fees, etc. Before Etrade and others, $5 wasn't even an option, but they brought the efficiencies of that market down below $5 so that they could actually make money there. Now take the telecom industry. They have tens of millions of transactions a day and they try and keep the costs down to $0.10 per transaction, hence the 'connection fee', 'rounding up' for calls less than a minute, etc. In the ad serving and reporting industry, our goal was to process billions of transactions a day at a cost of less than $0.0001 per transaction.
Obviously there are different requirements involved at each level of transaction cost, so that was a little bit of an aside I guess. I think there was a credit card transaction one in there at around $1 too, but the point is that there are real costs involved in per transaction tracking and reporting, and historically they have been accounted and processed in a particular way by the telecom industry. For more reasonable pricing, the telecom industry would need to develop new methods to do this, probably taking from the ideas that the ad serving industry has been using for years now.
But this may be also one of their excuses for charging for receiving a message, because they are required by statute to provide a certain level of tracking/paperwork/etc. for each transaction, and while one company (sending the sms from their customer)may have streamlined their reporting, another (the receiving customer's provider) may not, so since there is no standard transaction fee, they charge whatever they need to/can get away with.
I'm not saying this isn't twisted logic, just that this may be part of the equation.
In one year DVD and Blu-Ray burn media manufacturers will be having trouble. Once 1TB hard drives reach $100 dollars, you are basically at break even media cost wise with DVD+R media. Meaning you can just store all of your downloaded movies on a harddrive at the same cost as DVD media. In 2 years-ish, hard drives will be the clear winner, with 2TB drives approaching that $100 range possibly. While you have the chance of catastrpohic failure, if you really are using these things just for occasional read storage along with a docking solution you end up saving time and money and physical space (those 500 sleeve DVD holders add $0.10 to every disk you burn).
It will be nice in say 5 years when SSD tech reaches that same threshold, since catastrophic failure of those drives is presumably much less likely to occur.
I think it would be pretty cool to use say the Sims video game data and these visualization techniques to explore different phenomena in a virtual world.
I've tried a lot of them. Chicony, Adesso, etc. They all have awful keys, and their batteries tend to run out right in the middle of a redtu...um, important 'business meeting'.
I now have a DiNovo Edge, which rocks hard, though it is a little heavy, but completely rocks in most every way. The best feature is the round touchpad scrolling...You just start sliding your finger in a circle and it keeps scrolling as you circle. It could use some more customization features in the software, but it also has the rockin 'disable CAPSLOCK' built in. The only other issue I have with it is that it would be nice if you could easily use the KB while it was charging (ie. just a plug in, or a plugin option) rather than having to vertically dock it.
I'm really looking forward to the DiNovo Mini Logitech just announce, that a mini KB with the same round touchpad it looks like.
And I think there is a spectrum of people who actually use it for what it does, as a readily-available stimulant, and that these are the ones who I might imagine would benefit from something like this. People who aren't addicted per se, but who engage in binge behavior once or twice a week, who it requires little to no effort to acquire with little risk, and who are just modulating their drunkeness/giving in to lack of inhibitions caused by alcohol.
Or think of something like Polio. Polio incidence was on the decline due to addressing one of the major contributors to spread, effective cleanliness, reduced crowding, etc. Does that mean we should have forgone an effective tool against its fight, the vaccine?
I think you are also ignoring the impact of genetics and environmental history in your categorical denunciation of these types of tools. Some people are more genetically predisposed to being heavier, having mental issues like bipolar disodred, or is depressed. Or they were raised in an environment that did not furnish them with the mental tools that allow them to have effective mechanisms to deal with these issues.
I'm not arguing that the health care/pharma industry at large isn't over promoting these tools in lieu of or in combination with other techniques. I'm sure at first it will be used as intended in the proper setting in a rehab environment. And at least with the vaccine, there isn't the 'money train maintenance' effect of typical drugs that are being developed, so there is less incentive to over-prescribe. Will some people us it as a quick fix? Sure, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't have this tool, or shouldn't study how to make these kinds of tools, or otherwise lessen the importance of what I consider to be so pretty amazing advances in science and health care.
What are the core issues that lead people to behave in destructive ways? Besides the existential realities of the world we live in? And what are the non-quick fix solutions for this? * Church? * Better education system? * Getting rid of TV? * Forced marriages? * Preventing child abuse, rape, crime?
I just think that the 'root causes' are a bigger deal than just having a little discipline... though discipline does help.
Next to alcohol and marijuana, cocaine is the most readily available drug. Being addicted to cocaine doesn't necessarily mean you 'have to get high'. It means 'you want/need cocaine'. I know people who only do cocaine after drinking, because drinking reduces their inhibitions. If they don't find coke, they don't go out and try to find meth or heroin, or something else. They just try to find coke, and get pissed when they can't. Doesn't even cross their mind to try to get something else really, and in general anything else is harder to find, if you prefer one over the others. But when a little blow means you stay up an extra 4-6 hours, and drink an extra 6 beers, and generally make life and your job miserable for yourself the next day or so, plenty of people who might not qualify as addicts from a technical sense, might still feel they could benefit.
Or, think of the children:P If this stuff proved effective from keeping a pregnant woman off of coke during pregnancy... sorry couldn't help myself.
But when there is a quick fix, shouldn't it at least be offered?
The issue is that once you suffer from this 'weakness of character' there is very little chance to break the cycle.
Being forced into rehab, or being sent to jail happens all the time for cocaine. This could similarly be categorized as civil or cognitive impinging of freedoms. Which is worse? I;m not suggesting people be forced to do this. But in general, addicts don't want to keep being addicted, they just have no hope of breaking the cycle.
Getting diseases through risking behavior, or driving high or stealing in order maintain your habit are real results that affect other people, not just yourself. Say it takes 3 months for your brains reward system to reset itself so you no longer feel the urge to do cocaine. Wouldn't it be nice if you knew you didn't have to be perfect to still be able to reach that goal? I know a lot of people don't quit smoking, because it really is a thing in their minds where they think 'am I really never going to have another cigarrette for the rest of my life?' Some people, might want to make a decision when the influence of the addiction was less demanding, that would give them a greater chance of reaching their ultimate goal, rather than be told, 'sorry, no quick fixes for people with weak character'.
I agree that both Copyrights and Patents need to have their terms limited as well. I think the OP 5 years is probably too short. Say 10 or 15 years. It is a balancing act of course. But I think having the copyright expire on Harry Potter #1 before Harry Potter #7 is released is probably a little too extreme.
As far as the 'for sale' test the parent describes: This doesn't really take into account the realities of copyright, except for those very few things that actually get published. It might take me 3 years to get my story published...but what if all publishers just accept manuscripts, wait 3 years, and then publish them?
It also becomes open ended: Has Shakespeare ever gone out of print for 3 years? Maybe it has, but you see the point hopefully. Is Harry Potter ever going to go out of print? In the digital age, it is also fairly cheap to keep a book or music in 'print', on a server somewhere for maybe $5 a year. So IMO there need to be hard limits.
I do think that there is some merit to using the death of the author/musician plus a certain (small) number of years (an author I read recently died, with several books in the works to be published for instance). Works copyrighted by an individual would use that test, while works copyrighted by a non-person entity would get say 30 years or so.
Trademarks do complicate things, in the sense that Disney might trademark Mickey Mouse. Someone else being allowed to use Coca Cola's designs, and branding to sell cola doesn't seem like the best idea.
Patents: I want to say patents should be allowed to last 5 years from the date that a certain threshold of items using that patent are produced, but that reasonable licensing requirements MUST be made available. Some sort of utility based formula. Ie., say a patented process reduces the cost of manufacturing something by $1, then the license to use that process shouldn't cost more then $0.50 or some other fraction. That doesn't necessarily work for something like 'new holographic memory', but I'm sure a new utility function might deal with that as well.
Over the long term, you can make quite a bit of gold by just paying attention.
Here's how I've made most of my gold: 1) Fishbotted 40,000 stonescale eels, and cornered the market from other botters. This is pretty easy to do: You just Start selling you product for a lot less than what the 'standard' price is, but do not supply a buyout. Then cancel the auction before it sells. Generally, people with excess supply like other botters would drop their prices drmatatically, to match your prices. Then you buy all of their supply and repost at a higher price.
2) Arbitrage: I have 2 accounts, so I can buy things that are cheap on the Horde AH, and sell them for the higher prices on the Alliance AH, and vice versa. Ive made probably 100,000g doing this.
3) Pay attention to changes in upcoming patches and on the PTR (public test realm). I spent about 10,000g buying all of the jewelrycrafting, runecloth, etc., materials I could find for 2 months before the expansion came out. I hade several thousand stacks of items spread across 20 toons on 2 accounts, including thousands of items in the mail getting passed back and forth every 30 days. I sold everything in like 2 weeks after the expansion for 150,000g. In another case, I noticed Primal Shadows were 1g a pop versus 5-10g a pop for others, so I just bought all of them I could, thinking, at the very least the price won't drop. Then a few months later, a patch changes something, and all of a sudden I have 400 primal shadows I can sell for 17-20g a piece. This does mean I eat some things tho, like Black Diamonds, and Golden Pearls. But I made a crapton off of Shadow Pearls, as they weren't used for anything at one point, so I bought them for 1-2g as well, and then when crafting recipes came out that used them, I sold them for 35g each.
But in the end, I've given away most of that gold to friends and guild stuff, so in that sense it was worth it (in as much as a game can be worth it:).
A lot of this came up in the silverlight discussion a couple of days ago, but until html/javascript or some new standard provides for:
* Video Playback * Audio Playback * A/V Capture thru connected devices with appropriate security * Bitmap manipulation ala Displacement Maps, Blur, Glow, or other direct bitmap manipulation (for both video effects as well as photoshop style web apps)
there will be a place for flash (and maybe silverlight once it actually does these well).
And the comments like 'I've never found a useful flash app' are pretty disingenuous, or they didn't look too hard. YouTube wouldn't be around for in the way it is if not for flash. Plenty of people like the flash photo & video editing software built on flash.
Is flash perfect? Not saying that, just saying there are gaping holes in even the basic functionality we expect from a web experience these days.
I do flash/flex dev, as well as RoR. A site I did that wouldn't be doable in AJAX/HTML currently: http://www.pinktogether.com/
Flash & Flex do support signed code. The question is, who does the signing? Who is the organization that gets to tell me I am 'authorized programming'? Are you implying that users shouldn't be allowed to develop and run their own code on their own machines? Not sure how 'signing' works in that scenario. Sounds like 'Trusted Computing' to me.
Doesn't then 'signing' become the single point of failure?
In the same vein, Firefox, IE, Safari & Opera also 'render pages executable'. So we are supposed to trust those apps but not Flash? Flash & Java IMO have probably spent the most time planning security out, as opposed to 'no planning'. Doesn't mean there are problems on occasion, but I've never really heard of either being a major vector for viruses and trojans.
I'm running Vista x64 at the moment and I'm torn as to whether I should roll back or not. There are some nice features in Vista and x64 that I like:
* >3GB support. I do Adobe Flex & Ruby on Rails dev currently, and having >3GB of RAM really helps here, as Flex Builder/plugin, Photoshop, Flash, & Firefox really suck up RAM like there is no tomorrow. * Vista Task Manager is much improved, with command line args, etc. * Real symbolic link support (ln -s style) across network volumes. * I can do without the flip card Windows-Tab, but I do like the new Alt-TAB and Task Bar preview windows. * I run Windows Media Center with my HDHomeRun, and the new version is better than the one with XP. * I like the goal of UAC, and if UAC didn't cause my LCD to lose sync when it does the whole screen blink thing, it wouldn't be too annoying. It is annoying at times dealing with messing with files in the Program Files directory, but many users wouldn't need to do this. * Better sound/volume management: So for instance my Logitech di Novo Edge keyboard volume control actually works in Vista. Using WMP used to cause muting problems when pausing on XP as well.
Problems: * Haven't been able to figure out how to get ANSI.SYS/Ansi Colors to work in the command prompt on Vista x64. * x64 versus x86 right click Explorer extensions. I use Directory Opus, which is only 32 bit, so I have to install both version of TortoiseSVN, etc. (x64 and x86 versions). * Adobe Flash has problems with dragging causing the desktop windows manager to think it is not responding. So dragging the timeline playhead around, dwm takes over and whites out the app even tho nothing is really wrong. * Drivers drivers drivers. My HP ADF Scanner has no x64 drivers, and no Vista drivers, though apparently you can get it to work on 32 bit Vista by running some things as admin. * SuperFetch. SuperFetch was causing my system to hang 5 minutes after startup pretty consistently. * DRM would be an issue if I ever used DRM's BluRay/HDDVD. Fortunately there are ways around that. * Lack of vbscript.dll or suitable replacement for doing *real* Regular Expression searches in Word VBA. I'm not saying vbscript.dll should be there, just that VBA should have RegExpressions included. There is a version you can buy, but $100 to add regexp to Word is ridiculous. I'm sure there are other ways to do this, but it is a problem.
Linux?: * There is an Alpha version of Flex Builder for linux, but I don't think it is ready for prime time yet. * I love MythTV in theory, but you have to pay for listing now. Even tho it's not a lot, it is still a negative (assuming you didn't pay for Ultimate Vista). * No Directory Opus. It really is a god among file managers. * Games: I play a couple of games, and at a certain point it gets to be too much effort to figure to how to get decent performance in WINE/Cedega etc. * I like the concept of OpenOffice, but for my needs, MS Office 2k7 is just better at the moment, even though I only use it for RTF, and the new Ribbon interface *does* work once you get it figured out and put a couple of custom commands in the right places. OpenOffice is sorely missing regular expression *replace* as well. And I have some custom VBA dialogs/macros that I would need to convert (lock-in I know). * Photoshop/Flash CS3 etc.
Mac?: * I have a Mac Book, and I like it, but I like to build my own systems/upgrade/low noise, and Mac just doesn't have the same flexibility for the price. * Software: I dual boot my Power Book for a couple of things, but dual booting my main system isn't really something I'm into, and I haven't looked into whether Parallels/VMWare etc would allow me to use my ADF scanner in a VM on either Mac Book or my Vista x64 system, and games, blah blah.
I'm sure there are more, but still haven;t gotten frustrated enough with Vista x64 to make the rollback happen.
Slashdot Mirror
One factor when dealing with these things is whether it is a point source or not. So for instance, nuclear energy is produced in one place and the waste (hopefully) is contained there, instead of being spread out amongst all consumers. If the plant that makes these uses clean energy and can contain any of their own wastes(CO2 sequestration, etc), then even if these are net losers CO2-wise they can be a useful tool since their own wastes might be more easily containable. Not saying they are here, just that they could be.
:) Ditto... I used to work for that company Google is buying, heh.
Tho, of course, after I posted I actually looked around and found SafariBlock and PittHelmet or something, so ad blocking does exist for Safari...just not sure if there is anything for windows.
So I just tried it out, and while it is fast, where the hell is the home page button? Sure I can customize, but damn. It also crashed when I went to change the search field from google in the toolbar. And it doesn't have adblock, which hurts the overall 'speed' of the browser. Looks like it could be promising though.
As an aside:
One thing I would like to see in more browsers is the ability to duplicate buttons on the toolbars. Ie. I would like to have 2 search fields, one for Amazon and one for Google for example (this might be possible with an addin on firefox, haven't looked).
Another key feature I want is for better 'minimum font size support'. When I load a page, I want the font to be at least a certain size...but if I discover the site is unusable at that size, I should just be able to use my font size hotkeys to resize that one tab/window below the minimum, not have to go and undo it for every site. It would be nice if it remembered per page and per domain settings for font size as well. Maybe a second set of hotkeys for 'whole domain font size increase/decrease'.
And I don't doubt there are a lot of things you can measure that are 3.5 inches :) JK!!!
Um, that wasn't the point. The point is that they are 850nm thick which is less than a micrometer. In no way is any dimension (of the usual 3 :) of your car less than 1 micrometer.
I hear you, but in this case, I think because it lies within the range of nanometers ( ie. less than 1 micrometer) that it is an accurate and valid usage.
Except the problem is with Acrobat Reader, not Flash.
Not sure how you got on the brainwash tangent. I'm not sure how my statements could be construed as being 'steeped in political rhetoric'. Pot, meet kettle.
'Peace is the only way forward'... great. That's helpful. My point was you have to first understand what is motivating people away from the state of peace. Is it biological (monkeys chasing others out of their trees)? Politically historical (Sunni versus Shiite ideological schism)? Abject poverty? Ideological/religious indoctrination (White supremacists, some 'radical' Islam)? A combination of many of these?
In general, I would say that the main difference between war and terrorism is the 'hate' component. I don't think that the Pentagon as a rule 'hates' the people it chooses to bomb. I think it is done for current political or territorial or even altruistic purposes at times. I am not saying these are 'better' reason, just that they are different. Attacking Iraq to push back the Kuwait invasion was not terrorism. Trying to prevent Lebanon's government from falling to civil war was not terrorism. Supporting Israel is not terrorism. Toppling the Afghan government was not terrorism. You might say any of these are ill advised, didn't accomplish their goals, or that not everyone agrees with them, but saying that the US government is 'terroristic' is ridiculous.
I'm not saying that it couldn't be better. Guantanamo, water boarding, historical CIA support of insurgents, the current Iraq mess, NSA wire tapping, etc. are not high points of our governments decision making.
Dune? rofl
When 'Peace' for one group is the right to stone to death or rape women who happen to be walking around with a male friend, or to deny others the right to technology or freedom of speech or press, or the right to kill Sunni's or Shiite's because for hundreds of years there has been tension, or to prevent blacks from marrying whites, or to hang homosexuals, then 'peace' is not that at all.
As another poster mentions, this is a fairly simplistic view of things. The reality is that many of these conflicts are based on ideologies and historical anamosity going back hundreds if not a thousand years. US support of the Jewish state isn't 'bombing' people into being terrorists. There is just a subset of people who have extreme animosity towards Israel, and will do anything they can to get rid of it. Or, historically, the Crusades, or British Imperialism, or Dutch Colonies, etc. controlling vast parts of the world for hundreds of years causing animosity.
But it isn't as simple as that either. You don't see a lot of Africans hell bent on destroying the US because we enslaved millions of people (and the many thousands more that died on the way). Or South Americans going after Spain and Portugal. It takes a special blend of adversity, historical animosity, and indoctrination to breed terrorists. And don't confuse what is going on in Iraq with terrorism. That's just a civil war that's been going on for dozens of years, and guerilla warfare tactics bent on getting rid of an invading army.
Yea, he means the Tandy Model 100/102. I built a full scale Point of Sale/Inventory Control application for one in the mid-80's, while I was in high school. That was sort of the project that started it all for me.
In the end this project involved me:
* Writing the application on a 2 720k disk drive IBM compatible 'portable' computer in C running Digital Research's CPM OS.
* Cross compiling the application for the 8086 processor on the M100
* Burning the app and what I called 'overlays', or memory swapped pieces of the application, to EPROM because only 24k RAM was available.
* Building a 1MB RAM expansion board from scratch (wire wrapped, static ram chips) to store the inventory data, that plugged directly into the system bus
* Writing a quick sort and binary search in assembly for performance to read from the RAM expansion
* Figuring out the UPC bar code's checksum feature so I could print bar codes for certain products that didn't have them (more common than you might think in 80's and 90's)
They used it until 1999 (15 years total in a liquor store, through robberies, etc), when the Y2K bug would have started causing problems for the M100, and the hardware was simply getting long in the tooth.
But it is amazing what 24k program RAM, 32k of EPROM, 1MB of storage RAM, 1 MHZ, 8 bit, 3 pound portable computer built in 1980's could really do when you put your mind to it.
I don't know about anymore, but traditionally GMail only allowed people to invite a few of their friends occasionally, thereby limiting the effectiveness of getting one hacked account. For those without an invite, a cell phone number was required to receive your invite code, again limiting this.
I haven't looked at gmail's sign up anymore, but those were obviously pretty good techniques to limit the ability of spammers to get new accounts.
First, I want to agree that I think SMS service costs too much, and I think being charged for receiving a message is ridiculous...
But one of the main costs is transaction cost. I worked at a large internet ad delivery company back in the day and we had an anecdote describing what we were trying to do with our business. This is from a few years ago, so just take the numbers as approximate:
Take the stock exchanges. They have millions of transactions a day and they try to keep the transaction cost down below $5 per transaction. Hence the $5 transaction fees, etc. Before Etrade and others, $5 wasn't even an option, but they brought the efficiencies of that market down below $5 so that they could actually make money there. Now take the telecom industry. They have tens of millions of transactions a day and they try and keep the costs down to $0.10 per transaction, hence the 'connection fee', 'rounding up' for calls less than a minute, etc. In the ad serving and reporting industry, our goal was to process billions of transactions a day at a cost of less than $0.0001 per transaction.
Obviously there are different requirements involved at each level of transaction cost, so that was a little bit of an aside I guess. I think there was a credit card transaction one in there at around $1 too, but the point is that there are real costs involved in per transaction tracking and reporting, and historically they have been accounted and processed in a particular way by the telecom industry. For more reasonable pricing, the telecom industry would need to develop new methods to do this, probably taking from the ideas that the ad serving industry has been using for years now.
But this may be also one of their excuses for charging for receiving a message, because they are required by statute to provide a certain level of tracking/paperwork/etc. for each transaction, and while one company (sending the sms from their customer)may have streamlined their reporting, another (the receiving customer's provider) may not, so since there is no standard transaction fee, they charge whatever they need to/can get away with.
I'm not saying this isn't twisted logic, just that this may be part of the equation.
The blogger should just collect the reward himself...
:P
or barring that, tons of people should claim the reward, so that the signal to noise ratio drives this guy back into his hole
I'm sure there will be an external battery extended that plugs into the magsafe that will extend it another X hours...
In one year DVD and Blu-Ray burn media manufacturers will be having trouble. Once 1TB hard drives reach $100 dollars, you are basically at break even media cost wise with DVD+R media. Meaning you can just store all of your downloaded movies on a harddrive at the same cost as DVD media. In 2 years-ish, hard drives will be the clear winner, with 2TB drives approaching that $100 range possibly. While you have the chance of catastrpohic failure, if you really are using these things just for occasional read storage along with a docking solution you end up saving time and money and physical space (those 500 sleeve DVD holders add $0.10 to every disk you burn).
It will be nice in say 5 years when SSD tech reaches that same threshold, since catastrophic failure of those drives is presumably much less likely to occur.
I think it would be pretty cool to use say the Sims video game data and these visualization techniques to explore different phenomena in a virtual world.
I've tried a lot of them. Chicony, Adesso, etc. They all have awful keys, and their batteries tend to run out right in the middle of a redtu...um, important 'business meeting'.
I now have a DiNovo Edge, which rocks hard, though it is a little heavy, but completely rocks in most every way. The best feature is the round touchpad scrolling...You just start sliding your finger in a circle and it keeps scrolling as you circle. It could use some more customization features in the software, but it also has the rockin 'disable CAPSLOCK' built in. The only other issue I have with it is that it would be nice if you could easily use the KB while it was charging (ie. just a plug in, or a plugin option) rather than having to vertically dock it.
I'm really looking forward to the DiNovo Mini Logitech just announce, that a mini KB with the same round touchpad it looks like.
And I think there is a spectrum of people who actually use it for what it does, as a readily-available stimulant, and that these are the ones who I might imagine would benefit from something like this. People who aren't addicted per se, but who engage in binge behavior once or twice a week, who it requires little to no effort to acquire with little risk, and who are just modulating their drunkeness/giving in to lack of inhibitions caused by alcohol.
Or think of something like Polio. Polio incidence was on the decline due to addressing one of the major contributors to spread, effective cleanliness, reduced crowding, etc. Does that mean we should have forgone an effective tool against its fight, the vaccine?
I think you are also ignoring the impact of genetics and environmental history in your categorical denunciation of these types of tools. Some people are more genetically predisposed to being heavier, having mental issues like bipolar disodred, or is depressed. Or they were raised in an environment that did not furnish them with the mental tools that allow them to have effective mechanisms to deal with these issues.
I'm not arguing that the health care/pharma industry at large isn't over promoting these tools in lieu of or in combination with other techniques. I'm sure at first it will be used as intended in the proper setting in a rehab environment. And at least with the vaccine, there isn't the 'money train maintenance' effect of typical drugs that are being developed, so there is less incentive to over-prescribe. Will some people us it as a quick fix? Sure, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't have this tool, or shouldn't study how to make these kinds of tools, or otherwise lessen the importance of what I consider to be so pretty amazing advances in science and health care.
What are the core issues that lead people to behave in destructive ways? Besides the existential realities of the world we live in?
And what are the non-quick fix solutions for this?
* Church?
* Better education system?
* Getting rid of TV?
* Forced marriages?
* Preventing child abuse, rape, crime?
I just think that the 'root causes' are a bigger deal than just having a little discipline... though discipline does help.
Next to alcohol and marijuana, cocaine is the most readily available drug. Being addicted to cocaine doesn't necessarily mean you 'have to get high'. It means 'you want/need cocaine'. I know people who only do cocaine after drinking, because drinking reduces their inhibitions. If they don't find coke, they don't go out and try to find meth or heroin, or something else. They just try to find coke, and get pissed when they can't. Doesn't even cross their mind to try to get something else really, and in general anything else is harder to find, if you prefer one over the others. But when a little blow means you stay up an extra 4-6 hours, and drink an extra 6 beers, and generally make life and your job miserable for yourself the next day or so, plenty of people who might not qualify as addicts from a technical sense, might still feel they could benefit.
:P
Or, think of the children
If this stuff proved effective from keeping a pregnant woman off of coke during pregnancy... sorry couldn't help myself.
But when there is a quick fix, shouldn't it at least be offered?
The issue is that once you suffer from this 'weakness of character' there is very little chance to break the cycle.
Being forced into rehab, or being sent to jail happens all the time for cocaine. This could similarly be categorized as civil or cognitive impinging of freedoms. Which is worse? I;m not suggesting people be forced to do this. But in general, addicts don't want to keep being addicted, they just have no hope of breaking the cycle.
Getting diseases through risking behavior, or driving high or stealing in order maintain your habit are real results that affect other people, not just yourself. Say it takes 3 months for your brains reward system to reset itself so you no longer feel the urge to do cocaine. Wouldn't it be nice if you knew you didn't have to be perfect to still be able to reach that goal? I know a lot of people don't quit smoking, because it really is a thing in their minds where they think 'am I really never going to have another cigarrette for the rest of my life?' Some people, might want to make a decision when the influence of the addiction was less demanding, that would give them a greater chance of reaching their ultimate goal, rather than be told, 'sorry, no quick fixes for people with weak character'.
I agree that both Copyrights and Patents need to have their terms limited as well. I think the OP 5 years is probably too short. Say 10 or 15 years. It is a balancing act of course. But I think having the copyright expire on Harry Potter #1 before Harry Potter #7 is released is probably a little too extreme.
As far as the 'for sale' test the parent describes:
This doesn't really take into account the realities of copyright, except for those very few things that actually get published. It might take me 3 years to get my story published...but what if all publishers just accept manuscripts, wait 3 years, and then publish them?
It also becomes open ended: Has Shakespeare ever gone out of print for 3 years? Maybe it has, but you see the point hopefully. Is Harry Potter ever going to go out of print? In the digital age, it is also fairly cheap to keep a book or music in 'print', on a server somewhere for maybe $5 a year. So IMO there need to be hard limits.
I do think that there is some merit to using the death of the author/musician plus a certain (small) number of years (an author I read recently died, with several books in the works to be published for instance). Works copyrighted by an individual would use that test, while works copyrighted by a non-person entity would get say 30 years or so.
Trademarks do complicate things, in the sense that Disney might trademark Mickey Mouse. Someone else being allowed to use Coca Cola's designs, and branding to sell cola doesn't seem like the best idea.
Patents: I want to say patents should be allowed to last 5 years from the date that a certain threshold of items using that patent are produced, but that reasonable licensing requirements MUST be made available. Some sort of utility based formula. Ie., say a patented process reduces the cost of manufacturing something by $1, then the license to use that process shouldn't cost more then $0.50 or some other fraction. That doesn't necessarily work for something like 'new holographic memory', but I'm sure a new utility function might deal with that as well.
Just thinking out loud.
Over the long term, you can make quite a bit of gold by just paying attention.
:).
Here's how I've made most of my gold:
1) Fishbotted 40,000 stonescale eels, and cornered the market from other botters. This is pretty easy to do: You just Start selling you product for a lot less than what the 'standard' price is, but do not supply a buyout. Then cancel the auction before it sells. Generally, people with excess supply like other botters would drop their prices drmatatically, to match your prices. Then you buy all of their supply and repost at a higher price.
2) Arbitrage: I have 2 accounts, so I can buy things that are cheap on the Horde AH, and sell them for the higher prices on the Alliance AH, and vice versa. Ive made probably 100,000g doing this.
3) Pay attention to changes in upcoming patches and on the PTR (public test realm). I spent about 10,000g buying all of the jewelrycrafting, runecloth, etc., materials I could find for 2 months before the expansion came out. I hade several thousand stacks of items spread across 20 toons on 2 accounts, including thousands of items in the mail getting passed back and forth every 30 days. I sold everything in like 2 weeks after the expansion for 150,000g. In another case, I noticed Primal Shadows were 1g a pop versus 5-10g a pop for others, so I just bought all of them I could, thinking, at the very least the price won't drop. Then a few months later, a patch changes something, and all of a sudden I have 400 primal shadows I can sell for 17-20g a piece. This does mean I eat some things tho, like Black Diamonds, and Golden Pearls. But I made a crapton off of Shadow Pearls, as they weren't used for anything at one point, so I bought them for 1-2g as well, and then when crafting recipes came out that used them, I sold them for 35g each.
But in the end, I've given away most of that gold to friends and guild stuff, so in that sense it was worth it (in as much as a game can be worth it
A lot of this came up in the silverlight discussion a couple of days ago, but until html/javascript or some new standard provides for:
* Video Playback
* Audio Playback
* A/V Capture thru connected devices with appropriate security
* Bitmap manipulation ala Displacement Maps, Blur, Glow, or other direct bitmap manipulation (for both video effects as well as photoshop style web apps)
there will be a place for flash (and maybe silverlight once it actually does these well).
And the comments like 'I've never found a useful flash app' are pretty disingenuous, or they didn't look too hard. YouTube wouldn't be around for in the way it is if not for flash. Plenty of people like the flash photo & video editing software built on flash.
Is flash perfect? Not saying that, just saying there are gaping holes in even the basic functionality we expect from a web experience these days.
I do flash/flex dev, as well as RoR. A site I did that wouldn't be doable in AJAX/HTML currently: http://www.pinktogether.com/
Flash & Flex do support signed code. The question is, who does the signing? Who is the organization that gets to tell me I am 'authorized programming'? Are you implying that users shouldn't be allowed to develop and run their own code on their own machines? Not sure how 'signing' works in that scenario. Sounds like 'Trusted Computing' to me.
Doesn't then 'signing' become the single point of failure?
In the same vein, Firefox, IE, Safari & Opera also 'render pages executable'. So we are supposed to trust those apps but not Flash? Flash & Java IMO have probably spent the most time planning security out, as opposed to 'no planning'. Doesn't mean there are problems on occasion, but I've never really heard of either being a major vector for viruses and trojans.
I'm running Vista x64 at the moment and I'm torn as to whether I should roll back or not. There are some nice features in Vista and x64 that I like:
* >3GB support. I do Adobe Flex & Ruby on Rails dev currently, and having >3GB of RAM really helps here, as Flex Builder/plugin, Photoshop, Flash, & Firefox really suck up RAM like there is no tomorrow.
* Vista Task Manager is much improved, with command line args, etc.
* Real symbolic link support (ln -s style) across network volumes.
* I can do without the flip card Windows-Tab, but I do like the new Alt-TAB and Task Bar preview windows.
* I run Windows Media Center with my HDHomeRun, and the new version is better than the one with XP.
* I like the goal of UAC, and if UAC didn't cause my LCD to lose sync when it does the whole screen blink thing, it wouldn't be too annoying. It is annoying at times dealing with messing with files in the Program Files directory, but many users wouldn't need to do this.
* Better sound/volume management: So for instance my Logitech di Novo Edge keyboard volume control actually works in Vista. Using WMP used to cause muting problems when pausing on XP as well.
Problems:
* Haven't been able to figure out how to get ANSI.SYS/Ansi Colors to work in the command prompt on Vista x64.
* x64 versus x86 right click Explorer extensions. I use Directory Opus, which is only 32 bit, so I have to install both version of TortoiseSVN, etc. (x64 and x86 versions).
* Adobe Flash has problems with dragging causing the desktop windows manager to think it is not responding. So dragging the timeline playhead around, dwm takes over and whites out the app even tho nothing is really wrong.
* Drivers drivers drivers. My HP ADF Scanner has no x64 drivers, and no Vista drivers, though apparently you can get it to work on 32 bit Vista by running some things as admin.
* SuperFetch. SuperFetch was causing my system to hang 5 minutes after startup pretty consistently.
* DRM would be an issue if I ever used DRM's BluRay/HDDVD. Fortunately there are ways around that.
* Lack of vbscript.dll or suitable replacement for doing *real* Regular Expression searches in Word VBA. I'm not saying vbscript.dll should be there, just that VBA should have RegExpressions included. There is a version you can buy, but $100 to add regexp to Word is ridiculous. I'm sure there are other ways to do this, but it is a problem.
Linux?:
* There is an Alpha version of Flex Builder for linux, but I don't think it is ready for prime time yet.
* I love MythTV in theory, but you have to pay for listing now. Even tho it's not a lot, it is still a negative (assuming you didn't pay for Ultimate Vista).
* No Directory Opus. It really is a god among file managers.
* Games: I play a couple of games, and at a certain point it gets to be too much effort to figure to how to get decent performance in WINE/Cedega etc.
* I like the concept of OpenOffice, but for my needs, MS Office 2k7 is just better at the moment, even though I only use it for RTF, and the new Ribbon interface *does* work once you get it figured out and put a couple of custom commands in the right places. OpenOffice is sorely missing regular expression *replace* as well. And I have some custom VBA dialogs/macros that I would need to convert (lock-in I know).
* Photoshop/Flash CS3 etc.
Mac?:
* I have a Mac Book, and I like it, but I like to build my own systems/upgrade/low noise, and Mac just doesn't have the same flexibility for the price.
* Software: I dual boot my Power Book for a couple of things, but dual booting my main system isn't really something I'm into, and I haven't looked into whether Parallels/VMWare etc would allow me to use my ADF scanner in a VM on either Mac Book or my Vista x64 system, and games, blah blah.
I'm sure there are more, but still haven;t gotten frustrated enough with Vista x64 to make the rollback happen.