Yes, they have the majority of the vote, but when you're voting for president, you're generally voting for the person, not the party.
When the 2 or 3 parties combined win the vote, the choice of who will be president/prime minister is removed from the voters. Instead it's left up to the winning parties to choose which one of them is going to take the position.
Would be great if they added a large LED color display that would plot the national debt growth based on historical data.
Starting with 1989, show everyone a graph that displays how much the debt grew until now, month by month. Of course given the digital nature, it should be possible to show other data as well.
The benefit to this would be to show for example "How much did it grow under Bush #1, Clinton, Bush #2, Whoever's next"
I love my 2000 Yaris. It's a cute little car that gets amazing gas milage with its 1.0 liter putt putt engine. It has a futuristic dashboard and has been a pleasure to drive even here in Norway where the hills are so steep that there are times I have to turn around and find another way.
I've been trying for over 2 years to buy a decent pair of running shoes and every time I go to the store, everything is so damn pimped out or just so ugly that I wouldn't want any of them. I end up wearing "dress sneakers" instead which lack the support and comfort of the "bling bling" sneakers designed for sports.
I sure as hell don't want to have to buy 10 year old cars to find something that looks nice and practical.
Did the money magically appear from out of nowhere or did ACU tack the money onto the tuition somehow? I mean really. That iPhone which typically costs $199 at an Apple Store when connected to the expensive AT&T plan probably cost each student closer to $600 on their tuition.
Wouldn't it have been better to use the money more productively and made "A Web Enbabled Mobile Device" a prerequisit?
Of course it's a University that declares math and science irrelevant, so I'm guessing it was actually a message from God that the Uni should deploy the Jesus Phone.
While you may have a point, the American people general get to choose between Satan and the Devil. Gore was the last legitimate presidential candidate the country had available to them and the bitch of that was that he was too young and too arrogant. I personally blame him and his damn pride for much of what's happened over the past 8 years. If he could have just treated the average American (in other words frigging idiots) with a little more respect instead of insinuating that they were all morons, he would have taken office.
Then we had Kerry. Let's face it, Dukakis is the only person happy he ran since now the jokes about "Worst Presidential Candidate Ever" are no focused on Kerry instead of Dukakis.
The biggest problem is, for an intelligent candidate with morals to make it to the presidential ballad, they have to first be a vice president. The reason for this is that you have to be a pretty slimy kind of person to weasle your way up the political ladder and make it into a position of power strong enough to get on the ballad without having been carried up on someone elses coat tails.
People can say the two party system is flawed, but in reality, in a country the size of the US, the alternative systems would be just as bad if not considered ENTIRELY scandalous. In some countries, a candidate can win 45% of all the votes with the next runner up winning only 20%, but after the win, if enough competing parties can ally themselves to add up to 46% of the vote, then they can choose a new president or prime minister without consulting the people.
If the Americans had a system where this would work, it would probably result in constant presidential assassination attempts. Especially when you find the party you voted for grouping with the party you were in fact voting against and allowing that party to provide the executive leadership.
Great, ecmascript is wonderful! Software automization is always cool.
But here's the problem with the problem being solved.
1) The font size is known 2) The application which rendered the font is known (different apps render a little differently than others) 3) There is no background image or pattern to distort the pixelization
I can go on, but these points are the real issues, I guess it would be possible, with enough resources to build a database containing all characters from all fonts rendered at all interesting sizes and through all interesting applications. But even then, the background image would have to be recovered in order to apply this technique as it will greatly impact the colors of the pixelization.
Either way... nice presentation of ecmascript in Photoshop:)
I wrote a proof of concept Mac virus back when Apple first started bragging how Mac was immune to viruses. Guess what, Mac users DEFINATELY ARE NOT.
In my test on both Windows and Mac, I found that on Windows thanks to paranoia, 5 out of 10 times, you could get a user to click ok to installing malware. On Mac, you could gain root access more than 9 out of 10 times simply by presenting what appears to be an installation application and prompting for the administrator password.
What was worse is that I performed some experiments regarding antivirus software. What I found was... Mac antivirus software was excellent about detecting Windows viruses and avoiding sending or receiving them via e-mail, but it was extremely easy to hide viruses from Mac antivirus software. In fact, it was REALLY REALLY easy to make and install OpenFirmware malware that none of the antivirus software even looked for.
Everything was great up until recession. I worked in a film company for a few years and they're banking on the recession to make BluRay happen.
Here's why....
Jim Bob, your average Walmart employee is actually their #1 sales target. In fact, they depend on Jim Bob for quite a few reasons :
- He couldn't figure out how to pirate a film even if you gave him incentives like threatening to break his beer fridge on his porch.
- He places strange values on entertainment. After all he spent $200 on his new truck, $500 on his fake chrome wheels, $99 on his new paint job, but $1500 on his high end audiovox stereo system with three 18" subwoofers.
- He's lost his job to those [insert derogatory name for a minority group here] and now that he's receiving his pay checks from the unemployment office once a month instead of every week, he gets much bigger amounts in each payment. So, now he finally has enough money in one go to buy that 42" plasma and BluRay combo which will free up nearly 2/3s of his living room in his trailer, so he might be able to fit a couch next to his lay-z-boy imatation recliner. So he can even invite friends over to play XBox and drink beer.
- He realized that he can be the hottest thing at the local bar when he says "I just watched that at home on my new HIGH.... DEF... TV and Blu-Ray". When the other guys then say things like "Yeh, I heard about them things... I heard the movie is like much better on that".
I can go on and on like that forever, but the company I worked for knows one thing... it's only the middle class that spends less on entertainment budgets during recession, the lower class actually spends more since "It's too expensive to go out to the bar right now, I'll just (rent|buy) a new movie and a 6-pack for the house".
Th percentage of the market that even cares about DRM so long as they can insert a disc into the player and watch the film is minimal. On the other hand, probably 20% of Slashdot readers actually care, but the remaining 80% have one program or another to crack it anyway.
DRM is certainly not the problem. If anything, it helps the format since movie studios won't even release films for a format if they don't believe they have at least some protection. It's a stupid argument of course. It's like saying the studios won't use buy a new fire proof vault unless it has a lock on it which 80% of the people likely to want to break into it had a master key for it.
The studios are torn between either not supporting the format at all or supporting a format which at least "keeps the honest people honest".
The studios are not naive, they already know that every film they release will in fact be ripped and pirated every which way but loose, but the shareholders of their companies aren't quite so bright and thanks to organizations like the MPAA crying that studio profit growth is only 8% per annum instead of 50% because of piracy as opposed to the real arguments such as : - Less than 10% of new films each year don't suck - Every breathing person on the planet has already purchased all the older movies they're actually interested in. - The consumer actually only has $XXX.XX to spend on DVDs in a year. believe that film studio investments are less lucrative than they should be. Therefore, the shareholders are demanding that the studios at least make an attempt to protect their property.
The only real fear attached to DRM is that it will require a phone home system in the future which will make it so that players don't actually contain the decryption keys needed to play the films.
This is not a great fear yet since unless the studios include some sort of GSM or other wireless modem in every single portable player, a phone home system is not likely to work.
I've met TBL at a function where the topic was basically that implementing some of the W3C standards in browsers could be cryptic. During this talk, the feeling I got was, that once you get past his Sir Tim bullcrap he was technically a bright guy.
I think the biggest problem with TBL is that he's standing high up on a pedistal we built for him and forced him to stand on for so long that he's forgotten that he is and always has been a pretty innovative coder/engineer, but politically, he's still just as irrational as all the rest of us nerds.
Yeh, I rambled a bit more than necessary in the post. I agree with much of what has been said, in fact, even what I disagree with, I agree with the intent behind it.
I think that instead of breaking down the districts on a state level, to do it on a federal level. In the case of Florida specifically, there exists a real issue. The state has very little native population and I strongly believe that neither candidate can possibly represent the population of the state.
Maybe for no other reason but representation, I believe that Florida should actually be broken into several smaller states. There are a large number of highly misrepresented people within the state because the state was populated almost entirely for climatic purposes. I can only imagine California is similar, but I lack the experience to speak of it.
Counting Florida as a single monsterous vote is almost criminal in itself. And somehow this issue should be corrected.
You make a point of preferring to go back to a coalition of independant states, but in reality, maybe the problem is there's not enough states. I think it's a little silly that the only way to split a state in the U.S. is through a civil war that occurs on just the right boundary. I imagine that northern California has substantially different needs and wants than southern California. I'm sure that pan handle Florida, an area heavily populated descendants of the conferderacy would prefer their representation to be seperate from the yankees up and down the souther coasts or the dominant population of hispanics of Miami.
I have no clue about Texas since I've spent little time there and what time I spent there lead me to believe the difference there is based on religion, I've been told by some of the most educated people I met there that half of texas is baptist, half of texas is methodist and the last quarter doesn't actually matter. So I couldn't imagine how to split that state up. But somehow I can't imagine Texas's representation would actually change if it were split
I mean, this isn't like "Should a pre-law student have to learn trig?". O-chem, while one of the most painful subjects ever (I never took the course, but I read the book cover to cover because it was there) is actually incredibly important for doctors to be able to simply understand what is written in medical journals.
What makes a physician educated in the university different that fruitcakes like faith healers is that they are expected to learn about the human body from not only experience and experimentation, but from learning from the advanced research of others.
I read medical journals so that I can pretend like I'm smart. I enjoy reading about how treatments we've used for the past 10,000 years are in fact dangerous and should be avoided. Most importantly, as a smoker, I take Chemo-therapy VERY seriously and hope there will be a replacement treatment for it at some point so I may suffer through emphasima treatment as opposed to cancer treatment. I would not be able to understand these journal entries if it were not for O-chem. More importantly, when the time comes where I will need to address this issue for my personal health, I will need to talk with my physician to discuss the applicability of the new treatments for my case and therefore I demand that he/she is able to read the articles as well.
A doctor is expected to be an educated person. A doctor should be a person that we can trust. But when a doctor says that we should allow them to be called doctors when they can't even understand an article in a medical journal regarding the blood chemistry of jaundice, they should have their licenses revoked!
Yes, O-chem is not Bio-chem, but you can't expect to actually understand Bio-chem without the foundations of O-chem. It would be like studying Calculus and Differential Equations without first having learned Algebra.
I'd like to call for a committee to be established to address this issue. I believe that all the doctors that have been cited as ignoring the importance of O-chem should have their medical license reviewed. I believe the first step will be to visit the doctors, measure the thickness of the layer of dust on top of their medical books and observe their desks, I guarantee that each of them have many more magazines about golfing, boats and overpriced cars than medically related items.
After all, it would accomplish the exact same thing as if they were both allowed to be left on the balled.
The biggest problem with the process today is that the electoral college tends to run state by state. This system was ok in a time when the U.S. population was made up by small groups. But these days, you don't need a majority vote to win a state and in states where you have a huge number of electoral votes and a big split of support (like Florida), it should be possible for each electoral vote to be counted instead of just submitting all electoral votes for a state for a single party.
I think that Florida and California severely fuck up the entire electoral college method of vote counting. Florida would provide a lot more votes to the democrats and california a lot more for the republicans if the system worked properly. Texas might even have 2 or 3 votes blue.
If there's on thing I think the entire world agrees upon is that the current system is illogical in a country where the means actually do exist to count votes on a finer grain then when the system was originally created.
Let's face it, there are contradictions throughout the bible to easily make this seem like a silly topic.
Genesis (which I've read in several interprettations as well as in hebrew as b'rashit) and even when I was younger and willing to believe what my parents believed and I hadn't even heard of evolution as of yet, I had many questions regarding the logic behind it. After all, it seemed very unrealistic to me that everythe was created so quickly.
This didn't change my faith. It just struck me as if God had provided us with a VERY short answer to a question that he himself didn't consider to be the important to what he was attempting to accomplish. He described it in a way that people who lacked education could be pasified and if you wanted the real answer, you can look deeper and figure it out. What Genesis was saying was that God created it all. He provided something similar to a childrens book version of what he did and moved on.
So, now that I'm enlightened and no longer believe in fairy tales like God, I am forced to wonder why creationism is taken so literally by religion. They constantly try to tell us that it is not our job to question Gods motives but instead to accept what he did was for our best interests in the greater picture. Yet, they can't accept that a story of creation fed to Mose's flocks might have been an extremely simplified version of what happened and that the real deal could in fact be a process that took him 13 billion years to accomplish.
So, why is the literal interprettation of Genesis so important to them? I mean really... they talk about Intelligent Design to try and make science accept the literal translation of Genesis. Why can't they assume that maybe the scientists have simply finally figured out what their God did and take credit for that instead?
After all, who would want to pray to an ever eternal God that has existed infinately, who considers a billion years to be little more that how we see waiting 5 minutes for a bus that slapped all this shit together in 7 days? I mean really, if God loves us nearly as much as they say he does, wouldn't he have spent the equivilent of one of our hours (about 13 billion years hehe) trying to actually get it right?
I greatly appreciate this response. This is my first "Ask Slashdot" ever and your comment and several others have proven very educational and informative.
Several lifetimes ago, I worked in battery life prolongment technologies as an engineer developing measurement equipment to attempt to predict when a battery would need replacement in large banks of cells. Since all the cells were in use within safety systems at nuclear facilities, the environmental cost of the batteries were not the issue at hand.
Your comment fills in many gaps in my knowledge as well as identifies and corrects quite a few of my misconceptions.
Doh, I had a great response written and when I clicked login, it didn't save my state.
In short, I agree with you regarding the pay, or at least conceed you've made many valid points. But to be frank, the pay isn't the issue and I should have made the point in my earlier post.
The point is, that whether you get a CCIE or a Masters in Comp Sci/El Eng, you have the same fiduciary path ahead. The difference is, with a CSEE with a focus on networking technologies, the guy should know they hows, whys, and whens of networking. You should know how to formall calculate network conditions mathematically and provide a high level of confidence to the receiver of your input because the guy has done more than just say "my experience is..." based on holding is thumb up in the air to judge wind current.
For wireless networking instead of just guessing the signal is bad because someone might have used iron nails in the old building, a CSEE with an education which included physics and mathematics would be able to calculate a wireless strategy to circumvent interference instead of just adding access points until it works.
The market runs in cycles. And a high schooler starting now will graduate in 4 years. By the time the teacher actually gets a course up and running, it could be 5 or 6 years before the first certified student graduates.
While the market is looking at a downturn in the next few years, withing 5-6 years there will be a "talent shortage" as there always is. And I remember just about 8 years ago, I was at Linux expo surrounded by piles of 20 year old kids making from $80,000-$200,000 a year in companies that pretty much all went tits up... but still, while those companies had investor money, they were making it.
Just two years ago, I heard about salaries within the states for young guys in the $60-$90K range.
And even now, when the market is going to shit, any kid can take a CCIE certification to Norway, Luxumborg, Switzerland or any other high paid European country and get that. After all, here in Norway, a fry chef at McDonalds gets 95-110NOK per hour (basically minimum wage) which translates to roughly $45,000 a year when all is said and done.
So, before you start telling people which bodily excretion to dissect in the future, I would recommend broadening your horizons.
I'm an American living in Norway and for the past 9 years, I almost never have paid a bill. In fact, I've seriously considered just removing my mailbox and saying screw it since I don't actually care what is in it.
I receive all my bills electronicly. I have automatic payment for all of them and I set limits on how much each debitor can withdraw from my account before my personal intervention is required. I have an account I use for paying bills. Each month, when I receive my pay, electronically, I automatically transfer enough to cover all my normal bills and then some. the bills are then automatically paid and if there is a bill which is larger than I allow it, I receive an e-mail telling me that an unusal request has been made against my account.
I have never had paper checks in this country since 99% of all places I have been accept my debit card. The remaining 1% are the street vendors or the new startup places which haven't purchased or installed the machines yet.
It's always really funny to look back and remember how many late or accidentally unpaid bills I had in America. Actually, my credit report stateside was terrible since I had so many problems with the billing and banking systems. I also suffered the biggest problem of all which was that I refused to use the postal service.
While I don't think I'm in a good position to recommend specific books, I feel that from my experiences with my nephew (we're quite close) I should add my 2 cents.
While you're in a great position to educate students with regards to computers and in reality, you could even prepare them for A+ and even Cisco or Juniper certification before they leave school, I believe that you should take advantage of the opportunity instead to teach them general computer knowledge and not specialized.
I have worked indirectly with CompTIA and have even assisted in writing books for A+ certification, but I prefer to believe that students taking courses voluntarily in high school should be directed towards higher education in computer science instead of providing them with a certification track that could allow them to go straight to work after high school. I believe that the A+, Network+, CCIE etc... track is great for guys that never got the higher education and want to work their way up the food chain without going to the university at the age of 30.
Don't get me wrong, preparing kids to take a CCIE which would get them $85,000-$125,000 a year the moment they graduate high school sounds great, but if they were able to achieve that by the time they left school, they could achieve so much more with a few years in the University.
Now, if you're teaching in a place where the students might otherwise be doomed to a life working in factories in dead end jobs, or in a place where the percentage of students continuing to higher education is disappointing, you would do them a great favor preparing them for certifications and careers straight out of high school. But if you make it obviously profitable for students to just ditch college and the university because they are certified for jobs right out of high school, then you could in fact be robbing the world of the valuable resources of higher educated scientists.
Teach the students computers as a science at the high school level, not as an engineering skill. If you're teaching at a proper (meaning public) high school as opposed to a vocational school, then computers should be approached in the same way as physics, biology or chemistry.
The students should leave your class knowing where computers come from, they should understand the history of computers. Maybe you should try to teach a limited set of electronics including discreet math (or just general boolean logic), you could even communicate with the local junior college and find out if you can design a credit track where you can use their curriculum to allow students to take college level 1st and 2nd year courses in high school and then take their finals at the college. This is actually how my high school worked and because of that many of the students continued on to New York Institute of Technology with 90% of their first two years of university credits completed.
Well, that was my two cents... I hope you find a good path to follow.
P.S. - if you do end up going down the certification track instead, please choose useful ones. A+ and Network+ are for guys driving silly vans to peoples houses with stupid names like Geek Squad. They're the fat assed, butt crack hanging out of their jeans plumbers of the computer business.
I would highly recommend ordering a single board computer which meets military specs, runs something like Linux, QNX, VxWorks, etc... and most importantly is interfacable through RS-232.
Milspec SBCs don't need to be expensive. In fact, often you can buy them off e-bay or other auction sites at a reasonable price. But the benefit of milspec systems is durability.
Most modern PCs, though being shipped with non-electrolytic capacitors are possibly capable of lasting longer than in the past are still consumer spec which means for the most part disposable. Military spec requires that the unit had survived an environmental testing regiment. Part of this includes that units have be shipped from east coast to west coast (U.S.) and back in the back of a 18 wheeler with no shock absorbers all the while in high heat and humidity or low temperature and dryness (or alternative combinations).
While this by no means guarantees the circuit will last 25 years under ground, in tact. It does mean that your chances are much higher.
RS-232 is a no brainer. Based on an earlier posting which referenced a Wang 10meg drive (which I have a functional system for actually hehe) it reminds me of the interface issue.
First of all USB, SATA, Firewire, etc... are all moving targets. They aim for backwards compatibility and there is a SMALL chance that USB version 9 or Firewire 64000 will support USB-2 or Firewire 400, I wouldn't bank on it any time soon. If for no other reason but USB, Firewire, and SATA devices are disposable. Therefore, while an occassional drive might come along that might still work, most companies won't care about testing it. Especially since the current move is to try and eliminate cables. So future versions of these standards might just be wireless or even fibre.
RS-232 is a standard which more or less is unchanged since the C revision of the standard published in 1969. That means the standard is already nearly 40 years old and we can still depend on it. What's more important is that it will be around for a while. If you doubt it, remember that the majority of the industrial world runs all their measurement and control equipment on RS-232 and much of this equipment dates back over 20 years.
What's more is that RS-232 is REALLY easy to implement. So if you were to contact ANY university level electronics student and ask them to start from scratch and implement an RS-232 UART (interface), they would be able to handle it blindfolded with their arms tied behind their backs while being forced to listen to ABBA. So, that means that if somehow RS-232 is GONE! by the time the capsule is openned, at the very least some student would be able to hack together something to read it.
As for file storage... I highly recommend that on that SBC, there is a copy of a library used to compress the files. So if you used JPEG, include the tarball for libjpeg for example. I'm sure these formats will be supported 25 years down the road, but just to play it safe you might want to include code. I'm sure C compilers will still be around (there is still COBOL).
For text documents, remember that even programs release by Microsoft may not be able to read current revisions of Word or Powerpoint. I actually make money by keeping a Word for DOS and Wordperfect for DOS virtual machine running for conversion. PDF is safer, especially if you include the source to XPDF which I have ported to another platform once in about 6 hours (not a clean and polished port, but one which reads files). Besides with a huge part of document archival industry using PDF, it'll be around for a while.
I wish you luck, makes me wonder if there's a market for a production time capsule PC company.
I am genuinely greatful to you for replying for providing me with the first well written response to one of my Slashdot posting. After a long time of posting on this site, the frustration of receiving unjustified flames has driven me to write most of my postings in a model that invites flames.
Your response has provided me with at least a little faith in the direction that there are in fact rational people participating on this site.
While I also avoided the web early on, seeing it as little more than glorified desktop publishing, I can see parallels in my experiences to nearly everything you said.
With every popular platform of development there will always be some language or tool which appeals to the general masses whom will utilize the "simplest" and cheapest technology to accomplish their goals. After all, for the most part, many of these people desire to get their projects up and running, they themselves don't actually know the difference between clean and sloppy coding styles.
Now that I think of it, during my lifetime, there was an obvious trend towards BASIC derivatives (GWBASIC, QuickBasic, Visual Basic) until recently when languages like Perl, PHP, server side JavaScript, and C derivatives took over.
Being a chronic C++/Assember coder through and through I will say that since the beginning of the web, I have classically insisted on the use of interpretted languages (or environments such as virtual machines) for web based applications since I have long believed that even superb C++ programmers could not possibly reliably produce compiled code securely. A quality interpretted language will throw exceptions when memory boundaries are violated where compiled languages require the developer to provide that functionality explicitly.
Well off I go to work on my current project, which today requires me to track memory leaks and to perform bounds checking on a code base of 1.2 million lines across 400 modules written by 20 in-house developers and 100 open source guys. Sometimes I really like interpretted languages.
Perl is UNIX's Visual Basic. Give a money a perl interpretter and they'll manage to make some cryptic script that gets the job done, but would never be useful to another scripter.
While perl might actually not suck in itself, the overwhelming perl user base often does. I strongly believe that the same goes for PHP.
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Yes, they have the majority of the vote, but when you're voting for president, you're generally voting for the person, not the party.
When the 2 or 3 parties combined win the vote, the choice of who will be president/prime minister is removed from the voters. Instead it's left up to the winning parties to choose which one of them is going to take the position.
Would be great if they added a large LED color display that would plot the national debt growth based on historical data.
Starting with 1989, show everyone a graph that displays how much the debt grew until now, month by month. Of course given the digital nature, it should be possible to show other data as well.
The benefit to this would be to show for example "How much did it grow under Bush #1, Clinton, Bush #2, Whoever's next"
I love my 2000 Yaris. It's a cute little car that gets amazing gas milage with its 1.0 liter putt putt engine. It has a futuristic dashboard and has been a pleasure to drive even here in Norway where the hills are so steep that there are times I have to turn around and find another way.
I've been trying for over 2 years to buy a decent pair of running shoes and every time I go to the store, everything is so damn pimped out or just so ugly that I wouldn't want any of them. I end up wearing "dress sneakers" instead which lack the support and comfort of the "bling bling" sneakers designed for sports.
I sure as hell don't want to have to buy 10 year old cars to find something that looks nice and practical.
Took me three tries to read it as Debian Lenny as opposed to Lesbian Denny.
Did the money magically appear from out of nowhere or did ACU tack the money onto the tuition somehow? I mean really. That iPhone which typically costs $199 at an Apple Store when connected to the expensive AT&T plan probably cost each student closer to $600 on their tuition.
Wouldn't it have been better to use the money more productively and made "A Web Enbabled Mobile Device" a prerequisit?
Of course it's a University that declares math and science irrelevant, so I'm guessing it was actually a message from God that the Uni should deploy the Jesus Phone.
While you may have a point, the American people general get to choose between Satan and the Devil. Gore was the last legitimate presidential candidate the country had available to them and the bitch of that was that he was too young and too arrogant. I personally blame him and his damn pride for much of what's happened over the past 8 years. If he could have just treated the average American (in other words frigging idiots) with a little more respect instead of insinuating that they were all morons, he would have taken office.
Then we had Kerry. Let's face it, Dukakis is the only person happy he ran since now the jokes about "Worst Presidential Candidate Ever" are no focused on Kerry instead of Dukakis.
The biggest problem is, for an intelligent candidate with morals to make it to the presidential ballad, they have to first be a vice president. The reason for this is that you have to be a pretty slimy kind of person to weasle your way up the political ladder and make it into a position of power strong enough to get on the ballad without having been carried up on someone elses coat tails.
People can say the two party system is flawed, but in reality, in a country the size of the US, the alternative systems would be just as bad if not considered ENTIRELY scandalous. In some countries, a candidate can win 45% of all the votes with the next runner up winning only 20%, but after the win, if enough competing parties can ally themselves to add up to 46% of the vote, then they can choose a new president or prime minister without consulting the people.
If the Americans had a system where this would work, it would probably result in constant presidential assassination attempts. Especially when you find the party you voted for grouping with the party you were in fact voting against and allowing that party to provide the executive leadership.
Great, ecmascript is wonderful! Software automization is always cool.
:)
But here's the problem with the problem being solved.
1) The font size is known
2) The application which rendered the font is known (different apps render a little differently than others)
3) There is no background image or pattern to distort the pixelization
I can go on, but these points are the real issues, I guess it would be possible, with enough resources to build a database containing all characters from all fonts rendered at all interesting sizes and through all interesting applications. But even then, the background image would have to be recovered in order to apply this technique as it will greatly impact the colors of the pixelization.
Either way... nice presentation of ecmascript in Photoshop
I wrote a proof of concept Mac virus back when Apple first started bragging how Mac was immune to viruses. Guess what, Mac users DEFINATELY ARE NOT.
In my test on both Windows and Mac, I found that on Windows thanks to paranoia, 5 out of 10 times, you could get a user to click ok to installing malware. On Mac, you could gain root access more than 9 out of 10 times simply by presenting what appears to be an installation application and prompting for the administrator password.
What was worse is that I performed some experiments regarding antivirus software. What I found was... Mac antivirus software was excellent about detecting Windows viruses and avoiding sending or receiving them via e-mail, but it was extremely easy to hide viruses from Mac antivirus software. In fact, it was REALLY REALLY easy to make and install OpenFirmware malware that none of the antivirus software even looked for.
Everything was great up until recession. I worked in a film company for a few years and they're banking on the recession to make BluRay happen.
Here's why....
Jim Bob, your average Walmart employee is actually their #1 sales target. In fact, they depend on Jim Bob for quite a few reasons :
- He couldn't figure out how to pirate a film even if you gave him incentives like threatening to break his beer fridge on his porch.
- He places strange values on entertainment. After all he spent $200 on his new truck, $500 on his fake chrome wheels, $99 on his new paint job, but $1500 on his high end audiovox stereo system with three 18" subwoofers.
- He's lost his job to those [insert derogatory name for a minority group here] and now that he's receiving his pay checks from the unemployment office once a month instead of every week, he gets much bigger amounts in each payment. So, now he finally has enough money in one go to buy that 42" plasma and BluRay combo which will free up nearly 2/3s of his living room in his trailer, so he might be able to fit a couch next to his lay-z-boy imatation recliner. So he can even invite friends over to play XBox and drink beer.
- He realized that he can be the hottest thing at the local bar when he says "I just watched that at home on my new HIGH.... DEF... TV and Blu-Ray". When the other guys then say things like "Yeh, I heard about them things... I heard the movie is like much better on that".
I can go on and on like that forever, but the company I worked for knows one thing... it's only the middle class that spends less on entertainment budgets during recession, the lower class actually spends more since "It's too expensive to go out to the bar right now, I'll just (rent|buy) a new movie and a 6-pack for the house".
Th percentage of the market that even cares about DRM so long as they can insert a disc into the player and watch the film is minimal. On the other hand, probably 20% of Slashdot readers actually care, but the remaining 80% have one program or another to crack it anyway.
DRM is certainly not the problem. If anything, it helps the format since movie studios won't even release films for a format if they don't believe they have at least some protection. It's a stupid argument of course. It's like saying the studios won't use buy a new fire proof vault unless it has a lock on it which 80% of the people likely to want to break into it had a master key for it.
The studios are torn between either not supporting the format at all or supporting a format which at least "keeps the honest people honest".
The studios are not naive, they already know that every film they release will in fact be ripped and pirated every which way but loose, but the shareholders of their companies aren't quite so bright and thanks to organizations like the MPAA crying that studio profit growth is only 8% per annum instead of 50% because of piracy as opposed to the real arguments such as :
- Less than 10% of new films each year don't suck
- Every breathing person on the planet has already purchased all the older movies they're actually interested in.
- The consumer actually only has $XXX.XX to spend on DVDs in a year.
believe that film studio investments are less lucrative than they should be. Therefore, the shareholders are demanding that the studios at least make an attempt to protect their property.
The only real fear attached to DRM is that it will require a phone home system in the future which will make it so that players don't actually contain the decryption keys needed to play the films.
This is not a great fear yet since unless the studios include some sort of GSM or other wireless modem in every single portable player, a phone home system is not likely to work.
I've met TBL at a function where the topic was basically that implementing some of the W3C standards in browsers could be cryptic. During this talk, the feeling I got was, that once you get past his Sir Tim bullcrap he was technically a bright guy.
I think the biggest problem with TBL is that he's standing high up on a pedistal we built for him and forced him to stand on for so long that he's forgotten that he is and always has been a pretty innovative coder/engineer, but politically, he's still just as irrational as all the rest of us nerds.
At least he's not HWLee
Yeh, I rambled a bit more than necessary in the post. I agree with much of what has been said, in fact, even what I disagree with, I agree with the intent behind it.
I think that instead of breaking down the districts on a state level, to do it on a federal level. In the case of Florida specifically, there exists a real issue. The state has very little native population and I strongly believe that neither candidate can possibly represent the population of the state.
Maybe for no other reason but representation, I believe that Florida should actually be broken into several smaller states. There are a large number of highly misrepresented people within the state because the state was populated almost entirely for climatic purposes. I can only imagine California is similar, but I lack the experience to speak of it.
Counting Florida as a single monsterous vote is almost criminal in itself. And somehow this issue should be corrected.
You make a point of preferring to go back to a coalition of independant states, but in reality, maybe the problem is there's not enough states. I think it's a little silly that the only way to split a state in the U.S. is through a civil war that occurs on just the right boundary. I imagine that northern California has substantially different needs and wants than southern California. I'm sure that pan handle Florida, an area heavily populated descendants of the conferderacy would prefer their representation to be seperate from the yankees up and down the souther coasts or the dominant population of hispanics of Miami.
I have no clue about Texas since I've spent little time there and what time I spent there lead me to believe the difference there is based on religion, I've been told by some of the most educated people I met there that half of texas is baptist, half of texas is methodist and the last quarter doesn't actually matter. So I couldn't imagine how to split that state up. But somehow I can't imagine Texas's representation would actually change if it were split
I mean, this isn't like "Should a pre-law student have to learn trig?". O-chem, while one of the most painful subjects ever (I never took the course, but I read the book cover to cover because it was there) is actually incredibly important for doctors to be able to simply understand what is written in medical journals.
What makes a physician educated in the university different that fruitcakes like faith healers is that they are expected to learn about the human body from not only experience and experimentation, but from learning from the advanced research of others.
I read medical journals so that I can pretend like I'm smart. I enjoy reading about how treatments we've used for the past 10,000 years are in fact dangerous and should be avoided. Most importantly, as a smoker, I take Chemo-therapy VERY seriously and hope there will be a replacement treatment for it at some point so I may suffer through emphasima treatment as opposed to cancer treatment. I would not be able to understand these journal entries if it were not for O-chem. More importantly, when the time comes where I will need to address this issue for my personal health, I will need to talk with my physician to discuss the applicability of the new treatments for my case and therefore I demand that he/she is able to read the articles as well.
A doctor is expected to be an educated person. A doctor should be a person that we can trust. But when a doctor says that we should allow them to be called doctors when they can't even understand an article in a medical journal regarding the blood chemistry of jaundice, they should have their licenses revoked!
Yes, O-chem is not Bio-chem, but you can't expect to actually understand Bio-chem without the foundations of O-chem. It would be like studying Calculus and Differential Equations without first having learned Algebra.
I'd like to call for a committee to be established to address this issue. I believe that all the doctors that have been cited as ignoring the importance of O-chem should have their medical license reviewed. I believe the first step will be to visit the doctors, measure the thickness of the layer of dust on top of their medical books and observe their desks, I guarantee that each of them have many more magazines about golfing, boats and overpriced cars than medically related items.
After all, it would accomplish the exact same thing as if they were both allowed to be left on the balled.
The biggest problem with the process today is that the electoral college tends to run state by state. This system was ok in a time when the U.S. population was made up by small groups. But these days, you don't need a majority vote to win a state and in states where you have a huge number of electoral votes and a big split of support (like Florida), it should be possible for each electoral vote to be counted instead of just submitting all electoral votes for a state for a single party.
I think that Florida and California severely fuck up the entire electoral college method of vote counting. Florida would provide a lot more votes to the democrats and california a lot more for the republicans if the system worked properly. Texas might even have 2 or 3 votes blue.
If there's on thing I think the entire world agrees upon is that the current system is illogical in a country where the means actually do exist to count votes on a finer grain then when the system was originally created.
Let's face it, there are contradictions throughout the bible to easily make this seem like a silly topic.
Genesis (which I've read in several interprettations as well as in hebrew as b'rashit) and even when I was younger and willing to believe what my parents believed and I hadn't even heard of evolution as of yet, I had many questions regarding the logic behind it. After all, it seemed very unrealistic to me that everythe was created so quickly.
This didn't change my faith. It just struck me as if God had provided us with a VERY short answer to a question that he himself didn't consider to be the important to what he was attempting to accomplish. He described it in a way that people who lacked education could be pasified and if you wanted the real answer, you can look deeper and figure it out. What Genesis was saying was that God created it all. He provided something similar to a childrens book version of what he did and moved on.
So, now that I'm enlightened and no longer believe in fairy tales like God, I am forced to wonder why creationism is taken so literally by religion. They constantly try to tell us that it is not our job to question Gods motives but instead to accept what he did was for our best interests in the greater picture. Yet, they can't accept that a story of creation fed to Mose's flocks might have been an extremely simplified version of what happened and that the real deal could in fact be a process that took him 13 billion years to accomplish.
So, why is the literal interprettation of Genesis so important to them? I mean really... they talk about Intelligent Design to try and make science accept the literal translation of Genesis. Why can't they assume that maybe the scientists have simply finally figured out what their God did and take credit for that instead?
After all, who would want to pray to an ever eternal God that has existed infinately, who considers a billion years to be little more that how we see waiting 5 minutes for a bus that slapped all this shit together in 7 days? I mean really, if God loves us nearly as much as they say he does, wouldn't he have spent the equivilent of one of our hours (about 13 billion years hehe) trying to actually get it right?
I lack the experience as a nudist to have build callasses on my behind, so I doubt I'll be making them happy any time soon :)
I greatly appreciate this response. This is my first "Ask Slashdot" ever and your comment and several others have proven very educational and informative.
Several lifetimes ago, I worked in battery life prolongment technologies as an engineer developing measurement equipment to attempt to predict when a battery would need replacement in large banks of cells. Since all the cells were in use within safety systems at nuclear facilities, the environmental cost of the batteries were not the issue at hand.
Your comment fills in many gaps in my knowledge as well as identifies and corrects quite a few of my misconceptions.
Thanks!
Well not yet, but when the tech goes public, I give it a week... MAX before it is.
Doh, I had a great response written and when I clicked login, it didn't save my state.
In short, I agree with you regarding the pay, or at least conceed you've made many valid points. But to be frank, the pay isn't the issue and I should have made the point in my earlier post.
The point is, that whether you get a CCIE or a Masters in Comp Sci/El Eng, you have the same fiduciary path ahead. The difference is, with a CSEE with a focus on networking technologies, the guy should know they hows, whys, and whens of networking. You should know how to formall calculate network conditions mathematically and provide a high level of confidence to the receiver of your input because the guy has done more than just say "my experience is..." based on holding is thumb up in the air to judge wind current.
For wireless networking instead of just guessing the signal is bad because someone might have used iron nails in the old building, a CSEE with an education which included physics and mathematics would be able to calculate a wireless strategy to circumvent interference instead of just adding access points until it works.
High school is a place for general education.
The market runs in cycles. And a high schooler starting now will graduate in 4 years. By the time the teacher actually gets a course up and running, it could be 5 or 6 years before the first certified student graduates.
While the market is looking at a downturn in the next few years, withing 5-6 years there will be a "talent shortage" as there always is. And I remember just about 8 years ago, I was at Linux expo surrounded by piles of 20 year old kids making from $80,000-$200,000 a year in companies that pretty much all went tits up... but still, while those companies had investor money, they were making it.
Just two years ago, I heard about salaries within the states for young guys in the $60-$90K range.
And even now, when the market is going to shit, any kid can take a CCIE certification to Norway, Luxumborg, Switzerland or any other high paid European country and get that. After all, here in Norway, a fry chef at McDonalds gets 95-110NOK per hour (basically minimum wage) which translates to roughly $45,000 a year when all is said and done.
So, before you start telling people which bodily excretion to dissect in the future, I would recommend broadening your horizons.
I'm an American living in Norway and for the past 9 years, I almost never have paid a bill. In fact, I've seriously considered just removing my mailbox and saying screw it since I don't actually care what is in it.
I receive all my bills electronicly. I have automatic payment for all of them and I set limits on how much each debitor can withdraw from my account before my personal intervention is required. I have an account I use for paying bills. Each month, when I receive my pay, electronically, I automatically transfer enough to cover all my normal bills and then some. the bills are then automatically paid and if there is a bill which is larger than I allow it, I receive an e-mail telling me that an unusal request has been made against my account.
I have never had paper checks in this country since 99% of all places I have been accept my debit card. The remaining 1% are the street vendors or the new startup places which haven't purchased or installed the machines yet.
It's always really funny to look back and remember how many late or accidentally unpaid bills I had in America. Actually, my credit report stateside was terrible since I had so many problems with the billing and banking systems. I also suffered the biggest problem of all which was that I refused to use the postal service.
While I don't think I'm in a good position to recommend specific books, I feel that from my experiences with my nephew (we're quite close) I should add my 2 cents.
While you're in a great position to educate students with regards to computers and in reality, you could even prepare them for A+ and even Cisco or Juniper certification before they leave school, I believe that you should take advantage of the opportunity instead to teach them general computer knowledge and not specialized.
I have worked indirectly with CompTIA and have even assisted in writing books for A+ certification, but I prefer to believe that students taking courses voluntarily in high school should be directed towards higher education in computer science instead of providing them with a certification track that could allow them to go straight to work after high school. I believe that the A+, Network+, CCIE etc... track is great for guys that never got the higher education and want to work their way up the food chain without going to the university at the age of 30.
Don't get me wrong, preparing kids to take a CCIE which would get them $85,000-$125,000 a year the moment they graduate high school sounds great, but if they were able to achieve that by the time they left school, they could achieve so much more with a few years in the University.
Now, if you're teaching in a place where the students might otherwise be doomed to a life working in factories in dead end jobs, or in a place where the percentage of students continuing to higher education is disappointing, you would do them a great favor preparing them for certifications and careers straight out of high school. But if you make it obviously profitable for students to just ditch college and the university because they are certified for jobs right out of high school, then you could in fact be robbing the world of the valuable resources of higher educated scientists.
Teach the students computers as a science at the high school level, not as an engineering skill. If you're teaching at a proper (meaning public) high school as opposed to a vocational school, then computers should be approached in the same way as physics, biology or chemistry.
The students should leave your class knowing where computers come from, they should understand the history of computers. Maybe you should try to teach a limited set of electronics including discreet math (or just general boolean logic), you could even communicate with the local junior college and find out if you can design a credit track where you can use their curriculum to allow students to take college level 1st and 2nd year courses in high school and then take their finals at the college. This is actually how my high school worked and because of that many of the students continued on to New York Institute of Technology with 90% of their first two years of university credits completed.
Well, that was my two cents... I hope you find a good path to follow.
P.S. - if you do end up going down the certification track instead, please choose useful ones. A+ and Network+ are for guys driving silly vans to peoples houses with stupid names like Geek Squad. They're the fat assed, butt crack hanging out of their jeans plumbers of the computer business.
I would highly recommend ordering a single board computer which meets military specs, runs something like Linux, QNX, VxWorks, etc... and most importantly is interfacable through RS-232.
Milspec SBCs don't need to be expensive. In fact, often you can buy them off e-bay or other auction sites at a reasonable price. But the benefit of milspec systems is durability.
Most modern PCs, though being shipped with non-electrolytic capacitors are possibly capable of lasting longer than in the past are still consumer spec which means for the most part disposable. Military spec requires that the unit had survived an environmental testing regiment. Part of this includes that units have be shipped from east coast to west coast (U.S.) and back in the back of a 18 wheeler with no shock absorbers all the while in high heat and humidity or low temperature and dryness (or alternative combinations).
While this by no means guarantees the circuit will last 25 years under ground, in tact. It does mean that your chances are much higher.
RS-232 is a no brainer. Based on an earlier posting which referenced a Wang 10meg drive (which I have a functional system for actually hehe) it reminds me of the interface issue.
First of all USB, SATA, Firewire, etc... are all moving targets. They aim for backwards compatibility and there is a SMALL chance that USB version 9 or Firewire 64000 will support USB-2 or Firewire 400, I wouldn't bank on it any time soon. If for no other reason but USB, Firewire, and SATA devices are disposable. Therefore, while an occassional drive might come along that might still work, most companies won't care about testing it. Especially since the current move is to try and eliminate cables. So future versions of these standards might just be wireless or even fibre.
RS-232 is a standard which more or less is unchanged since the C revision of the standard published in 1969. That means the standard is already nearly 40 years old and we can still depend on it. What's more important is that it will be around for a while. If you doubt it, remember that the majority of the industrial world runs all their measurement and control equipment on RS-232 and much of this equipment dates back over 20 years.
What's more is that RS-232 is REALLY easy to implement. So if you were to contact ANY university level electronics student and ask them to start from scratch and implement an RS-232 UART (interface), they would be able to handle it blindfolded with their arms tied behind their backs while being forced to listen to ABBA. So, that means that if somehow RS-232 is GONE! by the time the capsule is openned, at the very least some student would be able to hack together something to read it.
As for file storage... I highly recommend that on that SBC, there is a copy of a library used to compress the files. So if you used JPEG, include the tarball for libjpeg for example. I'm sure these formats will be supported 25 years down the road, but just to play it safe you might want to include code. I'm sure C compilers will still be around (there is still COBOL).
For text documents, remember that even programs release by Microsoft may not be able to read current revisions of Word or Powerpoint. I actually make money by keeping a Word for DOS and Wordperfect for DOS virtual machine running for conversion. PDF is safer, especially if you include the source to XPDF which I have ported to another platform once in about 6 hours (not a clean and polished port, but one which reads files). Besides with a huge part of document archival industry using PDF, it'll be around for a while.
I wish you luck, makes me wonder if there's a market for a production time capsule PC company.
I am genuinely greatful to you for replying for providing me with the first well written response to one of my Slashdot posting. After a long time of posting on this site, the frustration of receiving unjustified flames has driven me to write most of my postings in a model that invites flames.
Your response has provided me with at least a little faith in the direction that there are in fact rational people participating on this site.
While I also avoided the web early on, seeing it as little more than glorified desktop publishing, I can see parallels in my experiences to nearly everything you said.
With every popular platform of development there will always be some language or tool which appeals to the general masses whom will utilize the "simplest" and cheapest technology to accomplish their goals. After all, for the most part, many of these people desire to get their projects up and running, they themselves don't actually know the difference between clean and sloppy coding styles.
Now that I think of it, during my lifetime, there was an obvious trend towards BASIC derivatives (GWBASIC, QuickBasic, Visual Basic) until recently when languages like Perl, PHP, server side JavaScript, and C derivatives took over.
Being a chronic C++/Assember coder through and through I will say that since the beginning of the web, I have classically insisted on the use of interpretted languages (or environments such as virtual machines) for web based applications since I have long believed that even superb C++ programmers could not possibly reliably produce compiled code securely. A quality interpretted language will throw exceptions when memory boundaries are violated where compiled languages require the developer to provide that functionality explicitly.
Well off I go to work on my current project, which today requires me to track memory leaks and to perform bounds checking on a code base of 1.2 million lines across 400 modules written by 20 in-house developers and 100 open source guys. Sometimes I really like interpretted languages.
Perl is UNIX's Visual Basic. Give a money a perl interpretter and they'll manage to make some cryptic script that gets the job done, but would never be useful to another scripter.
While perl might actually not suck in itself, the overwhelming perl user base often does. I strongly believe that the same goes for PHP.