I can't understand why this kind of common sense approach has not been taken in the past. Why is it that a book stored electronically and read on a digital device should be treated differently than a book printed on paper? Why is it that eavesdropping is illegal for audio communications but not for video? Why is it not illegal to hide spycameras in your tenants bedrooms and bathrooms? Why is the postal mail sacred but email is not? Good analogies can be drawn from this decision by comparing the internet connected PC to real property and the laws governing tresspass, breaking and entering, unauthorized taking, public nuisance, etc. Just because things are taking place in cyberspace instead of physical space doesn't mean we should ignore the commonlaw which was shaped over thousands of years. I applaud this judge. I just hope there are no A-holes in Washington taking bri... er, I mean campaign contributions from Claria and their ilk.
Greed 1.0 was in screwing the artists for the past fifty years. The labels always claim that successful artists make plenty of money but if that's true then
why have so many of them gotten such a small piece of the pie that they sued?
Listen to some of the stories told by people like Little Richard, Prince, Neil Young, The Dixie Chicks, Shania Twain, and many more. It is actually pretty amusing when you hear them and suddenly understand why things happened, like Prince legally changing his name to that god-awful abstract symbol and why Neil Young made the album Trans.
The big draw? Speeding up supply-chain management.
That's what Wal-Mart says. But you brought up what is probably one of the real reasons... market research. When every product you pick up off the shelf and compare with another and put once back can be analyzed they will be way ahead of the competition.
Another reason would be for automated checkout. Those braindead terminals you stand at and scan your own items would be obsoleted. The store could tally your items as you push the cart out the door. Eventually they will make it so you don't even have to wave a credit card at a reader, the store will simply recognize you and charge your account while storing digital video footage of your visit in case you contest the charges.
Along with automated checkout goes Loss Prevention. This may be the most critical factor from Wal-Mart's point of view. It would virtually stop casual theft. And though most losses are inside jobs and every system can be circumvented, it would make larceny much more difficult even for insiders.
By eliminating sales associates and security personnel Wal-Mart might be able to run an entire superstore with only a handful of people increasing their profit margins even more. The employees they lay off will be able to find jobs as long as they don't mind working for minimum wage, living in a trailer park, and taking a bus to work.
there's no limit or control over who could scan what you have...
Why not use public key encryption with the RFIDs? As long as the store's key remains secret then third parties could not determine what you have. Yet Big Brother would love it because they would have access to all the keys allowing them to determine where, when, and by whom any item ever sold was purchased.
Now you can watch your treasures being cleaned out as it happens, rather than having to wait and rewind the security camera tapes when you get home.
I would much prefer that to waiting until the police had reviewed hours of security tapes, especially if the only things the thieves left were my toothbrush and my camera.
I agree that PC's don't need to be in every classroom. There are some classes where they are needed though, for example in a business department to teach typing and the basics of word processing and spreadsheets. They can also be useful in other classes from Civics to Auto Shop to illustrate concepts and demonstrate how to find resources on the internet. But in those cases I believe it is more useful to have one computer with an LCD projector which would simply supplement the blackboard.
I don't see any sense in limiting children to Microsoft products though which is what most school boards are doing. KDE/Gnome and Open Office contain 95% of the same functionality as MS Office but with easier administration and better security. Eliminating the license fees for MS Windows, MS Office, Windows Server, Visual Studio, MS Backoffice, and all the client access licenses to connect to MS server products would allow the district to purchase many more bare-metal commodity PC's within the same capital budget.
And for teaching programming before college, Linux is a dream. There are a plethora of programming tools and compilers for every language under the sun, and most of them are free. Linux has taken the server market by storm and is also becoming the standard for small devices. School administrators should look 5-10 years down the road at when these kids will be college graduates and prepare them now for the Open Source future they will be living and working in.
That, and the fact that fossil-fuel power plants are typically doing continual burns against the fuel, as opposed to creating several thousand tiny explosions per second.
Sorry to nitpick but my spidey sense started tingling. A six cylinder engine running at 3000 RPM would have the shaft turning 50 times a second. It is a four cycle engine so there would be 25 burns per second per cylinder. So 25 times six is 150 ignitions per second. Also, in a properly tuned engine burning fuel with at least the recommended octane rating there will not be any explosions (called detonations, pre-ignition, or pinging) but a slow, even burn.
Until someone is willing to focus on more than next quarter's profits, this will be an ongoing trend.
You mean like Japan where they invest for the long term by researching electronics and robotics?
And where the Nikkei index has dropped since the eighties and the economy is still languishing?
Even with the loss of jobs to overseas, India is currently asking for H1B Visas to be increased back to the Dot.Com boom levels of 195,000 a year. And there still is no cap on L1 visas. Another thing many americans are not aware of is that renewals of visas do not count toward the cap and one estimate I have seen is that only 40% visa applications are new ones. Allowing some foreign workers each year may be necessary if they have special skills that no Americans have, but importing these kinds of numbers is a fraud. Americans will gear up for those high-tech skills if they are attracted by good pay, good benefits, and job satisfaction. Instead, Supply-demand is being short circuited by importing foreign workers to keep the prevailing wages and job security low thus creating a self-sustaining reaction.
I was hoping he would talk about the decision to put JavaScript in the Netscape browser. I seem to remember at the time that the magazine columnists were saying Sun was upset that Netscape chose JavaScript over TCL and the fact that they chose to name it JavaScript since that confused the masses of people who generally weren't even sure what Java was yet. I guess they were in a hurry to innovate scripting into the browser before you know who did or we would have ended up with vbscript as the de facto web language. But I've always wondered why they didn't go with TCL. It probably could have been embedded and extended just as easily and there were already lots of programmers familiar with it who could have jumped right in with both feet.
You are correct. The energy that must be input to the system is called potential energy. Even if there were no viscosity losses in the atmosphere which there will be and no friction losses in the mechanical components. Some people have responded to your post suggesting that another car be sent down the ribbon simultaneously which in a perfect system would give up its potential energy which could then be used to power the upward bound car.
First, I don't think two cars could travel the ribbon at once. Second, a car already at GEO is stationary relative to the earth so it would not provide any force that could be harnessed to power the other car. The force it could provide would depend on how far down the ribbon the car had travelled since below GEO the centrifugal force will be less than its weight. However that force will start from zero at GEO and increase to a maximum at sea level. Think about that. There is no upward force to help lift the upward bound cargo when it needs to get going and the cargo is being propelled violently when it nears the end of its journey at GEO. So I don't think this system would work.
I have concerns about laser assisted solar panels as well. Shining a laser so close to the ribbon could be problematic. A laser beam will travel in a straight line but a straight line is not perfectly straight inside the atmosphere.
Some observatories use lasers now to adjust their mirrors reduce the blurring caused by the atmosphere. I don't know whether the effect would be pronounced enough to worry about for this application but I have another reason to worry as well. I expect the ribbon might oscillate like a guitar string for several reasons.
If the ribbon is not anchored directly over the equator there would be a natural tendancy to oscillate since the tug of gravity would not be completely along the length of the ribbon. To understand, imagine if the ribbon were anchored at the pole then think about the pull of gravity and consider the inverse square law and the fact that sealevel is about 4000 miles from the center of the earth while GEO is about 24000.
Moving the anchor to 'avoid space debris' would also "pluck" the string.
Atomospheric winds would cause vibration in the ribbon. Imagine the force of a 150 mile per hour jetstream pushing against a 3 foot wide ribbon! And if there are lateral vibrations as in a guitar string then there would also be a circular precession similar to
foucault's pendulum.
I can't say if these effects would be negligible or not, but I don't see any discussion of vibration in their FAQ much less an engineering study.
You might try some of the more role based/objective based "one life to live - friendly fire on" FPS's out there. When your squad is 6 guys, and there is only 1 medic, 1 engineer, etc - suddenly team play, coordination, positional awareness and support become very critical.
Jagged Alliance had many of those qualities but wasn't first person and gameplay was kind of tedious. I would rather see a small tweak to the many FPS interfaces that already exist. Everyone copied Castle Wolfenstein 3D's interface and it hasn't changed much since. I would like to see the use of fatigue as a way to increase realism and inject a bit more thinking into the game.
If the gamer sprints 100 meters across a courtyard carrying 40 pounds of gear and an M-60 then he should be winded for a while. This simple change wouldn't require the gamer to press any more buttons. It wouldn't even necessarily require another gauge on the screen. The feedback could come through sound effects of the character's breathing and heartbeat.
But on the other hand, some people like the meth hopstrafe games....
I can understand that. They are only games after all. My preference is for realistic simulations without overly complicated controls but to each his own. Still, I think fatigue is a simple, easy way to add challenge to the standard FPS interface without adding any complexity to the controls. It could even be turned on or off from an options screen.
Almost zero. One, there's more and more focus on multiplayer for this sort of game. This takes some of the pressure off programmers because in multiplayer, other humans supply their own A.I. Even the ones who are complete morons.
Not only that but they ought to work toward creating a multiplayer experience that is more realistic. Just because some twelve year old kid is controling that enemy soldier doesn't make the game any more fun than if it were just a bot. Every time I have gotten into a multiplayer game hosted on the internet it turns out to work about like this: Every player runs blindly through the level like they are crazy and high on methamphetamines shooting everything they see. If it is a team game then the only change is to shoot everything they see but stop if they realize it is their own team's color. How many soldiers do you think charge through alleys shooting people and picking up ammo and flak jackets? Their have been a few but they usually get awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously. For anyone that wants to go back home, that's a sure way to make the trip in a body bag. Multiplayer games should be designed so that wild hotdogging heroes buy the farm just like in real life.
Older users
on
Just a Phone?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The need for a simplified handset, especially for older people, is borne out by a survey conducted by consultancy firm Cap Gemini last year.
But is it because older people can't learn as quickly and are set in their ways, or is it because they are older and wiser and refuse to be fished in to subscription and usage fees for gimmicky services of dubious usefulness? I have noticed that the young people who are keen to fiddle with every silly bell and whistle are also more likely to fall for crap like "Forward this email to everyone you know and Bill Gates will pay you $100 for every address because he is testing out his new email system."
Sometimes you just want to be able to pick up something and use without having to study a manual and remember sequences of buttons. Imagine what life would be like if the same so-called level of innovation was applied to common household items like the kitchen faucet or the toilet.
Is there a screenshot anywhere of the YaST module used for configuration? I read the LSM pages and I think I have an idea of what it does but not how to manage it. Are the access control models applied to processes themselves or to the accounts running the processes? So if I wanted to allow the system user to change the time would I configure the date program to be able to do this or the user account in which case he could use any program which could change the system clock.
And since the framework consists of stackable modules, how do you configure permissions for an arbitrary module with unknown capabilities? Must each module author also write a YaST module to configure it? Can I set one user to be able to open sockets on low ports but allow a different user to only open high ports and only when the protocol is http? Or can I set a user to follow a symbolic link but only if it points to a CD mounted by root? Or am I misunderstanding what the LSM does?
Two experienced con men cook up a counterfeiting scheme but when they put it into action, the offshore print shop that they outsourced the job to sends them fake eighteen dollar bills instead of the twenties they asked for, giving only some flimsy excuse about the exchange rate fluctuating. Well what could they do? They certainly couldn't take this complaint to the authorities. So the two decide to find some easy marks, people who wouldn't be very familiar with U.S. currency. They drive to another city across the state lines and find a deserted Quickie-Mart with a foreign-looking gentleman behind the counter. Into the store they walk where the first con man conspicuously asks his partner, 'Hey Joe do you have a few bucks I can borrow to fill my tank?' The second con man answers, 'Sure John but the smallest I have is an eighteen. Excuse me, Cashier, could you break an eighteen dollar bill for me?' He says to the store employee whose name tag appears to contain over half the alphabet and with no letter appearing twice. Whereupon the newly hired night manager replies, 'Yes, Yes, of course. And I am begging your pardon very much but would you like your change as two nines or three sixes?'
You should try paying in Susan B. Anthony dollars someplace. Even though coins are struck with "One dollar" right on the face, some people insist that they are quarters. Very annoying.
That has happened to me too. I think it is hilarious to see young kids working at the drive-through windows who have never seen one. Sometimes they get all flustered and call another employee over to ask if it's real. I have even run into kids that are confused by the
new Sacajawea dollars and those are recent!
If anyone wants to have their own fun with dollar coins it isn't necessary to ask for them at a bank. Just go buy a book of stamps from a machine at your postoffice. Pay with a $10 or $20 bill and you will get a mix of Susan B. Anthony's and Sacajawea's with your change.
I haven't seen any silver dollars in circulation since I was a kid and those Kennedy 50 cent pieces are extremely uncommon anymore but I did get one sometime last year.
If I were to win the lottery then just to amuse my Slashdot friends I promise to commission a study by the Alexis de Toqueville Institute which finds that small hairy dwarves who live in the sewer actually invented Linux. I will have Ken Brown include in the bibliography the ingredients label on a can of Lima beans as well as a second ADTI report which finds that the Law of Gravity is on a collision course with intellectual "property" law, and I will pay him extra if he agrees to entitle the report "The Secret Incestual Goat Fetish of My Immediate Family". How much do you think he will do it for, about 5 or 10 grand?
I figured out that I need to actually be able to *listen* to my alarm for a good 10-15 minutes before I'm fully awake, so now I just set it to NPR in the morning.(I can't stand radio music and no station plays classical in the morning.) Works like a charm
I agree with you 100%. I used to love waking slowly to a strings concierto but somehow every once in a while I would wake up 2 hours late and find the radio tuned just slightly off from the station. I don't have a cat so I can't imagine how it happens. Also, on those occasions that I only got a few hours sleep then the music (or talking) might not be jarring enough to wake me. I could sleep right through it.
Thanks for the link. I have always wanted an alarm clock that did this but I didn't know anyone was selling them. I was afraid I would have to build my own and just kept putting off the project.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't understand why this kind of common sense approach has not been taken in the past. Why is it that a book stored electronically and read on a digital device should be treated differently than a book printed on paper? Why is it that eavesdropping is illegal for audio communications but not for video? Why is it not illegal to hide spycameras in your tenants bedrooms and bathrooms? Why is the postal mail sacred but email is not? Good analogies can be drawn from this decision by comparing the internet connected PC to real property and the laws governing tresspass, breaking and entering, unauthorized taking, public nuisance, etc. Just because things are taking place in cyberspace instead of physical space doesn't mean we should ignore the commonlaw which was shaped over thousands of years. I applaud this judge. I just hope there are no A-holes in Washington taking bri... er, I mean campaign contributions from Claria and their ilk.
Greed 1.0 was in screwing the artists for the past fifty years. The labels always claim that successful artists make plenty of money but if that's true then why have so many of them gotten such a small piece of the pie that they sued? Listen to some of the stories told by people like Little Richard, Prince, Neil Young, The Dixie Chicks, Shania Twain, and many more. It is actually pretty amusing when you hear them and suddenly understand why things happened, like Prince legally changing his name to that god-awful abstract symbol and why Neil Young made the album Trans.
Yeah. They are like Microsoft was, back when you and Bill first started the company.
That's what Wal-Mart says. But you brought up what is probably one of the real reasons... market research. When every product you pick up off the shelf and compare with another and put once back can be analyzed they will be way ahead of the competition. Another reason would be for automated checkout. Those braindead terminals you stand at and scan your own items would be obsoleted. The store could tally your items as you push the cart out the door. Eventually they will make it so you don't even have to wave a credit card at a reader, the store will simply recognize you and charge your account while storing digital video footage of your visit in case you contest the charges. Along with automated checkout goes Loss Prevention. This may be the most critical factor from Wal-Mart's point of view. It would virtually stop casual theft. And though most losses are inside jobs and every system can be circumvented, it would make larceny much more difficult even for insiders. By eliminating sales associates and security personnel Wal-Mart might be able to run an entire superstore with only a handful of people increasing their profit margins even more. The employees they lay off will be able to find jobs as long as they don't mind working for minimum wage, living in a trailer park, and taking a bus to work.
there's no limit or control over who could scan what you have...
Why not use public key encryption with the RFIDs? As long as the store's key remains secret then third parties could not determine what you have. Yet Big Brother would love it because they would have access to all the keys allowing them to determine where, when, and by whom any item ever sold was purchased.
I would much prefer that to waiting until the police had reviewed hours of security tapes, especially if the only things the thieves left were my toothbrush and my camera.
I agree that PC's don't need to be in every classroom. There are some classes where they are needed though, for example in a business department to teach typing and the basics of word processing and spreadsheets. They can also be useful in other classes from Civics to Auto Shop to illustrate concepts and demonstrate how to find resources on the internet. But in those cases I believe it is more useful to have one computer with an LCD projector which would simply supplement the blackboard.
I don't see any sense in limiting children to Microsoft products though which is what most school boards are doing. KDE/Gnome and Open Office contain 95% of the same functionality as MS Office but with easier administration and better security. Eliminating the license fees for MS Windows, MS Office, Windows Server, Visual Studio, MS Backoffice, and all the client access licenses to connect to MS server products would allow the district to purchase many more bare-metal commodity PC's within the same capital budget.
And for teaching programming before college, Linux is a dream. There are a plethora of programming tools and compilers for every language under the sun, and most of them are free. Linux has taken the server market by storm and is also becoming the standard for small devices. School administrators should look 5-10 years down the road at when these kids will be college graduates and prepare them now for the Open Source future they will be living and working in.
Sorry to nitpick but my spidey sense started tingling. A six cylinder engine running at 3000 RPM would have the shaft turning 50 times a second. It is a four cycle engine so there would be 25 burns per second per cylinder. So 25 times six is 150 ignitions per second. Also, in a properly tuned engine burning fuel with at least the recommended octane rating there will not be any explosions (called detonations, pre-ignition, or pinging) but a slow, even burn.
You mean like Japan where they invest for the long term by researching electronics and robotics?
And where the Nikkei index has dropped since the eighties and the economy is still languishing?
I could be playing golf and working on my novel!
Even with the loss of jobs to overseas, India is currently asking for H1B Visas to be increased back to the Dot.Com boom levels of 195,000 a year. And there still is no cap on L1 visas. Another thing many americans are not aware of is that renewals of visas do not count toward the cap and one estimate I have seen is that only 40% visa applications are new ones. Allowing some foreign workers each year may be necessary if they have special skills that no Americans have, but importing these kinds of numbers is a fraud. Americans will gear up for those high-tech skills if they are attracted by good pay, good benefits, and job satisfaction. Instead, Supply-demand is being short circuited by importing foreign workers to keep the prevailing wages and job security low thus creating a self-sustaining reaction.
What if the judge ruled against Novell still owning the copyrights? We've all seen stranger things happen in the Amercian court system.
I was hoping he would talk about the decision to put JavaScript in the Netscape browser. I seem to remember at the time that the magazine columnists were saying Sun was upset that Netscape chose JavaScript over TCL and the fact that they chose to name it JavaScript since that confused the masses of people who generally weren't even sure what Java was yet. I guess they were in a hurry to innovate scripting into the browser before you know who did or we would have ended up with vbscript as the de facto web language. But I've always wondered why they didn't go with TCL. It probably could have been embedded and extended just as easily and there were already lots of programmers familiar with it who could have jumped right in with both feet.
God I hope not. I'm way too old to learn how to read maps upside down.
First, I don't think two cars could travel the ribbon at once. Second, a car already at GEO is stationary relative to the earth so it would not provide any force that could be harnessed to power the other car. The force it could provide would depend on how far down the ribbon the car had travelled since below GEO the centrifugal force will be less than its weight. However that force will start from zero at GEO and increase to a maximum at sea level. Think about that. There is no upward force to help lift the upward bound cargo when it needs to get going and the cargo is being propelled violently when it nears the end of its journey at GEO. So I don't think this system would work.
I have concerns about laser assisted solar panels as well. Shining a laser so close to the ribbon could be problematic. A laser beam will travel in a straight line but a straight line is not perfectly straight inside the atmosphere. Some observatories use lasers now to adjust their mirrors reduce the blurring caused by the atmosphere. I don't know whether the effect would be pronounced enough to worry about for this application but I have another reason to worry as well. I expect the ribbon might oscillate like a guitar string for several reasons.
If the ribbon is not anchored directly over the equator there would be a natural tendancy to oscillate since the tug of gravity would not be completely along the length of the ribbon. To understand, imagine if the ribbon were anchored at the pole then think about the pull of gravity and consider the inverse square law and the fact that sealevel is about 4000 miles from the center of the earth while GEO is about 24000.
Moving the anchor to 'avoid space debris' would also "pluck" the string. Atomospheric winds would cause vibration in the ribbon. Imagine the force of a 150 mile per hour jetstream pushing against a 3 foot wide ribbon! And if there are lateral vibrations as in a guitar string then there would also be a circular precession similar to foucault's pendulum.
I can't say if these effects would be negligible or not, but I don't see any discussion of vibration in their FAQ much less an engineering study.
Bush really just wants to find out who has been posting the photoshopped pictures of Jenna to alt.porn.celebrities!
Jagged Alliance had many of those qualities but wasn't first person and gameplay was kind of tedious. I would rather see a small tweak to the many FPS interfaces that already exist. Everyone copied Castle Wolfenstein 3D's interface and it hasn't changed much since. I would like to see the use of fatigue as a way to increase realism and inject a bit more thinking into the game.
If the gamer sprints 100 meters across a courtyard carrying 40 pounds of gear and an M-60 then he should be winded for a while. This simple change wouldn't require the gamer to press any more buttons. It wouldn't even necessarily require another gauge on the screen. The feedback could come through sound effects of the character's breathing and heartbeat.
But on the other hand, some people like the meth hopstrafe games....
I can understand that. They are only games after all. My preference is for realistic simulations without overly complicated controls but to each his own. Still, I think fatigue is a simple, easy way to add challenge to the standard FPS interface without adding any complexity to the controls. It could even be turned on or off from an options screen.
Almost zero. One, there's more and more focus on multiplayer for this sort of game. This takes some of the pressure off programmers because in multiplayer, other humans supply their own A.I. Even the ones who are complete morons.
Not only that but they ought to work toward creating a multiplayer experience that is more realistic. Just because some twelve year old kid is controling that enemy soldier doesn't make the game any more fun than if it were just a bot. Every time I have gotten into a multiplayer game hosted on the internet it turns out to work about like this: Every player runs blindly through the level like they are crazy and high on methamphetamines shooting everything they see. If it is a team game then the only change is to shoot everything they see but stop if they realize it is their own team's color. How many soldiers do you think charge through alleys shooting people and picking up ammo and flak jackets? Their have been a few but they usually get awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously. For anyone that wants to go back home, that's a sure way to make the trip in a body bag. Multiplayer games should be designed so that wild hotdogging heroes buy the farm just like in real life.
But is it because older people can't learn as quickly and are set in their ways, or is it because they are older and wiser and refuse to be fished in to subscription and usage fees for gimmicky services of dubious usefulness? I have noticed that the young people who are keen to fiddle with every silly bell and whistle are also more likely to fall for crap like "Forward this email to everyone you know and Bill Gates will pay you $100 for every address because he is testing out his new email system."
Sometimes you just want to be able to pick up something and use without having to study a manual and remember sequences of buttons. Imagine what life would be like if the same so-called level of innovation was applied to common household items like the kitchen faucet or the toilet.
Is there a screenshot anywhere of the YaST module used for configuration? I read the LSM pages and I think I have an idea of what it does but not how to manage it. Are the access control models applied to processes themselves or to the accounts running the processes? So if I wanted to allow the system user to change the time would I configure the date program to be able to do this or the user account in which case he could use any program which could change the system clock.
And since the framework consists of stackable modules, how do you configure permissions for an arbitrary module with unknown capabilities? Must each module author also write a YaST module to configure it? Can I set one user to be able to open sockets on low ports but allow a different user to only open high ports and only when the protocol is http? Or can I set a user to follow a symbolic link but only if it points to a CD mounted by root? Or am I misunderstanding what the LSM does?
Two experienced con men cook up a counterfeiting scheme but when they put it into action, the offshore print shop that they outsourced the job to sends them fake eighteen dollar bills instead of the twenties they asked for, giving only some flimsy excuse about the exchange rate fluctuating. Well what could they do? They certainly couldn't take this complaint to the authorities. So the two decide to find some easy marks, people who wouldn't be very familiar with U.S. currency. They drive to another city across the state lines and find a deserted Quickie-Mart with a foreign-looking gentleman behind the counter. Into the store they walk where the first con man conspicuously asks his partner, 'Hey Joe do you have a few bucks I can borrow to fill my tank?' The second con man answers, 'Sure John but the smallest I have is an eighteen. Excuse me, Cashier, could you break an eighteen dollar bill for me?' He says to the store employee whose name tag appears to contain over half the alphabet and with no letter appearing twice. Whereupon the newly hired night manager replies, 'Yes, Yes, of course. And I am begging your pardon very much but would you like your change as two nines or three sixes?'
That has happened to me too. I think it is hilarious to see young kids working at the drive-through windows who have never seen one. Sometimes they get all flustered and call another employee over to ask if it's real. I have even run into kids that are confused by the new Sacajawea dollars and those are recent!
If anyone wants to have their own fun with dollar coins it isn't necessary to ask for them at a bank. Just go buy a book of stamps from a machine at your postoffice. Pay with a $10 or $20 bill and you will get a mix of Susan B. Anthony's and Sacajawea's with your change.
I haven't seen any silver dollars in circulation since I was a kid and those Kennedy 50 cent pieces are extremely uncommon anymore but I did get one sometime last year.
Could have been worse. Bill could have made the kid proofread his latest manuscript.
If I were to win the lottery then just to amuse my Slashdot friends I promise to commission a study by the Alexis de Toqueville Institute which finds that small hairy dwarves who live in the sewer actually invented Linux. I will have Ken Brown include in the bibliography the ingredients label on a can of Lima beans as well as a second ADTI report which finds that the Law of Gravity is on a collision course with intellectual "property" law, and I will pay him extra if he agrees to entitle the report "The Secret Incestual Goat Fetish of My Immediate Family". How much do you think he will do it for, about 5 or 10 grand?
I agree with you 100%. I used to love waking slowly to a strings concierto but somehow every once in a while I would wake up 2 hours late and find the radio tuned just slightly off from the station. I don't have a cat so I can't imagine how it happens. Also, on those occasions that I only got a few hours sleep then the music (or talking) might not be jarring enough to wake me. I could sleep right through it.
Thanks for the link. I have always wanted an alarm clock that did this but I didn't know anyone was selling them. I was afraid I would have to build my own and just kept putting off the project.