One time I attended a class for people wanting to start a business. The teacher started the class asking us each to describe the business we had in mind of starting. One woman stood up and said she wanted to start a "peregrine falcon business."
Without any further description, the teacher said, "You can't sell those birds. They're protected." She replied that she wasn't going to sell falcons. She was going to rent them.
Her plan was to get contracted by big box stores. When they get normal birds stuck flying around inside the building, they'll call the falcon lady and she'll bring her peregrines in and set them loose. It's illegal to poison birds. Shooting them indoors is also a dicey proposition considering that the species could be protected as a migratory bird. But there's no law against releasing a falcon to devour a wild bird.
Don't know if her business 'took off,' but I admired her clever idea.
dont you think the bank should reject anyone using my identity with an IP address that is in another country?
Scenario: Your computer is compromised with a keylogger. It's also got a proxy and other remote control features. The illicit transaction is bounced off your computer, so the bank sees it as coming from your IP address.
Stuffing it all into 1-6 pages would do nothing more than insure that when they got slashdotted, they'd drown their server faster.
Actually, fewer pages with more text content delivered per http request would reduce the load on the server. The bigger impact on the server is repeated visits to the hard drive and trips to the database. When one article requires 12 separate page requests, that cranks up the number of http requests coming in that have to be responded to with hard drive file reads and database queries.
Not knowing their specific server architecture, the above is a generalization. Caching, virtual memory mapped file systems, etc. can alleviate these bottlenecks.
I am not concerned so much with the how it's accomplished as much as what is accomplished. I'm actually just midway through Forever Peace, so I don't know everything about it, but on first glance of the trailer, the avatar fighting in a tropical environment against a technologically less-developed foe reminded me of Forever Peace. All the ferocious animals reminded me of All My Sins Remembered.
Trailer reflects a lot of different Joe Haldeman books. I see pieces of "All My Sins Remembered," "Forever Peace," and a tiny bit of "Forever War." Ridley Scott's planning to film "Forever War," and he said he was inspired to do it in 3-D after seeing what Cameron had done with Avatar. The avatar thing connects with Haldeman's "Forever Peace" very well.
Wish Taco would avoid the snide comment about the trailer lacking story. It's not like Cameron has proven himself a poor storyteller on his past films. Just because it's CGI and science fiction, doesn't mean this is going to be garbage like Transformers 2 or Terminator 4.
No real joke intended here. But just an idea-- robotic snakes. The snake form factor does a lot better on rough terrain than anything based on wheels. If it is built to look like a real snake, it can also frighten enemies beyond belief. They can also be designed to be thrown up on telephone / power lines, hook on, then travel along the line while sending video back to the thrower. Power lines are a great vantage point.
Can't believe your frustrated post got modded higher than your earlier posts...
Anyway, I agree with your perspective here. The OP is interpreting the problem without considering scaling economies of efficiency by replacing SUV's and unneccessary trucks with hyper-efficient vehicles. I'll give some anecdotal support for your position.
I used to have an employee who would drive his diesel F450 pickup to the jobsite everyday from his house that was 40 miles away. It had low gearing for towing, but he was never towing anything, so it got the same poor gas mileage whether it was fully loaded with equipment or empty. I was covering his gas on this project, which cost me something like $200 per week. I asked him why he wanted to drive his truck everyday when he had a Dodge Neon at home. He said he wanted to have all his tools with him. We had a storage container on the jobsite, so I would have preferred that he leave his tools in the container and drive that Neon. Would have cost a heck of a lot less than $200 per week. Look around our roads and ask yourself, does that person really NEED to drive that truck where they're going? If we were to raise gas to $8 per gallon, I think you'd see a lot of truck drivers start to ask themselves that question, which would quickly reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
As a contrast to that employee, I had another guy who drove a diesel Volkswagon TDI wagon. Just a few weeks ago, he drove to a job 1600 miles away with 600lbs of tools in the back of his station wagon. His car is rated to get 40+mpg, and the trip literally cost him $80. Should the other guy with the F450 have attempted the trip, it would have cost roughly $474. If you ask me, I'd like to see more people dump their big pickups and drive more fuel efficient vehicles.
Oh, and for those few instances when you need plywood and 16' 2x4's transported, Home Depot has trucks you can rent by the hour and they also deliver to the jobsite. Most materials we use are delivered, anyway.
If this car is less than $22k, I will buy one day-of-release. TFPR does not provide an MSRP, but it does say it will be low-priced. Four doors, and your gas bill gets moved over to your house electric bill. I never drive more than 100 miles in a day, so it would be perfect for getting me around town on all my stop-start errands.
Moving the cost of driving from a fuel purchase tracked with credit card might make it more difficult for people to get reimbursed by their company for business driving. I wonder how that's going to get sorted. Also, in a roommate situation, it becomes a little unfair to evenly split the electric bill if only one tennant is charging a car.
I also thought of the same liability over letting it continue to scam people while waiting for the perp. One way to fix that would be to take a screw gun and screw a 3" screw into the slot you put your card into. Nobody could use it, and eventually, the owner of the machine might try to fix it or take it away.
I agree with the other theories presented above... the machine likely is using a prepaid wireless phone to export the data from each transaction so that the machine never needs to be retrieved.
What would stop them from building high-end scientific/medical/video/whatever Mac Pro workstations but using Power6 chips/boards straight from IBM?
Maintaining a branch of the OS complete with drivers for a separate chip architecture is non-trivial. Undoubtedly, someone in Apple marketing has a spreadsheet that compares development & maintenance costs of each chip available (ARM, CELL, Intel, Power) with anticipated product demand. Right now the numbers don't work out.
Meanwhile, every public pool has a policy of emptying everyone if thunder is heard. "Oh, you might get struck by lightening!" Yeah, well, you know what the chances of that are? A hell of a lot less than the risk that one of these brats is going to run out into the street and get run over by a car (perhaps while the driver is calling to see if the pool is open).
It's like people take all these precautions against the least likely dangers, while the more likely risks are ignored.
PG movies on average outearn R movies, but there are more R movies made than PG movies.
Where are your stats to back this assertion up? Most of the intended big blockbusters are PG, which supports your box office observation, but not your number-of-releases claim. Few directors are allowed by the producers to develop an R movie with a big budget.
With the success of Old School, there has been a resurgence in the R-rated comedy, but until Hangover whomped the shit out of the PG-rated Land of the Lost, the studios were still refusing to substantially fund any movie that wouldn't sell tickets to 8th Grade Girls. I suspect there are a lot of meetings taking place in Hollywood these days where execs are discussing the Hangover's success.
Apparently, even President Obama doesn't want to hear complaints about the warrantless wiretaps. The Computerworld story provides a convenient link titled "Obama administration defends Bush wiretapping"
While campaigning against President George W. Bush, Barack Obama had pledged that there would be "no more wiretapping of American citizens," but Obama's administration has continued to use many of his predecessor's arguments when it comes to warrantless wiretapping.
Ok, perhaps the reporter of that story got a few of the facts wrong. (George W. Bush != John McCain)
Even the encoding that the disks use isn't very complicated, we crack much more difficult codes all the time.
Sorry for being such a nit-wit.... but I think your comment would carry more weight if you could explain how to get the Antikythera mechanism to reveal its function.
Other posters are suggesting that a working DVD player be bundled with the archival discs. Given a thousand years, I believe the electrical components would degrade too much to function. The player would also need to be accompanied by a display device, which would also likely deteriorate over time.
Seth
The video is impressive, but I'm wondering if that's a typo. 150k lines of code would handle just the graphics engine- barely. Then there's the AI, the character objects, etc. Pretty dense coding..
Speaking of pay phones / cell phones influencing story lines... If you go back and watch TV shows from the 70s and 80s, you'll see that a bunch of the stories just won't work today. Many of the plots turn on character X having to jump in a car and race to point Y to warn character Z about threat G. If these shows were re-shot to be set in modern times, the writers would have to perpetually make characters forget to charge their cell phones or put them in areas with spotty coverage.
Try using the Boxee remote app on an iPod Touch or iPhone. Then come back here and tell us that the AppleTV remote has too few buttons.
Because there are no physical buttons on the Boxee Remote, you have to look at the handset to make every single navigational click. Then you have to look at the tv screen to verify the navigation through the interface. To preserve battery power, you have to sleep your iPhone, and when it wakes up, you have to go through the process of re-launching the Boxee remote app and it connecting to your server, etc. No dis on Boxee, because if you are running Boxee on an AppleTV, then you can use that remote. I'm running it on a BYO Ubuntu system and I wish I had a normal remote control.
AppleTV is a strong offering. I had considered it in setting up my own HTPC. Especially considering it can be hacked to run Boxee, also. So what is missing within AppleTV can be supplemented by Boxee. The main thing I felt was absent within AppleTV was support for viewing local content stored in a variety of formats (DIVX for example).
I also had an idle AMD XP3200-based mobo system laying around, so I just went with that and a Ubuntu OS. The persistent advantage of AppleTV over the linux route is you get a nicely integrated remote device that works across the AppleTV and Boxee interfaces. With the BYO Ubuntu approach, you have to figure out your own remote which for most people is a wireless mouse or keyboard. Not as elegant as the AppleTV remote, for sure.
Oh, and the other strength of AppleTV is the form factor. No fan, and small, so it fits well in an entertainment center. In my system, I've basically got a bare motherboard sitting on a shelf with a full-sized power supply and other components.
Violent thugs are the ones who come up behind you, hit you on the head to knock you unconscious / disorient you, and then steal your stuff.
This is the absolute truth. Small-time hoods aren't tough. Just like any other predator, they only eat what is small enough to fit into their mouths. If the crime is minor, the criminal is lightweight.
The problem with the NSA is that it is part of the intelligence structure. If you insert them as a defensive player, more often than not, they will take absolutely NO action in order to protect their spying capabilities.
At present, nobody knows exactly what the reach is of the NSA. Nobody knows what they can and can't hear. If you task them with defending assets, each probe or attack reveals new information about what the NSA has at their disposal, depending on what the response is. I really don't think the NSA is willing to compromise the secrecy of its capabilities in order to thwart hackers.
The linked article references online vigilantism in China, but offers no example of it taking place in America. The American animal cruelty example referenced in the article illustrates an online crowd working to identify the culprits, which were then apprehended by police and charged via due process of the law. There is nothing regrettable in this case.
I am happy to see online tools used by citizens to identify criminals for law enforcement purposes. In fact, I hope someone identifies these guys and alerts the Austin Police Department.
The existance of scalpers shows that the ticket office sells the tickets at far below market value.
Ticketmaster is guilty of this. Bruce Springstein did a series of concerts and wanted his regular street-level fans to be able to attend. Ticketmaster and Bruce's management agreed upon a range of ticket prices.
Slashdot Mirror
One time I attended a class for people wanting to start a business. The teacher started the class asking us each to describe the business we had in mind of starting. One woman stood up and said she wanted to start a "peregrine falcon business."
Without any further description, the teacher said, "You can't sell those birds. They're protected." She replied that she wasn't going to sell falcons. She was going to rent them.
Her plan was to get contracted by big box stores. When they get normal birds stuck flying around inside the building, they'll call the falcon lady and she'll bring her peregrines in and set them loose. It's illegal to poison birds. Shooting them indoors is also a dicey proposition considering that the species could be protected as a migratory bird. But there's no law against releasing a falcon to devour a wild bird.
Don't know if her business 'took off,' but I admired her clever idea.
Seth
Scenario: Your computer is compromised with a keylogger. It's also got a proxy and other remote control features. The illicit transaction is bounced off your computer, so the bank sees it as coming from your IP address.
Seth
Actually, fewer pages with more text content delivered per http request would reduce the load on the server. The bigger impact on the server is repeated visits to the hard drive and trips to the database. When one article requires 12 separate page requests, that cranks up the number of http requests coming in that have to be responded to with hard drive file reads and database queries.
Not knowing their specific server architecture, the above is a generalization. Caching, virtual memory mapped file systems, etc. can alleviate these bottlenecks.
Seth
I am not concerned so much with the how it's accomplished as much as what is accomplished. I'm actually just midway through Forever Peace, so I don't know everything about it, but on first glance of the trailer, the avatar fighting in a tropical environment against a technologically less-developed foe reminded me of Forever Peace. All the ferocious animals reminded me of All My Sins Remembered.
Seth
Trailer reflects a lot of different Joe Haldeman books. I see pieces of "All My Sins Remembered," "Forever Peace," and a tiny bit of "Forever War." Ridley Scott's planning to film "Forever War," and he said he was inspired to do it in 3-D after seeing what Cameron had done with Avatar. The avatar thing connects with Haldeman's "Forever Peace" very well.
Wish Taco would avoid the snide comment about the trailer lacking story. It's not like Cameron has proven himself a poor storyteller on his past films. Just because it's CGI and science fiction, doesn't mean this is going to be garbage like Transformers 2 or Terminator 4.
No real joke intended here. But just an idea-- robotic snakes. The snake form factor does a lot better on rough terrain than anything based on wheels. If it is built to look like a real snake, it can also frighten enemies beyond belief. They can also be designed to be thrown up on telephone / power lines, hook on, then travel along the line while sending video back to the thrower. Power lines are a great vantage point.
Seth
Copponex,
Can't believe your frustrated post got modded higher than your earlier posts...
Anyway, I agree with your perspective here. The OP is interpreting the problem without considering scaling economies of efficiency by replacing SUV's and unneccessary trucks with hyper-efficient vehicles. I'll give some anecdotal support for your position.
I used to have an employee who would drive his diesel F450 pickup to the jobsite everyday from his house that was 40 miles away. It had low gearing for towing, but he was never towing anything, so it got the same poor gas mileage whether it was fully loaded with equipment or empty. I was covering his gas on this project, which cost me something like $200 per week. I asked him why he wanted to drive his truck everyday when he had a Dodge Neon at home. He said he wanted to have all his tools with him. We had a storage container on the jobsite, so I would have preferred that he leave his tools in the container and drive that Neon. Would have cost a heck of a lot less than $200 per week. Look around our roads and ask yourself, does that person really NEED to drive that truck where they're going? If we were to raise gas to $8 per gallon, I think you'd see a lot of truck drivers start to ask themselves that question, which would quickly reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
As a contrast to that employee, I had another guy who drove a diesel Volkswagon TDI wagon. Just a few weeks ago, he drove to a job 1600 miles away with 600lbs of tools in the back of his station wagon. His car is rated to get 40+mpg, and the trip literally cost him $80. Should the other guy with the F450 have attempted the trip, it would have cost roughly $474. If you ask me, I'd like to see more people dump their big pickups and drive more fuel efficient vehicles.
Oh, and for those few instances when you need plywood and 16' 2x4's transported, Home Depot has trucks you can rent by the hour and they also deliver to the jobsite. Most materials we use are delivered, anyway.
Seth
If this car is less than $22k, I will buy one day-of-release. TFPR does not provide an MSRP, but it does say it will be low-priced. Four doors, and your gas bill gets moved over to your house electric bill. I never drive more than 100 miles in a day, so it would be perfect for getting me around town on all my stop-start errands.
Moving the cost of driving from a fuel purchase tracked with credit card might make it more difficult for people to get reimbursed by their company for business driving. I wonder how that's going to get sorted. Also, in a roommate situation, it becomes a little unfair to evenly split the electric bill if only one tennant is charging a car.
Looks cool.
Seth
I also thought of the same liability over letting it continue to scam people while waiting for the perp. One way to fix that would be to take a screw gun and screw a 3" screw into the slot you put your card into. Nobody could use it, and eventually, the owner of the machine might try to fix it or take it away.
I agree with the other theories presented above... the machine likely is using a prepaid wireless phone to export the data from each transaction so that the machine never needs to be retrieved.
Seth
If you do a google image search for 'Trackhoe' check the third hit. Whoah. That's some insurance money on that one.
Seth
Maintaining a branch of the OS complete with drivers for a separate chip architecture is non-trivial. Undoubtedly, someone in Apple marketing has a spreadsheet that compares development & maintenance costs of each chip available (ARM, CELL, Intel, Power) with anticipated product demand. Right now the numbers don't work out.
Seth
Glad they didn't hire those Lockheed-Martin programmers who forgot Nasa had standardized on the Metric system before the Mars Climate Orbiter Mission. Oops!
On a side note, Science Fiction author, Frederik Pohl, posted an interesting anecdote about the first Apollo moon landing.
Seth
Meanwhile, every public pool has a policy of emptying everyone if thunder is heard. "Oh, you might get struck by lightening!" Yeah, well, you know what the chances of that are? A hell of a lot less than the risk that one of these brats is going to run out into the street and get run over by a car (perhaps while the driver is calling to see if the pool is open).
It's like people take all these precautions against the least likely dangers, while the more likely risks are ignored.
Seth
Where are your stats to back this assertion up? Most of the intended big blockbusters are PG, which supports your box office observation, but not your number-of-releases claim. Few directors are allowed by the producers to develop an R movie with a big budget.
With the success of Old School, there has been a resurgence in the R-rated comedy, but until Hangover whomped the shit out of the PG-rated Land of the Lost, the studios were still refusing to substantially fund any movie that wouldn't sell tickets to 8th Grade Girls. I suspect there are a lot of meetings taking place in Hollywood these days where execs are discussing the Hangover's success.
Seth
Ok, perhaps the reporter of that story got a few of the facts wrong. (George W. Bush != John McCain)
Seth
Sorry for being such a nit-wit.... but I think your comment would carry more weight if you could explain how to get the Antikythera mechanism to reveal its function.
Other posters are suggesting that a working DVD player be bundled with the archival discs. Given a thousand years, I believe the electrical components would degrade too much to function. The player would also need to be accompanied by a display device, which would also likely deteriorate over time. Seth
The video is impressive, but I'm wondering if that's a typo. 150k lines of code would handle just the graphics engine- barely. Then there's the AI, the character objects, etc. Pretty dense coding..
Seth
Speaking of pay phones / cell phones influencing story lines... If you go back and watch TV shows from the 70s and 80s, you'll see that a bunch of the stories just won't work today. Many of the plots turn on character X having to jump in a car and race to point Y to warn character Z about threat G. If these shows were re-shot to be set in modern times, the writers would have to perpetually make characters forget to charge their cell phones or put them in areas with spotty coverage.
Seth
Try using the Boxee remote app on an iPod Touch or iPhone. Then come back here and tell us that the AppleTV remote has too few buttons.
Because there are no physical buttons on the Boxee Remote, you have to look at the handset to make every single navigational click. Then you have to look at the tv screen to verify the navigation through the interface. To preserve battery power, you have to sleep your iPhone, and when it wakes up, you have to go through the process of re-launching the Boxee remote app and it connecting to your server, etc. No dis on Boxee, because if you are running Boxee on an AppleTV, then you can use that remote. I'm running it on a BYO Ubuntu system and I wish I had a normal remote control.
Seth
AppleTV is a strong offering. I had considered it in setting up my own HTPC. Especially considering it can be hacked to run Boxee, also. So what is missing within AppleTV can be supplemented by Boxee. The main thing I felt was absent within AppleTV was support for viewing local content stored in a variety of formats (DIVX for example).
I also had an idle AMD XP3200-based mobo system laying around, so I just went with that and a Ubuntu OS. The persistent advantage of AppleTV over the linux route is you get a nicely integrated remote device that works across the AppleTV and Boxee interfaces. With the BYO Ubuntu approach, you have to figure out your own remote which for most people is a wireless mouse or keyboard. Not as elegant as the AppleTV remote, for sure.
Oh, and the other strength of AppleTV is the form factor. No fan, and small, so it fits well in an entertainment center. In my system, I've basically got a bare motherboard sitting on a shelf with a full-sized power supply and other components.
Seth
This is the absolute truth. Small-time hoods aren't tough. Just like any other predator, they only eat what is small enough to fit into their mouths. If the crime is minor, the criminal is lightweight.
Seth
The problem with the NSA is that it is part of the intelligence structure. If you insert them as a defensive player, more often than not, they will take absolutely NO action in order to protect their spying capabilities.
At present, nobody knows exactly what the reach is of the NSA. Nobody knows what they can and can't hear. If you task them with defending assets, each probe or attack reveals new information about what the NSA has at their disposal, depending on what the response is. I really don't think the NSA is willing to compromise the secrecy of its capabilities in order to thwart hackers.
Seth
The linked article references online vigilantism in China, but offers no example of it taking place in America. The American animal cruelty example referenced in the article illustrates an online crowd working to identify the culprits, which were then apprehended by police and charged via due process of the law. There is nothing regrettable in this case.
I am happy to see online tools used by citizens to identify criminals for law enforcement purposes. In fact, I hope someone identifies these guys and alerts the Austin Police Department.
Seth
It's still probably cheaper than having their ceremony in New York.
Seth
Ticketmaster is guilty of this. Bruce Springstein did a series of concerts and wanted his regular street-level fans to be able to attend. Ticketmaster and Bruce's management agreed upon a range of ticket prices.
Ticketmaster operates a few subsidiary companies that also sell tickets. These companies bought the Springstein tickets at face value and turned around and sold them with a scalper's mark-up. The common folk were then priced out of the Bruce Springstein concerts and the Boss didn't see any of that premium pricing in the form of additional revenue.