Once again, Space.com shows up a day late (Nasawatch.com reported this a day earlier), with misleading headlines ("Pluto mission saved"), and a misleading, incomplete article (see spaceflightnow.com article).
I swear, Space.com is looking more and more like they are graduate students at the Bill Gates School of Business.
As a former peon for this joke of a company, I can tell you that, contrary to their marketing, they do not sell software or services. They sell stock. And their product (stock) sucks.
It doesn't matter that the patents are unenforceable. What matters is that they got a patent. It looks good on the investor forums.
Seems to me the best near-term solution would be an electronic verifier, as mentioned in other posts. A voter would insert his punched-card ballot into a verifier before depositing it in the ballot box. Any double-punched or unpunched races could be flagged for the voter. It should be relatively easy and cheap to manufacture and maintain, if it uses optical technology to read the cards instead of mechanical readers.
It ain't perfect: it wouldn't solve all the problems with chads and poorly designed ballots, but it should be able to find and flag a lot of them before they end up in the ballot box. And maybe that's all we really need for now: a better solution until the perfect solution becomes available and affordable.
Article wrong:$27Mil to bring it DOWN
on
Mir Lives
·
· Score: 1
According to an article on AP/Yahoo on the same $27 Million, the money was given to bring Mir DOWN safely in February.
So would anybody care to guess how much WIRED has invested in the:CueCat project so far??
Even if they haven't paid a dime to Digital Convergence, they surely must have expenses involved in the distribution of the:CueCats, not to mention the marketing investment to their advertisers.
Of course, that wouldn't give them any incentive to candy-coat the issue or anything.
IMHO, the 'micro programming' industry of the 80's and early 90's is gone, having been taken over by the MBAs, Lawyers, Used Car Salesman, and Vulture Capitalists.
'Way back when', it used to be that a reasonably intelligent individual, willing to give up all hope of a social life and burn the midnight oil learning this new-fangled 'PC technology', would be rewarded with a decent income and looked upon by his/her peers as a visionary.
IF (and I know it's a big if) you agree with this opinion of the current state of affairs, what do you see as the 'Next Big Thing'? It would have it's roots in garages and basements, and be led by intelligent but non-degreed types (because they don't teach it yet at the college level). It will fundamentally change the way we live and/or work and/or commute. And will bring to an end some method of doing things that currently seems like it will be this way forever.
In my area of the midwest, we are starting to get E+85 gas, which is 85% Ethanol, I believe. We have at least one local station pumping it, and I hear there are a couple of hundred pumps in the state. According to our local paper, there are a handfull of cars/vans made in the last 2 years that can use E+85 or regular gasoline. I don't recall the exact models - would appreciate if someone knowledgeable could post them.
The last time I filled up, I paid $2.049/gallon, and the E+85 was $1.699/gallon. Gas prices have since dropped (about $1.699/gallon), but I don't know what E+85 prices are currently.
BTW- Did you know OPEC was boycotting the Milwaukee-Chicago area? I hadn't seen anything about it on the news, but that's what our local politicians would like us to believe!?!?!?
I saw an interview on NASA TV with the lead scientist on the e-nose project, and, IIRC, she mentioned that there were 'many' human maladies that they suspected could be easily screened for with this device (pending further development), and that this might be one of the first commercial applications, kind of implying that some company was already working on it.
They also showed the box opened up, and it was mostly empty - meaning it should be able to be easily reduced in size from it's already small form-factor.
These low-lifes routinely INSTALLED PCAnywhere on their machines so they could work from their laptops in bed!!!! Getting in was a no-brainer!! And they didn't know sh*t about the technology!!! They had a revolving door of script kiddies that had to set up their systems!!! They only knew what the script kiddies taught them!!
And check out some of the other URLs mentioned - they are all there! (like silver-shamrock.com)
My experience comes from messing with recycling plastic on a hobbyist level - remolding plastic soda bottles and the like. It can be done very cheaply - see description for this book.
The description of the case - brittle, shinier than the original - sounds like plastic that has been remolded. I propose that the counterfeiters might be just remolding the original cases. Any plastics engineers want to comment?
There were actually 12 copies made, but only one was intended for space flight. And part-ownership of one of them may be for sale on ebay soon, sort of. This article at SpaceDaily.com gives details, and has a picture of the one for sale, which is currently used as a Theme Park attaction?!?!
I can add a few tidbits and background to the fray. Remember that the guidelines issued by the Supreme Court are supposed to affect professionals only - lawyers, judges, and specifically state's attorneys. One of the reasons the guidelines were revised in the first place was that a few state's attorneys had the unbelievable practice of putting transcripts of secret Grand Jury testimony into the folders of convicted criminals, thereby making secret Grand Jury testimony public!!!!! When pressed by the media for an explanation of how they could justify such an unethical and unspeakable act, they replied "because there's nothing that says we can't"!! Voila - New Guidelines are hastily issued.
And because they were hasty and for some reason vague - some state's attorneys are, out of ignorance or an act of defiance, trying to cause FUD by passing the buck to police. And some media and police departments in other parts of the state all have their panties in a bunch over something that was probably never meant to affect them.
This is not censorship. It is just a (poorly executed) attempt to plug a 'procedural loophole' to prevent some unethical state's attorneys from making legally protected secret Grand Jury testimony public. Once the politically-motivated fear mongers get their 15 minutes of fame by making something out of nothing, this will all die down and nothing will have changed, except that secret Grand Jury testimony will remain secret, as it was always intended.
IANAPhysicist. However, I do believe that almost nothing is "impossible", we just haven't figured out how to do it YET. I believe that it is possible to create gravity-shielding. I just don't know if the human race will be able to figure out how before we go extinct. And since the physicists seem to be so bound by the World As They Know It, it will probably be a non-physicist who figures it out.
The possibility of gravity shielding would seem to bring up many new problems. For example: Most of the reason for having an International Space Station, and many other space-related projects, would go away. Since a lot of current space science has to do with Microgravity, there would be no need to go to space if we could create gravity-shielded platforms on terra firma. Applying gravity-shielding to automobiles and other ground-contact transportation would not seem to work, since they all rely on friction with the ground for steering and braking. If you apply gravity-shielding, you have less friction with the ground, and therefor less steering and braking control. And it will still take the same amount of energy to accelerate the mass, and you haven't affected aerodynamic drag at all. So a totally new form of non-contact propulsion (and steering and braking) would seem to be in order.
Now, what would be REALLY cool would be the ability to "shield" mass. This would allow true anti-gravity, and also allow acceleration and deceleration with minimal energy; like 90 degree turns at 500 MPH! Kinda like all those UFOs do!;-) And if Einstein's Theory of Relativity is still true, and Energy remains constant, the only thing left is that the speed of light must increase! So if we can't travel faster than the speed of light, we'll just raise the speed limit! Don't waste your time and mine explaining why this can't be done. Either ignore me, or assume it can be done and help figure out how!
Yes, it was shot down accidentally by the US Military. But it was a regularly scheduled flight, in normal commercial flight paths, and did nothing to indicate otherwise. The fault is ALL ours. Period.
Without taking anything away from Terry Anderson and his family, and what they deserve in remuneration, it is just plain TOTAL ARROGANCE on our part to make an award of this magnitude when WE only offered $150 million for a whole planeload of INNOCENT civilians. And remember, the $150 million was what WE OFFERED, not what we were fined in ANY court.
And while the kidnapping of Mr. Anderson was illegal and dispicable, he DID KNOW that he was putting himself at risk when he went to Beirut. The same can not be said for the passengers of the plane. They had no reason to suspect that they were at risk of losing their lives by flying a regularly scheduled commercial flight.
This award is nothing less than an embarassment to all Americans. I would hope that common sense would prevail and the judgement is set aside. WE set the standard for what a human life is worth ($500,000), and the judgement should be scaled back accordingly. And as for punitive damages - the same amount should be used for both cases - $0. Remember - We set the standard!
First: There are LOTS of data users that still use 9600 bps or less: most ATMs, all those credit-card verification swipers, lots of chain store/gas station/etc. sales/inventory/price networks, just to name a few. Most are a waste of a dedicated phone line, and have (relatively) low data rates over a 24-hour period. Sounds like a perfect application to me, if the cost is low enough.
I agree that coming up with an economically viable syndicate to keep these things in orbit is a long shot. So if they gotta come down, is there any way these things could be used as Space Garbage Trucks to knock down other obnoxious Space Junk when they de-orbit?? Seems it would be worth a try.
Do you know anybody that's upgraded their hard drive? I've been waiting for increased storage capacity, but if I can do it myself, I may get a DishPlayer now.
And when they first came out with DishPlayer, it was only $99 for the Dish and DishPlayer receiver!!! It was my understanding that the DishPlayer has all the features of the Tivo, except for the smaller record time, but I seem to remember hearing that they were coming out with an updated version with more storage among other things; maybe they'll announce it at next Tuesday's Tech Briefing on Channel 100. IMHO, Dish has always been a better value and better service than DirectTV. Not a lot better, but just enough to earn me as a customer. And I do get some comfort from knowing you only deal with one company for all the programming and service support. The 'Charlie Chats' do get corny, but how many other companies put their CEO on live TV once a month to take customer questions/complaints/suggestions?? And how many other companies schedule regular live broadcasts explaining all kinds of techie info, and giving peeks at what kind of new products and services they are working on, like the upcoming Tech Briefing?
As you can tell, I'm a BIG DishNetwork fan. I know some people will use other services for their own reasons, but I encourage anyone thinking about DBS services to give them a look, and talk to existing users of any service they are considering. The Tivo-DishPlayer comparison is a perfect example of the better 'value' I think you can get with DishNetwork. No, I don't work for DishNetwork.
According to the OEM website, OEM pricing starts at 10,000 units. And CircuitCity has run out of 'em nationally at least 3 times that I know of. And there are at least 3 versions of the ROM out there that have the hidden menu. So a safe guess would be AT LEAST 30,000 units.
I've tried them out at a couple of Circuit City stores, and all the ones I've seen have the menu. BTW, all the stores I went to said they don't normally display the Apex (even though they've been running newspaper ads nationally for at least a month) and that you have to ask to see one or buy one.
After the second time they ran out, 2 clerks at one store told me they just got some in, but they had all been re-worked to remove the secret menu. I bet them that it still worked, so they went in back to grab one as they were coming off the truck, we set it up, and I showed them how to access the menu and won the bet. They each bought one for themselves!
Off-Topic, I know, but how would WE design this system?
Assuming that we had to a) protect the rights of the content creators to make a FAIR buck from their movies. This would be mainly implemented by preventing mass quantities of content from being made WITHOUT paying royalties to the original content creator. b) Allow owners of media who HAD paid proper royalties to view the content on THEIR choice of dedicated players, computer systems, hand-held devices, or anything else that technology could come up with.
Any thoughts? Maybe we could help design the NEXT system. And it sems inevitable that their will be a NEXT system, now that the CSS cat is out of the bag.
Slashdot Mirror
Once again, Space.com shows up a day late (Nasawatch.com reported this a day earlier), with misleading headlines ("Pluto mission saved"), and a misleading, incomplete article (see spaceflightnow.com article).
I swear, Space.com is looking more and more like they are graduate students at the Bill Gates School of Business.
As a former peon for this joke of a company, I can tell you that, contrary to their marketing, they do not sell software or services. They sell stock. And their product (stock) sucks.
It doesn't matter that the patents are unenforceable. What matters is that they got a patent. It looks good on the investor forums.
seems to be in Electoral Engineering. Or maybe there are too many, at least in Florida.
BTW - is there such a thing as an Honorary Degree in Electoral Engineering??
Seems to me the best near-term solution would be an electronic verifier, as mentioned in other posts. A voter would insert his punched-card ballot into a verifier before depositing it in the ballot box. Any double-punched or unpunched races could be flagged for the voter. It should be relatively easy and cheap to manufacture and maintain, if it uses optical technology to read the cards instead of mechanical readers.
It ain't perfect: it wouldn't solve all the problems with chads and poorly designed ballots, but it should be able to find and flag a lot of them before they end up in the ballot box. And maybe that's all we really need for now: a better solution until the perfect solution becomes available and affordable.
According to an article on AP/Yahoo on the same $27 Million, the money was given to bring Mir DOWN safely in February.
So would anybody care to guess how much WIRED has invested in the :CueCat project so far??
:CueCats, not to mention the marketing investment to their advertisers.
Even if they haven't paid a dime to Digital Convergence, they surely must have expenses involved in the distribution of the
Of course, that wouldn't give them any incentive to candy-coat the issue or anything.
IMHO, the 'micro programming' industry of the 80's and early 90's is gone, having been taken over by the MBAs, Lawyers, Used Car Salesman, and Vulture Capitalists.
'Way back when', it used to be that a reasonably intelligent individual, willing to give up all hope of a social life and burn the midnight oil learning this new-fangled 'PC technology', would be rewarded with a decent income and looked upon by his/her peers as a visionary.
IF (and I know it's a big if) you agree with this opinion of the current state of affairs, what do you see as the 'Next Big Thing'? It would have it's roots in garages and basements, and be led by intelligent but non-degreed types (because they don't teach it yet at the college level). It will fundamentally change the way we live and/or work and/or commute. And will bring to an end some method of doing things that currently seems like it will be this way forever.
Should also produce some awesome auroras over most of the U.S., maybe tonight and probably tomorrow night!! kewl!!
In my area of the midwest, we are starting to get E+85 gas, which is 85% Ethanol, I believe. We have at least one local station pumping it, and I hear there are a couple of hundred pumps in the state. According to our local paper, there are a handfull of cars/vans made in the last 2 years that can use E+85 or regular gasoline. I don't recall the exact models - would appreciate if someone knowledgeable could post them.
The last time I filled up, I paid $2.049/gallon, and the E+85 was $1.699/gallon. Gas prices have since dropped (about $1.699/gallon), but I don't know what E+85 prices are currently.
BTW- Did you know OPEC was boycotting the Milwaukee-Chicago area? I hadn't seen anything about it on the news, but that's what our local politicians would like us to believe!?!?!?
I saw an interview on NASA TV with the lead scientist on the e-nose project, and, IIRC, she mentioned that there were 'many' human maladies that they suspected could be easily screened for with this device (pending further development), and that this might be one of the first commercial applications, kind of implying that some company was already working on it.
They also showed the box opened up, and it was mostly empty - meaning it should be able to be easily reduced in size from it's already small form-factor.
Did you even READ the ICQ logs???????
These low-lifes routinely INSTALLED PCAnywhere on their machines so they could work from their laptops in bed!!!! Getting in was a no-brainer!! And they didn't know sh*t about the technology!!! They had a revolving door of script kiddies that had to set up their systems!!! They only knew what the script kiddies taught them!!
And check out some of the other URLs mentioned - they are all there! (like silver-shamrock.com)
"We have heard the BS alarm.....and it is you!!!"
check out any one of the links below (if they are still up) and see how one net-savvy victim retaliated:
http://cow.org/~noise/belps.freewebsites.com/
http://homepages.manawatu.net.nz/~alanjb/
http://elias.rhi.hi.is/premier.cluelessfucks.com/
http://belps.freewebsites.com/
My experience comes from messing with recycling plastic on a hobbyist level - remolding plastic soda bottles and the like. It can be done very cheaply - see description for this book.
The description of the case - brittle, shinier than the original - sounds like plastic that has been remolded. I propose that the counterfeiters might be just remolding the original cases. Any plastics engineers want to comment?
There were actually 12 copies made, but only one was intended for space flight. And part-ownership of one of them may be for sale on ebay soon, sort of. This article at SpaceDaily.com gives details, and has a picture of the one for sale, which is currently used as a Theme Park attaction?!?!
Link to a current article at SpaceDaily.com
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/laser-00 e.html
I believe there are more links at the end of the article.
I can add a few tidbits and background to the fray. Remember that the guidelines issued by the Supreme Court are supposed to affect professionals only - lawyers, judges, and specifically state's attorneys. One of the reasons the guidelines were revised in the first place was that a few state's attorneys had the unbelievable practice of putting transcripts of secret Grand Jury testimony into the folders of convicted criminals, thereby making secret Grand Jury testimony public!!!!! When pressed by the media for an explanation of how they could justify such an unethical and unspeakable act, they replied "because there's nothing that says we can't"!! Voila - New Guidelines are hastily issued.
And because they were hasty and for some reason vague - some state's attorneys are, out of ignorance or an act of defiance, trying to cause FUD by passing the buck to police. And some media and police departments in other parts of the state all have their panties in a bunch over something that was probably never meant to affect them.
This is not censorship. It is just a (poorly executed) attempt to plug a 'procedural loophole' to prevent some unethical state's attorneys from making legally protected secret Grand Jury testimony public. Once the politically-motivated fear mongers get their 15 minutes of fame by making something out of nothing, this will all die down and nothing will have changed, except that secret Grand Jury testimony will remain secret, as it was always intended.
Tried a google search and found it - distro notes show it was distributed by RedHat!!
Wouldn't this be better as an update to the previous article, rather than a new thread?
IANAPhysicist. However, I do believe that almost nothing is "impossible", we just haven't figured out how to do it YET. I believe that it is possible to create gravity-shielding. I just don't know if the human race will be able to figure out how before we go extinct. And since the physicists seem to be so bound by the World As They Know It, it will probably be a non-physicist who figures it out.
;-) And if Einstein's Theory of Relativity is still true, and Energy remains constant, the only thing left is that the speed of light must increase! So if we can't travel faster than the speed of light, we'll just raise the speed limit! Don't waste your time and mine explaining why this can't be done. Either ignore me, or assume it can be done and help figure out how!
The possibility of gravity shielding would seem to bring up many new problems. For example:
Most of the reason for having an International Space Station, and many other space-related projects, would go away. Since a lot of current space science has to do with Microgravity, there would be no need to go to space if we could create gravity-shielded platforms on terra firma.
Applying gravity-shielding to automobiles and other ground-contact transportation would not seem to work, since they all rely on friction with the ground for steering and braking. If you apply gravity-shielding, you have less friction with the ground, and therefor less steering and braking control. And it will still take the same amount of energy to accelerate the mass, and you haven't affected aerodynamic drag at all. So a totally new form of non-contact propulsion (and steering and braking) would seem to be in order.
Now, what would be REALLY cool would be the ability to "shield" mass. This would allow true anti-gravity, and also allow acceleration and deceleration with minimal energy; like 90 degree turns at 500 MPH! Kinda like all those UFOs do!
Yes, it was shot down accidentally by the US Military. But it was a regularly scheduled flight, in normal commercial flight paths, and did nothing to indicate otherwise. The fault is ALL ours. Period.
Without taking anything away from Terry Anderson and his family, and what they deserve in remuneration, it is just plain TOTAL ARROGANCE on our part to make an award of this magnitude when WE only offered $150 million for a whole planeload of INNOCENT civilians. And remember, the $150 million was what WE OFFERED, not what we were fined in ANY court.
And while the kidnapping of Mr. Anderson was illegal and dispicable, he DID KNOW that he was putting himself at risk when he went to Beirut. The same can not be said for the passengers of the plane. They had no reason to suspect that they were at risk of losing their lives by flying a regularly scheduled commercial flight.
This award is nothing less than an embarassment to all Americans. I would hope that common sense would prevail and the judgement is set aside. WE set the standard for what a human life is worth ($500,000), and the judgement should be scaled back accordingly. And as for punitive damages - the same amount should be used for both cases - $0. Remember - We set the standard!
First: There are LOTS of data users that still use 9600 bps or less: most ATMs, all those credit-card verification swipers, lots of chain store/gas station/etc. sales/inventory/price networks, just to name a few. Most are a waste of a dedicated phone line, and have (relatively) low data rates over a 24-hour period. Sounds like a perfect application to me, if the cost is low enough.
I agree that coming up with an economically viable syndicate to keep these things in orbit is a long shot. So if they gotta come down, is there any way these things could be used as Space Garbage Trucks to knock down other obnoxious Space Junk when they de-orbit?? Seems it would be worth a try.
Do you know anybody that's upgraded their hard drive? I've been waiting for increased storage capacity, but if I can do it myself, I may get a DishPlayer now.
And when they first came out with DishPlayer, it was only $99 for the Dish and DishPlayer receiver!!! It was my understanding that the DishPlayer has all the features of the Tivo, except for the smaller record time, but I seem to remember hearing that they were coming out with an updated version with more storage among other things; maybe they'll announce it at next Tuesday's Tech Briefing on Channel 100. IMHO, Dish has always been a better value and better service than DirectTV. Not a lot better, but just enough to earn me as a customer. And I do get some comfort from knowing you only deal with one company for all the programming and service support. The 'Charlie Chats' do get corny, but how many other companies put their CEO on live TV once a month to take customer questions/complaints/suggestions?? And how many other companies schedule regular live broadcasts explaining all kinds of techie info, and giving peeks at what kind of new products and services they are working on, like the upcoming Tech Briefing?
As you can tell, I'm a BIG DishNetwork fan. I know some people will use other services for their own reasons, but I encourage anyone thinking about DBS services to give them a look, and talk to existing users of any service they are considering. The Tivo-DishPlayer comparison is a perfect example of the better 'value' I think you can get with DishNetwork. No, I don't work for DishNetwork.
According to the OEM website, OEM pricing starts at 10,000 units. And CircuitCity has run out of 'em nationally at least 3 times that I know of. And there are at least 3 versions of the ROM out there that have the hidden menu. So a safe guess would be AT LEAST 30,000 units.
I've tried them out at a couple of Circuit City stores, and all the ones I've seen have the menu. BTW, all the stores I went to said they don't normally display the Apex (even though they've been running newspaper ads nationally for at least a month) and that you have to ask to see one or buy one.
After the second time they ran out, 2 clerks at one store told me they just got some in, but they had all been re-worked to remove the secret menu. I bet them that it still worked, so they went in back to grab one as they were coming off the truck, we set it up, and I showed them how to access the menu and won the bet. They each bought one for themselves!
Off-Topic, I know, but how would WE design this system?
Assuming that we had to
a) protect the rights of the content creators to make a FAIR buck from their movies. This would be mainly implemented by preventing mass quantities of content from being made WITHOUT paying royalties to the original content creator.
b) Allow owners of media who HAD paid proper royalties to view the content on THEIR choice of dedicated players, computer systems, hand-held devices, or anything else that technology could come up with.
Any thoughts? Maybe we could help design the NEXT system. And it sems inevitable that their will be a NEXT system, now that the CSS cat is out of the bag.