Let's say that you match 100% with student A, and less than 80% with everybody else. Somebody else also matches 100% with student A and 80% or less with everybody else. Who gets to room with student A? Or, another way to look at it: you have 3 perfect matches, but only two can fit in a room. Somebody has to be left out in the cold. I also suspect that whatever the college used to match room-mates was something less than optimal. No doubt, those forms were scrupulously analyzed by the same highly dedicated, hard-working, midnight oil burning employees who analyzed your application essays. Yeah, right.
When it was 4 o'clock, all they could probably think about was making sure that Blacks got to room with Whites. At 5 o'clock, they just shuffled the forms like cards and went for beer.
1. Buy a large tract of land not too far from a city; preferably a tract that is threatened by encroaching suburbia.
2. (this is the hard part) Bribe zoning officials to let you...
3....subdivide the land into small parcels the size of townhouses, some office space, schools, whatever you need. However, designate the periphery as remaining rural land in perpetuity, with the existing rural zoning for farms and stuff, and with the understanding that said land may never be subdivided again.
4. Give half the land away, with stipulations that the houses, offices, schools etc. must be built to a certain height. Houses must be at least 3 stories, offices and apartments at least 10. The receiver of the land has a fixed time to complete construction, or else they must pay the asessed value of the parcel. Receivers also understand that personal cars will be discouraged by design, and that a special tax will be levied for the purpose of sustaining public transportation. Intially, that would mean a bus that ran regularly to a station for the commuter trains of the major metro area. Eventually, a connecting rail line would be built, hopefully to other cities of the same type which would dot the otherwise rural landscape like plumbs in pudding. Personal cars, when they existed, would be quartered in a garage that would be permitted to be built; but you might have to walk all the way accross town to get to your car (not that bad if the city is only a mile on a side). Access roads for the purpose of ambulance, delivery, and discharge of passengers would exist, but they would be one lane and one way. A more radical alternative is to require builders to complete segments of an underground ultralight rail, but that might negate the appeal of getting free land in exchange for the conditions.
5. Profit!!! As the holder of the original deed to all the land, you would end up holding deeds on lots of little parcels (the half that you didn't give away) that are now valuable urban real estate.
The trick to making something like this work is in step 4. It has to be restrictive enough to be truly different, yet unobtusive enough to attract people. With a suitable step 4, you might not have to bribe anybody in step 2. I think something like this would be great for Loudon County, Virginia, where they are habitually moaning about the loss of their precious horse country. Yet I doubt a proposal as radical as this would ever pass muster there.
The closest I've seen to this is a community called South Riding. The developers there have sought to recreate a "small town". Indeed, they've done a good job of building a retail center, but the last time I was there it looked like they skimped on office space. There are townhouses and much of it is pleasantly walkable, but alas every house had to have access for personal cars via fairly wide roads. Of course there are other concessions too. They had to build some cracker-box mansions because there is a demand for those. However, it's better than the miles-and-miles of nothing but houses where I grew up.
A long time ago, in an internet far, far, away... I recall that somebody had an "anon server" running in Sweden or Finland or someplace like that, back when anonymity was considered unusual on the 'net. They knew your real e-mail, but nobody else did.
The stated policy was that you could have anonymous mail there, but of course they had an abuse policy. Mostly, the abuse policy was against bulk mail but IIRC it was also prohibited to threaten someone with bodily harm.
The idea that you could actually be anonymous on the 'net is a bit of a farce anyway. After all, you're connected to a network. Regardless of whatever security you use, you are sending signals from a physical location. Even if you use wireless, your signals can be triangulated. The "anon-server" almost certainly could have been tapped by some gov.
If you have anything as important as the Federalist Papers or even the Watergate tapes (and let's face it, most of us don't) snail mail can't be beat for remaining anonymous, even to the point of permitting some very nasty criminal activity. Remember that little anthrax thingy?
1. Go to SourceForge and search for PDF
2. ???
3. Profit.
BTW, if you don't like the licenses and/or the code available there, do what I did: get the PDF spec and "clean room" it. The spec is, for the most part, quite lucid. I've probably spent 50-60 man-hours digesting the spec and coding. I've got scalable graphics working nicely now. That was all I really wanted, but now that I'm familiar with it, text and images are just an incremental upgrade. I've coded for text, but I haven't tested it. Inline images will require you to link in some encoding and compression but once you've done that it's all good.
I agree with you that HTML is much better for screen viewing. PDF is for printing, not screen-viewing. Improper use of PDF on the web has probably killed as many trees as Dutch Elm disease. Adobe's crappy free viewer pisses me off. It defaults to jerky page-viewing. I switch to "continuous" and whenever I move, it leaves bit-barf on the screen, and if I allow it to embed in IE it crashes half the time. The open spec almost makes up for that. Try doing a Google search to find the document. Google will sometimes provide an HTML version of PDFs.
No. Not "Yet Another GUI Wrapper". I was saying that if you are going to write an alternative GUI, the first software you port to it should be the most popular existing wrappers and APIs.
In other words, if I'm reviewing a new alternative GUI and I have a lot of apps that use libfoo as my GUI wrapper, the first thing I will want to know is "has libfoo been ported to it?".
The site you refer to claims their wrapper can be ported in "as few as 1000 lines of code". Great. Then they (or the alternative GUI author) can do that. I don't want to do that. It's not my job.
Now, I'm not knocking their product. For all I know it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, but even if that's true I'm not going to drop everything and port to their wrapper, and I'm certainly not going to drop everything and port to an alternative GUI OS. Neither is anybody else.
That's why the aspiring alternative GUI OS author has to port the most popular wrappers and APIs.
What's really needed in a non-X GUI (in fact, all GUIs) is support for higher level APIs so we don't have to care about the underlying GUI. That begs the question, what do developers use most often?
I'd be willing to wager that there is a large percentage of Windows software that uses the GUI's APIs directly--Win32 or one of the popular wrappers like MFC or OWL. On *NIX, GTK is probably the most popular.
There are high-level wrappers that will allow you to target Win32 and *NIX with just a recompile. wxWindows leaps to mind. However, I wager that the percentage of people using them is small, although the following is growing (doesn't AbiWord use wxWindows?).
Given that, I'd probably want to see GTK and wxWindows apps running on top of a non-X GUI before I'd use it. A Win32 subset would be sweet. No, not Wine. I don't want to swallow an elephant just to get a peanut. Full Windows emulation is overkill. I would just like to have Win32 API functions so I could recompile apps that use the APIs directly. I (and thousands of others) have written our own Win32 wrappers. For alternatives to succeed, they need to be able to pull in as much software as possible.
Oh crap... I can't even check the website to see what higher level APIs it supports. D#$%/.
...as prior art. Why? Some of them place things like "po" at the top of the page, or keywords like "potlatch" which is just "po" with the rest of a word on the end of it. Instead of being biased in favor of sales, it's biased in favor of alphabetical order and divisions in the dictionary, but it's essentially the same thing as what Amazon does. The only difference is that Amazon puts it on the web. Actually... I'd be surprised if there wasn't at least *one* online dictionary that did something like that before Amazon. Spellcheckers in word processors have been doing it for how many years? (though not on the web).
Bottom line? YACP (Yet Another Crank Patent). True fact: The crank was actually patented around the time that James Watt built his first steam engine. Some engines were actually designed with less efficient combinations of gears and linkage assemblies so as to achieve the results of a crank without violating the crank patent. You could also say that this patent is a "crank patent" in the sense that some phone calls are "crank calls". Actually... perhaps the "violators" could fail to respond to Amazon and state in their defense that this was so ridiculous they assumed it was a crank phone call/letter/fax or whatever.
I think the hardest part is social, not technical. What happens when some 19 year old with black leather and piercings knocks on the door of some Iowa corn farmer and tries to explain all this?
First thing they need is people who are... wait for it... people oriented, sales types. There. I said it.
Next, they will probably encounter broad swaths of land that are under the control of the Federal government or large corporations. Remember Roger and Me? Lotsa luck even getting an answer from these guys, and if you do get one it will probably be "no".
Assuming they can chart a course around forbidden land, they will have to deal with forbidding land. Desolate plains are easy, as long as you can find the owners. Uninhabited mountains are the worst. I think they should try to go from New York City to Miami before going from New York to LA. If they can't throw this bad-boy down the I-95 corridor, they have no hope. (I'm biased on this of course, because I can practically lean out my front door and spit on I-95).
As long as he's not obsessed with 802.11x, this is great! For the longer stretches, he should use IR lasers or something that can really throw the bits around.
If he can succeed, the long-term implications are fantastic. Internet will become too cheap to meter. Inexpensive laser and other types of LOS relays will join windmills and silos as familiar rural landmarks. AOL and Time-Warner can eat all of America's shorts. There is nothing to say the same economic forces that may eventually make proprietary software obsolete can't make proprietary networks obsolete too.
The hard part about free wireless has always been the "upstream". If this guy can get a viable continent spanning link, it may go down in history just like the link between... what was it... Duke and UNC? You know, the one that started the internet in the first place. Let's see... we have internet, internet 2, and now internet 3. I can't wait. I think Internet 3 could eventually replace internet 1 and make internet 2 jelous.
Give it the same amount of time we gave that first uucp link.
p.s., I'm surprised my subject line makes it through the filters.
Why must we always cloak our guilty pleasures in layers of "meaning?" (Probably something to do with our Judaeo-Christian mores, but I'll leave that to the armchair theologians and film-makers to posit upon...)
You just reminded me of something that happened to me in highschool. We were doing yet another unit in English class on popular culture (yes, the highschools here in the US are really that bad) and the teacher was asking us what shows we liked. I replied that I liked Knight Rider and she asked me why. I was like "it's fun to just sit there and watch it". She was like "so, do you identify with Michael Knight" to which I replied "no, I wouldn't want to be him. He's always getting shot at and stuff". Perhaps thinking I was missing the point, she pressed on, asking something along the line of "do you like to imagine you're the hero" and I replied--I swear I'm not making this up--"no, it's just a TV show. It's fun to veg out, shut my brain off for a while and watch it".
The other students laughed; I think they were laughing at me for admitting this, but I think they probably all knew it was true.
Why not just track the money? You need: 1. A camera looking over the shoulder of the cashier and 2. A database tracking each serial number.
I believe it is well within our image processing capabilities to pluck the serial number off a bill in real time.
Once you've captured the number, you can check for duplicate numbers, invalid numbers, stolen numbers, etc.
Of course this won't prevent you from getting a counterfeit bill in more informal situations, but it would seriously clamp down on the ability of bad guys to pass cash at stores.
There might be some privacy concerns, since the combination of till surveillance + regular video surveillance means that the store knows who has which bills. However, the government already knows the serial numbers on your Treasury bonds, and I haven't heard anybody complain about that.
I certainly like the idea of tracking money better than the oft-proposed alternative--tracking people.
The only barriers to this are setup cost to the retailer and getting the government to maintain the database; but in areas with a counterfeiting problem it might be worth installing, and maintaining a DB probably wouldn't dramaticly increase what's being spent on anti-counterfeiting now.
We tried population control, but for some reason the people that believe in it and pass it on as a value to their child are becoming fewer and fewer, while those who believe in having large families and preach that as a virtue continue to increase.:)
There is no population explosion anyway--just population shifts. We eradicated smallpox and malaria in the 3rd world, and surprise, surprise, people reproduce like gangbusters. Sooner or later, they'll reach a point where they want to send their kids to college. Then, nobody will have to tell them that 10 kids isn't such a bright idea. The population will shift to a new equilibrium. The real challenge is figuring out what to do when a prosperity spike backfires like it did in Japan. A big part of their economic problem is an aging population with insuficient replacement. In the US, we remedy the problem with immigration, but Japan is more xenophobic. They'll either have to give up their dislike for immigration, or they'll have to spend all their time caring for old people and settling for fewer consumer comforts (you can't make Hondas while you're tending the elderly at a nursing home).
So it would be nice if people stopped panicking and found something better to do... like procreating.
...this will keep payphones from going extinct, and maybe even bring them back where they've disappeared. That'd be cool. Maybe they could even roll out a lower bandwidth version for inexpensive pay-as-you-use internet, just to get email and stuff.
I skimmed the site. It looks like a VAT, which they have in the UK in Europe. I'm not sure if the VAT is UK/EU's only source of taxes. However, even if we made a VAT our only source, it's not going to be some kind of magic cure-all. Granted, it would be nice not to worry about going to jail because you misunderstood Title 5, Section 4, codicil 2a, subsection 2, paragraph B. Otherwise, it won't help us that much.
And it's steam powered. I can't wait for the computing equivalent of Diesel. What would that be? Massive parallelism? Optical computing? Quantum computing? And you just know there will be people bemoaning the death of server racks. They'll be replaced by toaster-sized spread spectrum wireless boxes containing more computing power than the NSA has currently. They'll consume less power than a toaster too. Guys in their 70s will be maintaining authentic rack server rooms, complete with dot-com T-shirts, CRTs, Twinkies, and Jolt (sugarles Jolt, because by then these guys will be diabetic). Hmmm... but we don't have a hat. Train guys wear hats. Otherwise, the scenarios match perfectly.
Quake. The Harrier. And that was just two examples off the top of my head in less than a minute. Get with the program. You're supposed to diss the French.:)
It all depends on you. I was so nervous about the test, that I decided to employ a different technique on myself. I decided not to register for the test. Instead, I would go in on standby, and I would not prepare for the test. In the days leading up to my SAT, I reassured myself with the knowledge that I was not necessarily taking the test. I was just going somewhere that a test might be given. That morning I had my father drive me to the site and stick around just long enough to see if I got in. I got in, took the test, and got a 1320.
Some time went by, and I began to wonder if pre-registering and getting psyched up might have been better. So I tried again. Disaster. Time was called on the verbal portion, and I had a whole page of questions that I hadn't even touched. On my previous attempt, there had been time to review every section. I had the results from that 2nd test canceled, so to this day I have no idea how well I would have done, but missing a whole page of questions, and not having any time to review the others didn't bode well as far as I was concerned.
I knew other people who dealt with the pressure in other ways. A number of people drank alcohol before the test to calm themselves. One guy got stoned and carded an 1150 or something.
This was in 1985. There was a lot more emphasis on the SAT and PSAT back then. It seemed like coping with the pressure was a big part of what was being tested. I used to joke going into tests sometimes. I'd say "how do you feel about that psychology section they were talking about". Some people would go "huh?". Every once in a while you can get somebody really freaked out and they'll go "psychology section???". Psych!:)
The bottom line? You couldn't pay me enough to go back and take a SAT test. This Colin guy is sick... in an entertaining way.
I saw something about this on Discovery or something. It was a joint effort. The Brits invented it, but it was too labor intensive to manufacture in sufficient volume. They took a unit to MIT, and a top engineer there made the military types very nervous taking this top secret device home to study it. He came up with a way to make them using laminated metal. In retrospect that seems like a simple idea. Maybe there was more to it than that. So, the Brits invented it, but the Yanks figured out how to make them cheaply by the truckload.
This reminds me of the time I was at some social gathering, and the topic of IQ came up. We all volunteered our IQs. Mine was 130 at the time based on a test I took in 7th grade. It later shot up to 150 based on a test with a psychologist, taken for the purpose of determining why I was having difficulty in college. If it makes any difference, my SAT was 1320 and I took it in 1985, before they dumbed it down.
Anyhow, the girl volunteered that her IQ was 105. That was the lowest that anybody fessed up to that evening. I thought since 100 was supposed to be average, either the IQ tests are bogus, or there are a lot of institutes for the retarded hidden away in the woods. I mean, this girl was dumb. The thought of more than 50% of the world being dumber than her was terrifying to me. Of course now I realize that intelligence isn't everything.
The girl was not bad looking. I wouldn't be surprised if she did just fine. I dropped out of college for two years shortly after that last test. I still consider myself to be "in recovery".
The point of antitrust law is supposed to be to prevent one company getting too much power over a market (however, it's been weakened from the original intent in the US). So it makes sense to have special conduct restrictions on monopolies to prvent them extending their monopolies into other markets.
If my choices are limited by many merchants that have collectively decided what my options are; I am no better off than if the decision had been made by a single entity. This reminds me of the old joke about gun control from All in the FamilyGloria: Did you know that last year (some number) people were killed by guns? Archie: Would it make you feel any better if they was stabbed to death?
The same argument cannot be adduced towards open source because open source is inherently antithetical towards monopolies.[emphasis mine] If the source is understandable by other developers (as it must be non-obfuscated to count as open source), then there is always the potential for competition if a market need is unsatisfied.
Au contraire! What do you think the odds are of RedHat taking 90% of the x86 server market at some point. Pretty durned good, I'd say. The point I was making originally was not an argument against Open Source (although I have made such arguments against the GPL in the past, this was not one of those times). Rather, the original point of my argument was that regulation of business practices, in its current form, is not entirely adequate. Due to some issues others have raised, I might add that re-writing those regulations is challenging, but let's be perfectly clear here: I wasn't focusing on Open Source, but that's what you inferred. I've hashed over those arguments way too many times on/. so I wont't go into too much detail here.
Also, it's important to make sure that we understand the difference between Open Source and Copyleft here. Actually, Open Source (TM) as defined by the Open Source Initiative includes Copyleft. I actually like non-copylefted Open Source. I think it's very much in the spirit of the Public Domain that the founders envisioned, because it gives people the choice of dipping into the pool of common knowledge and profiting from it (or not profiting from it!). It's Copyleft that threatens to form a monopoly. Entrepreneurs can't draw on it as a resource, so it creates a severe barrier to entry for those who wish to compete. Instead of adding to it and selling their additions, they are forced to retread all the same ground before adding something new. True, they could work within the allowed business parameters of the GPL, but those parameters are limited to only certain types of business; namely service, support, and customization which don't represent the full spectrum of business opportunities in software.
So what are these detrimental social effects of open source that you're worried about? Microsoft losing profits?
Boo hoo, cry me a river.
Once again, let's use the proper terminology. Only Copyleft has negative social implications, because it suppresses entrepreneurs as described above.
As for Microsoft, I could care less what happens to them. It's almost axiomatic that they aren't particularly innovative; so anything that hurts innovation won't really hurt them that badly. It's the industry as a whole that concerns me.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's say that you match 100% with student A, and less than 80% with everybody else. Somebody else also matches 100% with student A and 80% or less with everybody else. Who gets to room with student A? Or, another way to look at it: you have 3 perfect matches, but only two can fit in a room. Somebody has to be left out in the cold. I also suspect that whatever the college used to match room-mates was something less than optimal. No doubt, those forms were scrupulously analyzed by the same highly dedicated, hard-working, midnight oil burning employees who analyzed your application essays. Yeah, right.
When it was 4 o'clock, all they could probably think about was making sure that Blacks got to room with Whites. At 5 o'clock, they just shuffled the forms like cards and went for beer.
1. Buy a large tract of land not too far from a city; preferably a tract that is threatened by encroaching suburbia.
2. (this is the hard part) Bribe zoning officials to let you...
3. ...subdivide the land into small parcels the size of townhouses, some office space, schools, whatever you need. However, designate the periphery as remaining rural land in perpetuity, with the existing rural zoning for farms and stuff, and with the understanding that said land may never be subdivided again.
4. Give half the land away, with stipulations that the houses, offices, schools etc. must be built to a certain height. Houses must be at least 3 stories, offices and apartments at least 10. The receiver of the land has a fixed time to complete construction, or else they must pay the asessed value of the parcel. Receivers also understand that personal cars will be discouraged by design, and that a special tax will be levied for the purpose of sustaining public transportation. Intially, that would mean a bus that ran regularly to a station for the commuter trains of the major metro area. Eventually, a connecting rail line would be built, hopefully to other cities of the same type which would dot the otherwise rural landscape like plumbs in pudding. Personal cars, when they existed, would be quartered in a garage that would be permitted to be built; but you might have to walk all the way accross town to get to your car (not that bad if the city is only a mile on a side). Access roads for the purpose of ambulance, delivery, and discharge of passengers would exist, but they would be one lane and one way. A more radical alternative is to require builders to complete segments of an underground ultralight rail, but that might negate the appeal of getting free land in exchange for the conditions.
5. Profit!!! As the holder of the original deed to all the land, you would end up holding deeds on lots of little parcels (the half that you didn't give away) that are now valuable urban real estate.
The trick to making something like this work is in step 4. It has to be restrictive enough to be truly different, yet unobtusive enough to attract people. With a suitable step 4, you might not have to bribe anybody in step 2. I think something like this would be great for Loudon County, Virginia, where they are habitually moaning about the loss of their precious horse country. Yet I doubt a proposal as radical as this would ever pass muster there.
The closest I've seen to this is a community called South Riding. The developers there have sought to recreate a "small town". Indeed, they've done a good job of building a retail center, but the last time I was there it looked like they skimped on office space. There are townhouses and much of it is pleasantly walkable, but alas every house had to have access for personal cars via fairly wide roads. Of course there are other concessions too. They had to build some cracker-box mansions because there is a demand for those. However, it's better than the miles-and-miles of nothing but houses where I grew up.
A long time ago, in an internet far, far, away... I recall that somebody had an "anon server" running in Sweden or Finland or someplace like that, back when anonymity was considered unusual on the 'net. They knew your real e-mail, but nobody else did.
The stated policy was that you could have anonymous mail there, but of course they had an abuse policy. Mostly, the abuse policy was against bulk mail but IIRC it was also prohibited to threaten someone with bodily harm.
The idea that you could actually be anonymous on the 'net is a bit of a farce anyway. After all, you're connected to a network. Regardless of whatever security you use, you are sending signals from a physical location. Even if you use wireless, your signals can be triangulated. The "anon-server" almost certainly could have been tapped by some gov.
If you have anything as important as the Federalist Papers or even the Watergate tapes (and let's face it, most of us don't) snail mail can't be beat for remaining anonymous, even to the point of permitting some very nasty criminal activity. Remember that little anthrax thingy?
1. Go to SourceForge and search for PDF
2. ???
3. Profit.
BTW, if you don't like the licenses and/or the code available there, do what I did: get the PDF spec and "clean room" it. The spec is, for the most part, quite lucid. I've probably spent 50-60 man-hours digesting the spec and coding. I've got scalable graphics working nicely now. That was all I really wanted, but now that I'm familiar with it, text and images are just an incremental upgrade. I've coded for text, but I haven't tested it. Inline images will require you to link in some encoding and compression but once you've done that it's all good.
I agree with you that HTML is much better for screen viewing. PDF is for printing, not screen-viewing. Improper use of PDF on the web has probably killed as many trees as Dutch Elm disease. Adobe's crappy free viewer pisses me off. It defaults to jerky page-viewing. I switch to "continuous" and whenever I move, it leaves bit-barf on the screen, and if I allow it to embed in IE it crashes half the time. The open spec almost makes up for that. Try doing a Google search to find the document. Google will sometimes provide an HTML version of PDFs.
No, he should change it to 0.5F so everything is float. 1.0/2.0 has type double.
No. Not "Yet Another GUI Wrapper". I was saying that if you are going to write an alternative GUI, the first software you port to it should be the most popular existing wrappers and APIs.
In other words, if I'm reviewing a new alternative GUI and I have a lot of apps that use libfoo as my GUI wrapper, the first thing I will want to know is "has libfoo been ported to it?".
The site you refer to claims their wrapper can be ported in "as few as 1000 lines of code". Great. Then they (or the alternative GUI author) can do that. I don't want to do that. It's not my job.
Now, I'm not knocking their product. For all I know it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, but even if that's true I'm not going to drop everything and port to their wrapper, and I'm certainly not going to drop everything and port to an alternative GUI OS. Neither is anybody else.
That's why the aspiring alternative GUI OS author has to port the most popular wrappers and APIs.
I hope that's clear now.
What's really needed in a non-X GUI (in fact, all GUIs) is support for higher level APIs so we don't have to care about the underlying GUI. That begs the question, what do developers use most often?
I'd be willing to wager that there is a large percentage of Windows software that uses the GUI's APIs directly--Win32 or one of the popular wrappers like MFC or OWL. On *NIX, GTK is probably the most popular.
There are high-level wrappers that will allow you to target Win32 and *NIX with just a recompile. wxWindows leaps to mind. However, I wager that the percentage of people using them is small, although the following is growing (doesn't AbiWord use wxWindows?).
Given that, I'd probably want to see GTK and wxWindows apps running on top of a non-X GUI before I'd use it. A Win32 subset would be sweet. No, not Wine. I don't want to swallow an elephant just to get a peanut. Full Windows emulation is overkill. I would just like to have Win32 API functions so I could recompile apps that use the APIs directly. I (and thousands of others) have written our own Win32 wrappers. For alternatives to succeed, they need to be able to pull in as much software as possible.
Oh crap... I can't even check the website to see what higher level APIs it supports. D#$% /.
...straight to Hell. :)
What's to stop spammers from setting the FROM field to random valid email addresses, or even to some address they wish to DoS attack?
...as prior art. Why? Some of them place things like "po" at the top of the page, or keywords like "potlatch" which is just "po" with the rest of a word on the end of it. Instead of being biased in favor of sales, it's biased in favor of alphabetical order and divisions in the dictionary, but it's essentially the same thing as what Amazon does. The only difference is that Amazon puts it on the web. Actually... I'd be surprised if there wasn't at least *one* online dictionary that did something like that before Amazon. Spellcheckers in word processors have been doing it for how many years? (though not on the web).
Bottom line? YACP (Yet Another Crank Patent). True fact: The crank was actually patented around the time that James Watt built his first steam engine. Some engines were actually designed with less efficient combinations of gears and linkage assemblies so as to achieve the results of a crank without violating the crank patent. You could also say that this patent is a "crank patent" in the sense that some phone calls are "crank calls". Actually... perhaps the "violators" could fail to respond to Amazon and state in their defense that this was so ridiculous they assumed it was a crank phone call/letter/fax or whatever.
You mean like NASCAR?
I think the hardest part is social, not technical. What happens when some 19 year old with black leather and piercings knocks on the door of some Iowa corn farmer and tries to explain all this?
First thing they need is people who are... wait for it... people oriented, sales types. There. I said it.
Next, they will probably encounter broad swaths of land that are under the control of the Federal government or large corporations. Remember Roger and Me? Lotsa luck even getting an answer from these guys, and if you do get one it will probably be "no".
Assuming they can chart a course around forbidden land, they will have to deal with forbidding land. Desolate plains are easy, as long as you can find the owners. Uninhabited mountains are the worst. I think they should try to go from New York City to Miami before going from New York to LA. If they can't throw this bad-boy down the I-95 corridor, they have no hope. (I'm biased on this of course, because I can practically lean out my front door and spit on I-95).
As long as he's not obsessed with 802.11x, this is great! For the longer stretches, he should use IR lasers or something that can really throw the bits around.
If he can succeed, the long-term implications are fantastic. Internet will become too cheap to meter. Inexpensive laser and other types of LOS relays will join windmills and silos as familiar rural landmarks. AOL and Time-Warner can eat all of America's shorts. There is nothing to say the same economic forces that may eventually make proprietary software obsolete can't make proprietary networks obsolete too.
The hard part about free wireless has always been the "upstream". If this guy can get a viable continent spanning link, it may go down in history just like the link between... what was it... Duke and UNC? You know, the one that started the internet in the first place. Let's see... we have internet, internet 2, and now internet 3. I can't wait. I think Internet 3 could eventually replace internet 1 and make internet 2 jelous.
Give it the same amount of time we gave that first uucp link.
p.s., I'm surprised my subject line makes it through the filters.
Why must we always cloak our guilty pleasures in layers of "meaning?" (Probably something to do with our Judaeo-Christian mores, but I'll leave that to the armchair theologians and film-makers to posit upon...)
You just reminded me of something that happened to me in highschool. We were doing yet another unit in English class on popular culture (yes, the highschools here in the US are really that bad) and the teacher was asking us what shows we liked. I replied that I liked Knight Rider and she asked me why. I was like "it's fun to just sit there and watch it". She was like "so, do you identify with Michael Knight" to which I replied "no, I wouldn't want to be him. He's always getting shot at and stuff". Perhaps thinking I was missing the point, she pressed on, asking something along the line of "do you like to imagine you're the hero" and I replied--I swear I'm not making this up--"no, it's just a TV show. It's fun to veg out, shut my brain off for a while and watch it".
The other students laughed; I think they were laughing at me for admitting this, but I think they probably all knew it was true.
Why not just track the money? You need: 1. A camera looking over the shoulder of the cashier and 2. A database tracking each serial number.
I believe it is well within our image processing capabilities to pluck the serial number off a bill in real time.
Once you've captured the number, you can check for duplicate numbers, invalid numbers, stolen numbers, etc.
Of course this won't prevent you from getting a counterfeit bill in more informal situations, but it would seriously clamp down on the ability of bad guys to pass cash at stores.
There might be some privacy concerns, since the combination of till surveillance + regular video surveillance means that the store knows who has which bills. However, the government already knows the serial numbers on your Treasury bonds, and I haven't heard anybody complain about that.
I certainly like the idea of tracking money better than the oft-proposed alternative--tracking people.
The only barriers to this are setup cost to the retailer and getting the government to maintain the database; but in areas with a counterfeiting problem it might be worth installing, and maintaining a DB probably wouldn't dramaticly increase what's being spent on anti-counterfeiting now.
Yes. And that idiot assumes that everything is exponential.
We tried population control, but for some reason the people that believe in it and pass it on as a value to their child are becoming fewer and fewer, while those who believe in having large families and preach that as a virtue continue to increase. :)
There is no population explosion anyway--just population shifts. We eradicated smallpox and malaria in the 3rd world, and surprise, surprise, people reproduce like gangbusters. Sooner or later, they'll reach a point where they want to send their kids to college. Then, nobody will have to tell them that 10 kids isn't such a bright idea. The population will shift to a new equilibrium. The real challenge is figuring out what to do when a prosperity spike backfires like it did in Japan. A big part of their economic problem is an aging population with insuficient replacement. In the US, we remedy the problem with immigration, but Japan is more xenophobic. They'll either have to give up their dislike for immigration, or they'll have to spend all their time caring for old people and settling for fewer consumer comforts (you can't make Hondas while you're tending the elderly at a nursing home).
So it would be nice if people stopped panicking and found something better to do... like procreating.
...this will keep payphones from going extinct, and maybe even bring them back where they've disappeared. That'd be cool. Maybe they could even roll out a lower bandwidth version for inexpensive pay-as-you-use internet, just to get email and stuff.
I skimmed the site. It looks like a VAT, which they have in the UK in Europe. I'm not sure if the VAT is UK/EU's only source of taxes. However, even if we made a VAT our only source, it's not going to be some kind of magic cure-all. Granted, it would be nice not to worry about going to jail because you misunderstood Title 5, Section 4, codicil 2a, subsection 2, paragraph B. Otherwise, it won't help us that much.
And it's steam powered. I can't wait for the computing equivalent of Diesel. What would that be? Massive parallelism? Optical computing? Quantum computing? And you just know there will be people bemoaning the death of server racks. They'll be replaced by toaster-sized spread spectrum wireless boxes containing more computing power than the NSA has currently. They'll consume less power than a toaster too. Guys in their 70s will be maintaining authentic rack server rooms, complete with dot-com T-shirts, CRTs, Twinkies, and Jolt (sugarles Jolt, because by then these guys will be diabetic). Hmmm... but we don't have a hat. Train guys wear hats. Otherwise, the scenarios match perfectly.
Quake. The Harrier. And that was just two examples off the top of my head in less than a minute. Get with the program. You're supposed to diss the French. :)
It all depends on you. I was so nervous about the test, that I decided to employ a different technique on myself. I decided not to register for the test. Instead, I would go in on standby, and I would not prepare for the test. In the days leading up to my SAT, I reassured myself with the knowledge that I was not necessarily taking the test. I was just going somewhere that a test might be given. That morning I had my father drive me to the site and stick around just long enough to see if I got in. I got in, took the test, and got a 1320.
Some time went by, and I began to wonder if pre-registering and getting psyched up might have been better. So I tried again. Disaster. Time was called on the verbal portion, and I had a whole page of questions that I hadn't even touched. On my previous attempt, there had been time to review every section. I had the results from that 2nd test canceled, so to this day I have no idea how well I would have done, but missing a whole page of questions, and not having any time to review the others didn't bode well as far as I was concerned.
I knew other people who dealt with the pressure in other ways. A number of people drank alcohol before the test to calm themselves. One guy got stoned and carded an 1150 or something.
This was in 1985. There was a lot more emphasis on the SAT and PSAT back then. It seemed like coping with the pressure was a big part of what was being tested. I used to joke going into tests sometimes. I'd say "how do you feel about that psychology section they were talking about". Some people would go "huh?". Every once in a while you can get somebody really freaked out and they'll go "psychology section???". Psych! :)
The bottom line? You couldn't pay me enough to go back and take a SAT test. This Colin guy is sick... in an entertaining way.
I saw something about this on Discovery or something. It was a joint effort. The Brits invented it, but it was too labor intensive to manufacture in sufficient volume. They took a unit to MIT, and a top engineer there made the military types very nervous taking this top secret device home to study it. He came up with a way to make them using laminated metal. In retrospect that seems like a simple idea. Maybe there was more to it than that. So, the Brits invented it, but the Yanks figured out how to make them cheaply by the truckload.
This reminds me of the time I was at some social gathering, and the topic of IQ came up. We all volunteered our IQs. Mine was 130 at the time based on a test I took in 7th grade. It later shot up to 150 based on a test with a psychologist, taken for the purpose of determining why I was having difficulty in college. If it makes any difference, my SAT was 1320 and I took it in 1985, before they dumbed it down.
Anyhow, the girl volunteered that her IQ was 105. That was the lowest that anybody fessed up to that evening. I thought since 100 was supposed to be average, either the IQ tests are bogus, or there are a lot of institutes for the retarded hidden away in the woods. I mean, this girl was dumb. The thought of more than 50% of the world being dumber than her was terrifying to me. Of course now I realize that intelligence isn't everything.
The girl was not bad looking. I wouldn't be surprised if she did just fine. I dropped out of college for two years shortly after that last test. I still consider myself to be "in recovery".
The point of antitrust law is supposed to be to prevent one company getting too much power over a market (however, it's been weakened from the original intent in the US). So it makes sense to have special conduct restrictions on monopolies to prvent them extending their monopolies into other markets.
If my choices are limited by many merchants that have collectively decided what my options are; I am no better off than if the decision had been made by a single entity. This reminds me of the old joke about gun control from All in the Family Gloria: Did you know that last year (some number) people were killed by guns? Archie: Would it make you feel any better if they was stabbed to death?
The same argument cannot be adduced towards open source because open source is inherently antithetical towards monopolies. [emphasis mine] If the source is understandable by other developers (as it must be non-obfuscated to count as open source), then there is always the potential for competition if a market need is unsatisfied.
Au contraire! What do you think the odds are of RedHat taking 90% of the x86 server market at some point. Pretty durned good, I'd say. The point I was making originally was not an argument against Open Source (although I have made such arguments against the GPL in the past, this was not one of those times). Rather, the original point of my argument was that regulation of business practices, in its current form, is not entirely adequate. Due to some issues others have raised, I might add that re-writing those regulations is challenging, but let's be perfectly clear here: I wasn't focusing on Open Source, but that's what you inferred. I've hashed over those arguments way too many times on /. so I wont't go into too much detail here.
Also, it's important to make sure that we understand the difference between Open Source and Copyleft here. Actually, Open Source (TM) as defined by the Open Source Initiative includes Copyleft. I actually like non-copylefted Open Source. I think it's very much in the spirit of the Public Domain that the founders envisioned, because it gives people the choice of dipping into the pool of common knowledge and profiting from it (or not profiting from it!). It's Copyleft that threatens to form a monopoly. Entrepreneurs can't draw on it as a resource, so it creates a severe barrier to entry for those who wish to compete. Instead of adding to it and selling their additions, they are forced to retread all the same ground before adding something new. True, they could work within the allowed business parameters of the GPL, but those parameters are limited to only certain types of business; namely service, support, and customization which don't represent the full spectrum of business opportunities in software.
So what are these detrimental social effects of open source that you're worried about? Microsoft losing profits?
Boo hoo, cry me a river.
Once again, let's use the proper terminology. Only Copyleft has negative social implications, because it suppresses entrepreneurs as described above.
As for Microsoft, I could care less what happens to them. It's almost axiomatic that they aren't particularly innovative; so anything that hurts innovation won't really hurt them that badly. It's the industry as a whole that concerns me.