What about the US? How about we stop building weapons and educate our children? I mean, come on!
It sounds like a great analogy, but I think most studies have demonstrated that increased per pupil spending doesn't accomplish very much.
Besides, in the US at least, the increased spending generally goes for social welfare type programs (meals, social workers, kids dubiously labeled "learning disabled") within the schools instead of increasing the quality of education itself (better teaching, better teaching materials, etc).
The schools which seem to have the biggest problems are usually inner-city schools with large numbers of minority students and immigrants -- no amount of money short of individual tutoring will help them. Anytime you aggregate all the poor kids together, they're typically going to just demonstrate the social backgrounds they live in. Bussing doesn't help -- white families simply move outside the administrative authority of the bussing regeime, and some minority leaders have also complained that integration "undermines their cultural identity" (the result being "right to be ignorant and unemployed.")
It has been suggested that inner city schools could be "saved" by shipping their students to boarding schools in rural locations. It solves many of the social background issues the kids have (crime, neglect, diet) while putting them in an environment where education is their biggest priority. Minority leaders decry it as concentration camps, and conservatives won't pay for it, and it leaves some meaningful questions about family life. Strangely it's worked well for the British aristocracy for centuries.
Overall, you're right that big-ticket weapons systems are a waste of time. Nukes are a valuable big stick to carry around, but primarily the money should be spent on mobile tacitical troops, although Iraq has taught us the value of APCs and tanks in urban combat.
I'd spend the military savings on domestic infrastructure -- urban transit, telecommunications and environmental cleanup. Spending more on the school is just too problematic to get a payback.
I wouldn't bother with.300 Win Mag in Africa, especially hunting predatory large mammals. You need one-shot-drop power and the ability to keep a decent distance. Plus you might have to stop a charging Rhino or elephant, and.300 Win Mag doesn't cut it.
The safari standard is of course the.458 Winchester round, which carries a brush-clearing 510 grain slug and delivers a devastating 4700 ft lbs of energy at muzzle velocity. It will drop dead any animal native to this planet under 100 yards.
A secondary option would be.375 H&H Magnum -- less muzzle energy than the.458, but better long-range ballistics. Overpenetration on soft targets might be an issue at close ranges due to the higher muzzle velocity.
For backup, you might consider a gas-operated shotgun with extension tube loaded with 3" magnum rifled slugs. At panic ranges under 25 yards, 6 slugs ought to stop whatever's after you.
For so-close-I-can-hear-its-breath backup, something that can handle the newish S&W.500 magnum round which delivers a breathtaking 2500 ft lbs of energy at the muzzle..454 Casull would be your alternative option here. There may be some advantage to a Desert Eagle chambered for.50AE -- since it's a gas semi-auto, quick reloads and lighter recoil from a magazine might compensate for "only" 1600 ft lbs of energy (recoil from the.454 Casull *killed* a 12 year old when he tried firing one...)
I'd keep the.375 in my truck (or have someone else carry it for me), keep the.458 loaded and in my hands, the shotgun on a sling and probably the DE.50AE with 2 spare mags on my side.
It rises above the basement-level spammer, but it would make sense to me that these people invest some money into legal advice and setup a series of shell companies with obfuscated ownership so that if they run afoul of some law, company A can declare bankruptcy and skip out on some of the fine and (possibly new) company C can take over.
Civil fines presume that you're dealing with businesses that are basically honest. I think people involved in spammer are basically dishonest, and while a few that operate as sole proprietorships will pay fines and be "watchable" by government agencies. Even major corporations largely just pay the fines, raise their prices, and ignore it.
This is part of the reason I think civil fines will never work with spamming, only criminal fines and lengthy prison sentnces from RICO-type investigations that follow the money trail and catch everyone participating in the enterprise, including any "legitimate" businesses aware of the nature of the business.
If a credit-card processor and/or an ISP that knew about the nature of their client's business was indicted, fined $250,000 and jailed for 10 years in a Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison, the ties to banking and interest services that spammers need would be hard to come by in the future as ISPs and credit card processors who otherwise have a viable business wouldn't be willing to host spam or run spam credit processing -- even at 10x fee rates, it's not worth losing your home and spending the next 10 years dodging the Aryan Brotherhood in the shower.
What bothers me is why, given the high level of fraud in spam, the Feds haven't done much to follow the money trail. Either the money is too good for legit players on the sidelines and enforcement has become politicized ("Investigate us and we don't contribute to your boss' campaign.") or they just don't care.
I don't know about that. Many financial leaders (as opposed to the get-rich-quick crowd typically fronted as "business leadership") are leery of Bush's policies at this juncture. They like the idea of reduced taxes, but Bush's government spending has been profligate and he's amassed deficits that the real money guys are scared of.
His foreign policy hasn't made Americans popular and has a long-term price tag associated with its wars and occupations, which doesn't make their view of the deficit any rosier.
My person opinion is that a Kerry election would likely be seen by many as a welcome change (if only for the distraction of a change) and might lead to just enough optimism to push the economic engine hard enough to create a sustainable ecnomic upsurge.
Any kind of "bad democratic liberalism" which might anger markets and economic leaders would take years to show any real effect.
It's kind of surprising that he hasn't at least been bitchslapped in public -- if not because of what he's done, simply for the publicity related to who he is.
Killing may be going to far, but he's certainly a candidate for a blanket party or having his fingers double-jointed.
[Obligatory disclaimer: I do not advocate doing harm to anyone. All comments are purely a matter of philosophical discussion and enlightenment.]
I was wondering that too. I'm like "Geeze, I thought we might have another stab at the economy recovering {more, some, at all} next year."
I kind of wonder what a Kerry election might do for all this. Not practically, as in Kerry policies, but psychologically to markets and the business community.
In other words, what does it cost to build it and the launch plane? How much does an individual flight cost (maintenance, fuel, telemetry services)? Overhead (office staff, paperwork, etc)?
And how many flights is one good for before it becomes non-air/spaceworthy?
If you sum the first figures and divide by the second figure, it should give us a close idea as to what a quickie space tourist ride would cost. It doesn't factor in research, but I guess as a business I'd largely ignore that for savings relative to economies of scale of building several planes now that the design is proven workable.
Wasn't he talking about using the carbon produced at some earlier stage of the conversion process -- it's not a free energy thing, just a way to recycle the carbon produced earlier in the process.
Remember all our mobile phones are software and do use digital audio . You don't call them unreliable, do you ?.
Given that one of the largest wireless vendors claims reliability as a selling point must indicate to you the level of reliability generally associated with mobile phones.
(Admittedly this has more to do with their wireless nature, but still..)
I've been wondering why following the money hasn't been done and why all we've ever heard about fighting spam is crap about how its impossible because it comes from China/Russia/Africa.
I hadn't thought of the idea of making trade licenses pullable for participation in spam -- that's an excellent idea.
I've also advocated going one step further -- consider a spamed product as a candidate for a RICO investigation. Not only will this mandate large fines, asset forfeiture and long prison time, it will allow anyone knowingly participating in the organization suceptible to the same penalties.
This will ensnare all the "legitimate" businesses that provide services to spammers that enable spam to actually work in the real world -- credit processors, ISPs and other business functionaries. Not all of them will be "in" on spam businesses, but some will and those that will do hard time and cause some really bad negative publicity for their otherwise PR sensitive companies.
I think if you put some spammers and their otherwise legitimate business partners in prison for a long time, it could create a chilling effect that would cut off spam from access to the financial and technical servcies it needs to work. If you can't buy a spamvertised product electronically, no one will bother.
Coupled with your forfeiture of professional licenses, this could make spam a thing of the past.
As I see it the problem is resources for enforcement, and a business commmunity and regulatory environment that largely believes that deception and dishonesty are just sales techniques.
Verizon sucks. They (intelligently albeit in a dastardly way) see phones-as-devices as a source of revenue, provided you have an iron-clad grip on what goes onto and off of the phone and can collect a toll.
I had a chance to buy a new phone and considered a camera phone -- but when I realized that there was no way to get pictures on and off without paying for the privilege, decided against it.
Even my current T730 has a USB cable for it, but it's useless to get stuff on/off the phone, as VZW has managed to convince motorola to lock out user pictures and ring tones as well.
Like you, I was looking for a monitoring system better than the usual 49 Mhz analog domestic-problem broadcast units out there (a 2.4Ghz DSS phone is $50, a 49Mhz analog baby monitor is $50 -- what's wrong with this picture?).
I looked and looked for DSS monitors in *any* band and couldn't find them. They're all analog (easy eavesdropping) for some reason, but you can get them in all the mobile phone bands.
I ended up buying a Mobi video monitor from SmartHome.com. It's 2.4Ghz analog, but has audio + color video.
The camera has an IR LED array and can be set to "night" mode and does a very good job of illuminating a crib or bassinette in even total darkness. The camera lens swivels up and down and is a fixed-focus lens that provides a surprisingly good image. The unit includes a mounting system with 2 brackets.
The receiver uses a tiny LCD video display (2.5" diagnoal) that's visible in most lighting situations; a 4-5 step contrast adjustment is available. The receiver has an AV out cable (via 4-conductor mini-headphone jack) that breaks out into L/R and composite video (external video looks really good on my 42" TV). The receiver also has a "level" setting that disables the LCD display until a sound from the camera goes above the approximate setting of "LEVEL". Audio is maintained during this no-video-display monitoring. Reception is decent in my 2000 sq ft, 2 level house (I have no Wifi).
Both units can run on 4 AAs or through brick-type wall adapters which are included for both units. I had a spare Radio Shaft universal adapter I use with the camera, and the plug was a tight fit in the space provided. The units can be switched between 3 different channels.
Now the downsides:
The camera's lens swivels up and down, but not side to side. Means it must be mounted "dead on" with the crib. I ended up mounting a post to the crib to give the camera sufficient height to show the baby's face, as well as to keep the camera dead-on straight with the crib. I attached the other mounting bracket to a small peice of plywood and bolted that to a small sping clamp for mounting to the basinette. Ugly, but functional.
The switch for the camera is a tiny DIP switch on the bottom (OFF/ON/NIGHT) -- ideally it would be a front-panel ON/OFF with night mode automatically enabled via adjustable photo sensor. An audio sensor that turns on the transmitter might have been a good low-power solution as well -- don't transmit anything unless there's noise.
Reception isn't perfect, and the farther you go the more likely you are to experience jumps in the picture and noise -- it is analog, afterall. Overall it's pretty good.
Battery power on the receiver is limited if you keep the LCD display on. (I found video monitoring easier than audio monitoring -- no room noise, and a better cue as to whether baby is actually awake or not). If you planned on using both units without their PSUs, consider investing in 16 NiMH cells and enough chargers to keep a set constantly under charge.
I have some small concerns about the AC adapter cord. I have mine tie-wrapped to mounts on the back of my crub mount, and high enough that it shouldn't be reachable until the child is maybe 18 months. Any lower and I'd worry about an AC adapter getting put in a mouth.
Right now (baby is 4 weeks on 10/6) it's really of limited value. We have the basinette in our bedroom, so any noise the baby makes we can hear right away. I will flick on the monitor if the baby makes unusual noises just to see, but about 19 times out of 20, we're picking him up for food/change/comfort in about 2 minutes anyway.
I think it will be of more value when the baby is older and sleeps in its crib in another room regularly. I plan to connect the monitor to our bedroom TV (larger picture, etc) and the camera will be fixed in the crib.
Re:one of my friends works there
on
Inside Wal-Mart IT
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· Score: 5, Funny
This suggests all kinds of opportunities for mayhem:
(1) At "bedtime", go into the bathroom and make it sound like you're giving birth to triplets. Flush the toilet like 10 times. When "finished", put some kind of horriffic ass-stink in the bathroom -- like they used to sell at gag stores. Walk out of the bathroom as if nothing happened.
(2) Figure a way to wake up before your roomie. Have/fake a massive hard-on beneath the sheet, and when you see rommie stir, say "Morning, $roomie" making sure they see you're sporting wood. Take this further by pretending to fanatically jack off as they get up. If/when they make a nosie, pretend you were sleeping (most Slashdotters should remember how this works from home/dorms).
(3) Always come out of the shower stark naked. Don't get dressed right away. Hem and haw about it. A further option is to point to inner thigh or ass crack and ask about "bump" or "sore". Other questions -- "How's your daughter doing?" "I saw your wife the other day." "Do you think I'm fat?" Bonus points for erection.
(4) Try to plant sick porn (anything harder than Hustler) in traveling companion's luggage. "Honey, can you unpack my suitcase?" Bonus for gay/fetish porn.
I've always thought (note to Secret Service: as thought experiment only, never acted on) that you could keep up small-time counterfeiting for years without a lot of problems.
Where people seem to get in trouble is when they get greedy and want a lot of money fast.
Instead, you'd think you could generate a small amount of cash (say, $200 a week) via change machines and probably spend another $200 or so in other coin/bill operated machines and as direct cash in various high-traffic cash situations (parking garages, bars, food stands, etc) where the volume of transactions eliminates any verification options.
You'd never want to use denominations over $10 (although some isolated change machines or co-ops might take $20s), especially for cash transactions, and probably never more than a single bill at a time.
It basically serves as "walking around" money -- $200-$400 per week in cash that won't show up as assets to the IRS or arouse any suspicion. In a large city with more change machines, you might be able to generate more cash, although to be safe you'd want to minimize your visits to the same change machines.
Anyway, this always occured to me as the "safe" way to counterfeit. The level of money generated stays below everyone's radar screen, the denominations are small enough and involve enough machines that they might not even be found to be counterfeit until they were so far removed from the transaction as to be impossible to trace without a level of effort that wouldn't pay off.
Re:Article is way off base... such as...
on
Amateur Revolution?
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· Score: 1
Most music of any redeeming artistic value is written and performed by people fitting the 'middle class' label.
Even if the "middle class" had accomplished nothing in the music world, it doesn't redeem the ghetto attitude of rap music.
Re:Article is way off base... such as...
on
Amateur Revolution?
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· Score: 1
Way back in the 1970s when rap first rose to popularity it was actually more like a form of poetry to a rhythmic beat. The content, while far from intellectually earthshaking, was at least authentic in a folk-poetry way.
Since then, though, all it seems to be is a lot of noise, and it actually just seems to represent the dumbing down of music to a series of grunts and thumps, and nothing more than an expression of the basest of instincts. Which isn't surprising, considering the cast of convicted felons involved with it. (I was even on a jury pool this past year for a little-known "rap artist" accused of federal firearms and teenage prostitution).
The music press has unfortunately given rap a lot of positive press. I can only imagine its a function of music press writer's desire for "urban credibility" coupled with a predictable left-wing political bias.
None of this is to say that rap music doesn't represent the attitude of the ghetto -- it's actually the problem. I don't see the atittude of the ghetto advancing art anyplace useful.
For our 300 people to get email 365 days per year, that'd be $110K per year. That's something like an entire year's (actually, more than an entire year's lately) server budget around here.
Even if I bought two nice servers and clustered 'em for 99.99 uptime, I could likely get 2-3 years out of them easily. Even with software and maintenance, that's a ton of money. It might be comperable if you were talking zero IT staff, but at a 300 person company that's largely a fantasy as well.
That's what scares me the most about "business" anymore. It's no longer about wanting to run an organization, create or sell a compelling product. It's all about finding and using gimmicks to ultimately make yourself wealthy, whether those gimmicks are patents, copyrights, or semi-fraudulent business practices.
I think a lot of our economy is built this way, and I think that it's largely what they've been teaching in business schools -- outsource everything but your core marketing staff. It makes you a more "pure" businessman.
I've learned to completely discount all the "..researchers announce xxx {giga,tera}bytes on a DVD..." stories I've read here, simply because they've never become products or the timeline is so drawn out (2015???) that it's meaningless.
The only products that appear likely to actually hit the market for real are Blu-Ray and its competitor, DVD-HD (which seems kind of dead in the water as a data storage standard due to its limited size and growth). Blu Ray appears to have some legs from what I've read, due to its layer growth capability.
What's after that? Are there any storage standards backed by large consortiums coming after Blu Ray? Or is multi-layer blu ray supposed to be "good enough" until some of this lab stuff makes it to market in 2015?
...is corporate-sponsored totalitarianism. What I find so ironic is that the same corporations who claim that their freedom of speech rights are being limited by preventing million-dollar donations to candidates, are the same ones willing to march lockstep with totalitarian governments like the Chinese.
My gut reaction is that by and large, the corporate world likes China. They dislike some of the corruption, but the idea of a massive marketplace that's allowed to develop business-friendly economic institutions, while at the same time allows for dictatorial control over the labor market and a lawmaking process that favors only insiders and government control.
A percentage of the people buying the bootlegs will wind up short of ticket money? Are you fucking serious?
Yes. Clearly this is the case. A certain percentage of people will only be able to afford one or the other. Do you know some sort of magic math that allows for people of limitted means to purchase everything their hearts desire? Do you believe that being presented with the choice of "purchase infinitely replayable bootlegged live recording of expensive music show" or "pay through the nose for a concert you might not like" will have a singular and representative response?
What's being booted and by whom?
By and large most boots are live sets of past shows, usually of defunct artists who aren't playing anymore or by artists still worth recording live and doing something interesting live, but lacking the touring ability be everywhere; they're either collector's items (and in many cases, vital historical documentation) or fans making a key element of your favorite artist, available to you, because he only played a dozen clubs out east.
What they mostly aren't are arena shows by top-40 RIAA bands playing huge arenas. Those boots bite, they sound like crap, and nobody wants a 'concert' of Britney Spears lip-syncing to her own album.
Regardless, the people who buy or, more commonly, trade boots are the first ones in line for tickets at live shows, and often are traveling to the next city over to go to them.
I agree with the complainers that this is a brain-dead idea, but I also agree with you that there are way too many naysayers on Slashdot who presume that any idea which is not mathematically provable to be 100% valid is hopelessly flawed, regardless of the value of the idea, the level of the flaw, and the nature of the problem being mitigated.
If the object was a flat, 2-D surface you could probably correct for it relative to some start position. But a 3D object? You'd have to know its complete 3D geometry to do the perspective transformations.
If you had to scan the object with a laser to get 3D data on it, you might as well accept a lower resolution but 3-D image instead.
Doesn't changing angles on the subject (a result of moving the camera), cause you to collect not more but different data on the subject, resulting in a higher resolution image that's higher in angular/dimensional data, but not in 2D data?
It seems like you'd end up with a David Hockney-like image, not a higher resolution image.
Lots of otherwise smart people, who should know better, do things they shouldn't. That it's otherwise informed IT people running IE and Outlook shouldn't be all that surprising.
Slashdot Mirror
What about the US? How about we stop building weapons and educate our children? I mean, come on!
It sounds like a great analogy, but I think most studies have demonstrated that increased per pupil spending doesn't accomplish very much.
Besides, in the US at least, the increased spending generally goes for social welfare type programs (meals, social workers, kids dubiously labeled "learning disabled") within the schools instead of increasing the quality of education itself (better teaching, better teaching materials, etc).
The schools which seem to have the biggest problems are usually inner-city schools with large numbers of minority students and immigrants -- no amount of money short of individual tutoring will help them. Anytime you aggregate all the poor kids together, they're typically going to just demonstrate the social backgrounds they live in. Bussing doesn't help -- white families simply move outside the administrative authority of the bussing regeime, and some minority leaders have also complained that integration "undermines their cultural identity" (the result being "right to be ignorant and unemployed.")
It has been suggested that inner city schools could be "saved" by shipping their students to boarding schools in rural locations. It solves many of the social background issues the kids have (crime, neglect, diet) while putting them in an environment where education is their biggest priority. Minority leaders decry it as concentration camps, and conservatives won't pay for it, and it leaves some meaningful questions about family life. Strangely it's worked well for the British aristocracy for centuries.
Overall, you're right that big-ticket weapons systems are a waste of time. Nukes are a valuable big stick to carry around, but primarily the money should be spent on mobile tacitical troops, although Iraq has taught us the value of APCs and tanks in urban combat.
I'd spend the military savings on domestic infrastructure -- urban transit, telecommunications and environmental cleanup. Spending more on the school is just too problematic to get a payback.
I wouldn't bother with .300 Win Mag in Africa, especially hunting predatory large mammals. You need one-shot-drop power and the ability to keep a decent distance. Plus you might have to stop a charging Rhino or elephant, and .300 Win Mag doesn't cut it.
.458 Winchester round, which carries a brush-clearing 510 grain slug and delivers a devastating 4700 ft lbs of energy at muzzle velocity. It will drop dead any animal native to this planet under 100 yards.
.375 H&H Magnum -- less muzzle energy than the .458, but better long-range ballistics. Overpenetration on soft targets might be an issue at close ranges due to the higher muzzle velocity.
.500 magnum round which delivers a breathtaking 2500 ft lbs of energy at the muzzle. .454 Casull would be your alternative option here. There may be some advantage to a Desert Eagle chambered for .50AE -- since it's a gas semi-auto, quick reloads and lighter recoil from a magazine might compensate for "only" 1600 ft lbs of energy (recoil from the .454 Casull *killed* a 12 year old when he tried firing one...)
.375 in my truck (or have someone else carry it for me), keep the .458 loaded and in my hands, the shotgun on a sling and probably the DE .50AE with 2 spare mags on my side.
The safari standard is of course the
A secondary option would be
For backup, you might consider a gas-operated shotgun with extension tube loaded with 3" magnum rifled slugs. At panic ranges under 25 yards, 6 slugs ought to stop whatever's after you.
For so-close-I-can-hear-its-breath backup, something that can handle the newish S&W
I'd keep the
It rises above the basement-level spammer, but it would make sense to me that these people invest some money into legal advice and setup a series of shell companies with obfuscated ownership so that if they run afoul of some law, company A can declare bankruptcy and skip out on some of the fine and (possibly new) company C can take over.
Civil fines presume that you're dealing with businesses that are basically honest. I think people involved in spammer are basically dishonest, and while a few that operate as sole proprietorships will pay fines and be "watchable" by government agencies. Even major corporations largely just pay the fines, raise their prices, and ignore it.
This is part of the reason I think civil fines will never work with spamming, only criminal fines and lengthy prison sentnces from RICO-type investigations that follow the money trail and catch everyone participating in the enterprise, including any "legitimate" businesses aware of the nature of the business.
If a credit-card processor and/or an ISP that knew about the nature of their client's business was indicted, fined $250,000 and jailed for 10 years in a Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison, the ties to banking and interest services that spammers need would be hard to come by in the future as ISPs and credit card processors who otherwise have a viable business wouldn't be willing to host spam or run spam credit processing -- even at 10x fee rates, it's not worth losing your home and spending the next 10 years dodging the Aryan Brotherhood in the shower.
What bothers me is why, given the high level of fraud in spam, the Feds haven't done much to follow the money trail. Either the money is too good for legit players on the sidelines and enforcement has become politicized ("Investigate us and we don't contribute to your boss' campaign.") or they just don't care.
I don't know about that. Many financial leaders (as opposed to the get-rich-quick crowd typically fronted as "business leadership") are leery of Bush's policies at this juncture. They like the idea of reduced taxes, but Bush's government spending has been profligate and he's amassed deficits that the real money guys are scared of.
His foreign policy hasn't made Americans popular and has a long-term price tag associated with its wars and occupations, which doesn't make their view of the deficit any rosier.
My person opinion is that a Kerry election would likely be seen by many as a welcome change (if only for the distraction of a change) and might lead to just enough optimism to push the economic engine hard enough to create a sustainable ecnomic upsurge.
Any kind of "bad democratic liberalism" which might anger markets and economic leaders would take years to show any real effect.
It's kind of surprising that he hasn't at least been bitchslapped in public -- if not because of what he's done, simply for the publicity related to who he is.
Killing may be going to far, but he's certainly a candidate for a blanket party or having his fingers double-jointed.
[Obligatory disclaimer: I do not advocate doing harm to anyone. All comments are purely a matter of philosophical discussion and enlightenment.]
I was wondering that too. I'm like "Geeze, I thought we might have another stab at the economy recovering {more, some, at all} next year."
I kind of wonder what a Kerry election might do for all this. Not practically, as in Kerry policies, but psychologically to markets and the business community.
In other words, what does it cost to build it and the launch plane? How much does an individual flight cost (maintenance, fuel, telemetry services)? Overhead (office staff, paperwork, etc)?
And how many flights is one good for before it becomes non-air/spaceworthy?
If you sum the first figures and divide by the second figure, it should give us a close idea as to what a quickie space tourist ride would cost. It doesn't factor in research, but I guess as a business I'd largely ignore that for savings relative to economies of scale of building several planes now that the design is proven workable.
Wasn't he talking about using the carbon produced at some earlier stage of the conversion process -- it's not a free energy thing, just a way to recycle the carbon produced earlier in the process.
Remember all our mobile phones are software and do use digital audio . You don't call them unreliable, do you ?.
Given that one of the largest wireless vendors claims reliability as a selling point must indicate to you the level of reliability generally associated with mobile phones.
(Admittedly this has more to do with their wireless nature, but still..)
I've been wondering why following the money hasn't been done and why all we've ever heard about fighting spam is crap about how its impossible because it comes from China/Russia/Africa.
I hadn't thought of the idea of making trade licenses pullable for participation in spam -- that's an excellent idea.
I've also advocated going one step further -- consider a spamed product as a candidate for a RICO investigation. Not only will this mandate large fines, asset forfeiture and long prison time, it will allow anyone knowingly participating in the organization suceptible to the same penalties.
This will ensnare all the "legitimate" businesses that provide services to spammers that enable spam to actually work in the real world -- credit processors, ISPs and other business functionaries. Not all of them will be "in" on spam businesses, but some will and those that will do hard time and cause some really bad negative publicity for their otherwise PR sensitive companies.
I think if you put some spammers and their otherwise legitimate business partners in prison for a long time, it could create a chilling effect that would cut off spam from access to the financial and technical servcies it needs to work. If you can't buy a spamvertised product electronically, no one will bother.
Coupled with your forfeiture of professional licenses, this could make spam a thing of the past.
As I see it the problem is resources for enforcement, and a business commmunity and regulatory environment that largely believes that deception and dishonesty are just sales techniques.
Verizon sucks. They (intelligently albeit in a dastardly way) see phones-as-devices as a source of revenue, provided you have an iron-clad grip on what goes onto and off of the phone and can collect a toll.
I had a chance to buy a new phone and considered a camera phone -- but when I realized that there was no way to get pictures on and off without paying for the privilege, decided against it.
Even my current T730 has a USB cable for it, but it's useless to get stuff on/off the phone, as VZW has managed to convince motorola to lock out user pictures and ring tones as well.
Like you, I was looking for a monitoring system better than the usual 49 Mhz analog domestic-problem broadcast units out there (a 2.4Ghz DSS phone is $50, a 49Mhz analog baby monitor is $50 -- what's wrong with this picture?).
I looked and looked for DSS monitors in *any* band and couldn't find them. They're all analog (easy eavesdropping) for some reason, but you can get them in all the mobile phone bands.
I ended up buying a Mobi video monitor from SmartHome.com. It's 2.4Ghz analog, but has audio + color video.
The camera has an IR LED array and can be set to "night" mode and does a very good job of illuminating a crib or bassinette in even total darkness. The camera lens swivels up and down and is a fixed-focus lens that provides a surprisingly good image. The unit includes a mounting system with 2 brackets.
The receiver uses a tiny LCD video display (2.5" diagnoal) that's visible in most lighting situations; a 4-5 step contrast adjustment is available. The receiver has an AV out cable (via 4-conductor mini-headphone jack) that breaks out into L/R and composite video (external video looks really good on my 42" TV). The receiver also has a "level" setting that disables the LCD display until a sound from the camera goes above the approximate setting of "LEVEL". Audio is maintained during this no-video-display monitoring. Reception is decent in my 2000 sq ft, 2 level house (I have no Wifi).
Both units can run on 4 AAs or through brick-type wall adapters which are included for both units. I had a spare Radio Shaft universal adapter I use with the camera, and the plug was a tight fit in the space provided. The units can be switched between 3 different channels.
Now the downsides:
The camera's lens swivels up and down, but not side to side. Means it must be mounted "dead on" with the crib. I ended up mounting a post to the crib to give the camera sufficient height to show the baby's face, as well as to keep the camera dead-on straight with the crib. I attached the other mounting bracket to a small peice of plywood and bolted that to a small sping clamp for mounting to the basinette. Ugly, but functional.
The switch for the camera is a tiny DIP switch on the bottom (OFF/ON/NIGHT) -- ideally it would be a front-panel ON/OFF with night mode automatically enabled via adjustable photo sensor. An audio sensor that turns on the transmitter might have been a good low-power solution as well -- don't transmit anything unless there's noise.
Reception isn't perfect, and the farther you go the more likely you are to experience jumps in the picture and noise -- it is analog, afterall. Overall it's pretty good.
Battery power on the receiver is limited if you keep the LCD display on. (I found video monitoring easier than audio monitoring -- no room noise, and a better cue as to whether baby is actually awake or not). If you planned on using both units without their PSUs, consider investing in 16 NiMH cells and enough chargers to keep a set constantly under charge.
I have some small concerns about the AC adapter cord. I have mine tie-wrapped to mounts on the back of my crub mount, and high enough that it shouldn't be reachable until the child is maybe 18 months. Any lower and I'd worry about an AC adapter getting put in a mouth.
Right now (baby is 4 weeks on 10/6) it's really of limited value. We have the basinette in our bedroom, so any noise the baby makes we can hear right away. I will flick on the monitor if the baby makes unusual noises just to see, but about 19 times out of 20, we're picking him up for food/change/comfort in about 2 minutes anyway.
I think it will be of more value when the baby is older and sleeps in its crib in another room regularly. I plan to connect the monitor to our bedroom TV (larger picture, etc) and the camera will be fixed in the crib.
This suggests all kinds of opportunities for mayhem:
(1) At "bedtime", go into the bathroom and make it sound like you're giving birth to triplets. Flush the toilet like 10 times. When "finished", put some kind of horriffic ass-stink in the bathroom -- like they used to sell at gag stores. Walk out of the bathroom as if nothing happened.
(2) Figure a way to wake up before your roomie. Have/fake a massive hard-on beneath the sheet, and when you see rommie stir, say "Morning, $roomie" making sure they see you're sporting wood. Take this further by pretending to fanatically jack off as they get up. If/when they make a nosie, pretend you were sleeping (most Slashdotters should remember how this works from home/dorms).
(3) Always come out of the shower stark naked. Don't get dressed right away. Hem and haw about it. A further option is to point to inner thigh or ass crack and ask about "bump" or "sore". Other questions -- "How's your daughter doing?" "I saw your wife the other day." "Do you think I'm fat?" Bonus points for erection.
(4) Try to plant sick porn (anything harder than Hustler) in traveling companion's luggage. "Honey, can you unpack my suitcase?" Bonus for gay/fetish porn.
If you keep it up, you will get caught.
I've always thought (note to Secret Service: as thought experiment only, never acted on) that you could keep up small-time counterfeiting for years without a lot of problems.
Where people seem to get in trouble is when they get greedy and want a lot of money fast.
Instead, you'd think you could generate a small amount of cash (say, $200 a week) via change machines and probably spend another $200 or so in other coin/bill operated machines and as direct cash in various high-traffic cash situations (parking garages, bars, food stands, etc) where the volume of transactions eliminates any verification options.
You'd never want to use denominations over $10 (although some isolated change machines or co-ops might take $20s), especially for cash transactions, and probably never more than a single bill at a time.
It basically serves as "walking around" money -- $200-$400 per week in cash that won't show up as assets to the IRS or arouse any suspicion. In a large city with more change machines, you might be able to generate more cash, although to be safe you'd want to minimize your visits to the same change machines.
Anyway, this always occured to me as the "safe" way to counterfeit. The level of money generated stays below everyone's radar screen, the denominations are small enough and involve enough machines that they might not even be found to be counterfeit until they were so far removed from the transaction as to be impossible to trace without a level of effort that wouldn't pay off.
Most music of any redeeming artistic value is written and performed by people fitting the 'middle class' label.
Even if the "middle class" had accomplished nothing in the music world, it doesn't redeem the ghetto attitude of rap music.
Way back in the 1970s when rap first rose to popularity it was actually more like a form of poetry to a rhythmic beat. The content, while far from intellectually earthshaking, was at least authentic in a folk-poetry way.
Since then, though, all it seems to be is a lot of noise, and it actually just seems to represent the dumbing down of music to a series of grunts and thumps, and nothing more than an expression of the basest of instincts. Which isn't surprising, considering the cast of convicted felons involved with it. (I was even on a jury pool this past year for a little-known "rap artist" accused of federal firearms and teenage prostitution).
The music press has unfortunately given rap a lot of positive press. I can only imagine its a function of music press writer's desire for "urban credibility" coupled with a predictable left-wing political bias.
None of this is to say that rap music doesn't represent the attitude of the ghetto -- it's actually the problem. I don't see the atittude of the ghetto advancing art anyplace useful.
For our 300 people to get email 365 days per year, that'd be $110K per year. That's something like an entire year's (actually, more than an entire year's lately) server budget around here.
Even if I bought two nice servers and clustered 'em for 99.99 uptime, I could likely get 2-3 years out of them easily. Even with software and maintenance, that's a ton of money. It might be comperable if you were talking zero IT staff, but at a 300 person company that's largely a fantasy as well.
That's what scares me the most about "business" anymore. It's no longer about wanting to run an organization, create or sell a compelling product. It's all about finding and using gimmicks to ultimately make yourself wealthy, whether those gimmicks are patents, copyrights, or semi-fraudulent business practices.
I think a lot of our economy is built this way, and I think that it's largely what they've been teaching in business schools -- outsource everything but your core marketing staff. It makes you a more "pure" businessman.
I've learned to completely discount all the "..researchers announce xxx {giga,tera}bytes on a DVD..." stories I've read here, simply because they've never become products or the timeline is so drawn out (2015???) that it's meaningless.
The only products that appear likely to actually hit the market for real are Blu-Ray and its competitor, DVD-HD (which seems kind of dead in the water as a data storage standard due to its limited size and growth). Blu Ray appears to have some legs from what I've read, due to its layer growth capability.
What's after that? Are there any storage standards backed by large consortiums coming after Blu Ray? Or is multi-layer blu ray supposed to be "good enough" until some of this lab stuff makes it to market in 2015?
...is corporate-sponsored totalitarianism. What I find so ironic is that the same corporations who claim that their freedom of speech rights are being limited by preventing million-dollar donations to candidates, are the same ones willing to march lockstep with totalitarian governments like the Chinese.
My gut reaction is that by and large, the corporate world likes China. They dislike some of the corruption, but the idea of a massive marketplace that's allowed to develop business-friendly economic institutions, while at the same time allows for dictatorial control over the labor market and a lawmaking process that favors only insiders and government control.
A percentage of the people buying the bootlegs will wind up short of ticket money? Are you fucking serious?
Yes. Clearly this is the case. A certain percentage of people will only be able to afford one or the other. Do you know some sort of magic math that allows for people of limitted means to purchase everything their hearts desire? Do you believe that being presented with the choice of "purchase infinitely replayable bootlegged live recording of expensive music show" or "pay through the nose for a concert you might not like" will have a singular and representative response?
What's being booted and by whom?
By and large most boots are live sets of past shows, usually of defunct artists who aren't playing anymore or by artists still worth recording live and doing something interesting live, but lacking the touring ability be everywhere; they're either collector's items (and in many cases, vital historical documentation) or fans making a key element of your favorite artist, available to you, because he only played a dozen clubs out east.
What they mostly aren't are arena shows by top-40 RIAA bands playing huge arenas. Those boots bite, they sound like crap, and nobody wants a 'concert' of Britney Spears lip-syncing to her own album.
Regardless, the people who buy or, more commonly, trade boots are the first ones in line for tickets at live shows, and often are traveling to the next city over to go to them.
I agree with the complainers that this is a brain-dead idea, but I also agree with you that there are way too many naysayers on Slashdot who presume that any idea which is not mathematically provable to be 100% valid is hopelessly flawed, regardless of the value of the idea, the level of the flaw, and the nature of the problem being mitigated.
If the object was a flat, 2-D surface you could probably correct for it relative to some start position. But a 3D object? You'd have to know its complete 3D geometry to do the perspective transformations.
If you had to scan the object with a laser to get 3D data on it, you might as well accept a lower resolution but 3-D image instead.
Doesn't changing angles on the subject (a result of moving the camera), cause you to collect not more but different data on the subject, resulting in a higher resolution image that's higher in angular/dimensional data, but not in 2D data?
It seems like you'd end up with a David Hockney-like image, not a higher resolution image.
Lots of otherwise smart people, who should know better, do things they shouldn't. That it's otherwise informed IT people running IE and Outlook shouldn't be all that surprising.