I got burned by Apple on some rebates (back when the B&W G3 came out). We bought like 5 of them for an office, I sent in the rebates to Apple with all the appropriate documentation.
The rebate deal was a free internal zip or $50. I sent in three zips and two $50s. I got two zip drives and none of the money.
I didn't complain because work bought the PCs and for my efforts I got two internal zip drives, but would have appreciated a third zip drive and $100.
I guess my point is that rebate reliability is all over the map, even with big companies with big budgets and big reputations. Which is partly why I never buy based on rebate pricing. I know I'll fuck up half the time sending it in and they'll fuck up the other half not sending the rebate.
MOHAA multiplayer is fun, although I'd like to see some objectives that involve taking/holding territory and not just hitting the button for 10 seconds.
It'd also be nice if there was some way of adding "lightweight" objectives to the team matches. Those are amusing, but they're often just a lot of chaotic shooting and dying.
Both would be more fun if some of the levels were designed to be more defensable. As it is they're virtually undefensable swiss cheese with a lot of needless rooms that most people never go in.
...but maybe it doesn't have to. Why not a dual platform solution?
Sun has Solaris for x86 and the last I checked they were still pushing a lot of Solaris on Sparc.
It doesn't sound like it would be all that expensive or complicated for Apple to support x86 hardware in addition to PPC, especially if they take the Sun model and get real selective about what will and won't run. They can use many of the low-level drivers from FreeBSD x86, which will ease most of their hardware burden.
The biggest work IMHO would be making the graphics layer work with PC graphics cards, but then again Apple already has a ton of experience with nVidia and ATI already -- couple that with a "limited menu" for supported hardware and you're off the races.
The purpose of making something like this available? It'd send a signal to CPU vendors that they are ready, willing and able to support other CPUs *now*, not just through in-house portability boxes. It'd also give them an opportunity to improve their portability capabilities.
Would it make a huge dent in Windows? Probably not, but there's always a chance that it grab enough trendsetters and mindshare leaders that it could possibly move into places where it hasn't existed.
It sounds good on the surface, and everyone likes the idea of spammers spending some quality time in a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
But...it won't work. It's just too easy to move (if its not already moved) these operations offshore to countries where pissed off AOL users aren't a concern. And that's if you can trace the messages and the trail doesn't go cold at some open relay or owned box.
Furthermore, it only invites a lot of unwanted government regulation of email. If DMCA, the Patriot Act and others aren't enough for you, can you imagine having to license an SMTP server?
What we need (and I've started to see this gain more prominance in comments to these stories) is better enforcement of fraud and racketeering laws. Most SPAM is criminal, and the best way to find the crooks is to FOLLOW THE MONEY TRAIL! The one way the crooks behind spam allow themselves to be tracked is through the mechanism that allows them to collect money from their victims.
If you can eliminate the crooks who are behind most spam, you should see a big reduction in spam. Not everything will go away, but enough should to make a big impact on the people who make a living doing the spamming. If they can't make a buck selling spam services, they might move on to something else.
If the government won't enforce the criminal laws spammers are already breaking, why should we expect them do a very good job enforcing anti-spam laws, except of course where it benefits Ashcroft et al.
The fiber I had run in our building is in a metal jacket (similar to BX armored cable) which is in a plastic jacket. I'm not sure, but I think it's as durable as liquidtight conduit, which itself is OK for direct burial.
Anyway, the jackets provide a lot of strain relief. I think you'd have to bend/pull hard enough to break the jacket to trash the fibers. Plus, there's multiple strands. I don't think you pull any significant distance of fiber without having at least 3x the maximum number of strands you ever plan to use.
When I've seen them lay fiber along the side of the freeway its usually in a super tough, thick plastic jacket and usually has tons of redundant strands. I think you'd have to shear it to damage the strands.
It has a rather depressing article about three middle-age professionals who have been unemployed for several years. Two have technology backgrounds, although only one appears to have anything approaching a hands-on technology job.
Regardless, the whole personal downward spiral was presented, including ugly spousal relationships, disappearing financial futures, McJobs, and so on.
One guy had a job as some kind of "New Media/New Economy" guru, one guy had a PhD in physical chemistry but became an "IT Consultant" and another guy was a banker.
The banker was in the best situation, kids college funds and his retirement were pretty squared away, it was mainly maintaining his current standard of living that was at risk.
The New Media/Economy guy (who has a set of computer books, "Einstein's Manuals" or something, written pre-Dummies) seems fairly finished. He's working at the Gap for $10 and it seems unlikely that his particular speciality will ever be revived.
The IT Consultant was hard to judge. He's obviously smart (PhD), but what kind of an IT Consultant is he? He was one of those guys that moved into IT in the 90s from another tech field and probably got pretty advanced positions due to his educational background and general intelligence relative to what was available in the job market now. The bummer for him is that he's looking for those same, $150K jobs and they're gone forever. If he was looking for techmonkey work he might do better, but it wouldn't support the $2.5k mortgage.
What I can't decide is if the economy is permanently shrunk or if the "new economy" portion + excessive profits part only. It's scary, anyway.
he could hardly ever get to the magical 10,000 steps that everyone should take a day becuase it is set in our genetics by our ancestors who HAD to walk a lot. They didn't have the option of just sitting all day.
Slightly OT, but I seem to remember reading someplace that our "ancestors" (as in more primative hunter-gatherer societies) actually had a lot of time to just sit around. I don't remember the source, but I seem to recall that they only spent 4-6 hours per day obtaining necessities.
A friend of mine is a lawyer who also attended post-law school tax school (grad school for lawyers?).
He swears by tax programs for ordinary people's taxes and says they generally do a good job, although there are places where hand-tuning can help.
The analogy he made was programming -- tax software is like a high level language. It's great for most stuff, although there are places where hand-tuned assembly can help, and some places where its necessary.
Just use the drug dealer's trick. Don't hide it in your house, hide it outside your house in some publicly accessable area. Yes, it leaves the device more vulnerable but it also leaves you less culpable since it wasn't in your posession.
An electronic device that needs power is trickier, but a wireless device mitigates some of that since you don't even have to touch it to use it. The right kind of device could run for a long time without external power (batteries, solar) or the right hiding place could provide it with power (hidden in wall, behind an outlet or something).
First of all, anyone running a science class who thinks that forcing a bunch of rote formula memorization is "learning" isn't doing very much teaching.
Second of all, everybody that actually makes a living with math and science cheats every day, by referring to reference books, studies, conferring with others, and so on.
We should be teaching people how to *learn* by using reference materials, not waste storage neurons on things that are already written down.
FWIW, when I was in college (circa 1985), the physics teacher allowed us to bring in a 3x5 card with anything we want written on it. We got the guy with the best penmanship in our study group to write ALL the formulas we could think of, complete with notes, examples and so on on a 8x11 sheet of paper which we then reduced on a photocopier to 3x5.
Again, you could call this cheating, or you could give us credit for innovation.
That was pretty good, but it was missing the Death Star from Star Wars. It'd also be interesting to see a US Navy aircraft carrier on there for comparison.
I was surprised at how tiny the Star Trek ships were.
This cracks me endlessly. I have two domains registered, one has a vaguely professional sounding name associated with it and the other has a crypto-anarchist name associated with it.
Both of them get sent junk snail mail, and I've even gotten some sales calls to the crypto-anarchist name.
Sales: I'd like to know if ____ is interested in updating their postage meter to a new Pitney-Bowes Mailmaster 1000.
Me: Actually, ____ is more interested in burning Pitney-Bowes machines in the street as part of our worldwide campaign to forment revolution.
Sales: Well, if you are interested in a better postage meter, will you give us a call?
It's pretty funny. I wonder if people with domains like "fuckoffasshole.com" get called, too...
My take on the cyclical nature of the record industry is that we're at about the same point in the trough as we were in the late 1970s.
The early 1960s were the blossoming of a new rock n roll sound that was in many was fundamentally different. It reached a zenith in about 1970 and just got beaten to death with theme and variation by the late 1970s.
The late 1970s (in the UK) and early 1980s in the US saw the blossoming of another new era in music ("alternative" -- hate the word, but its vague enough to sum it all up). This reached its zenith in the early 90s and has been pounded to death by the same cycle of theme and variation.
Anyway, my theory is that we're at the tail-end of the alternative thing and nothing worthwhile has really come up to replace it, so we're malcontent while we feed on the imitators and leftovers.
None of this is to say there weren't bands that broke moulds or did things out of cycle (the Velvet Underground was astonishingly ahead of their time) or bands that don't manage to be original in a time of dreary lack of originality, but that doesn't also invalidate the general trend.
I, like a number of other Americans, have had deep misgivings about the war in Iraq. On one had, Saddam is a really brutal dictator with a proven track record of killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, not even counting the empire-building military misadventures of the Iran-Iraq war and the invasion of Kuwait. And the grab for nukes, chemical and biological weapons which are further chilling due to his past regional aggression.
On the other hand, the US has its own dodgy track record of trying to impose a political and social template that can wreak havoc of its own, and that's when we have been altruistically motivated.
With that in mind, while not entirely satisified we're doing the right thing for the right reasons, at the end of the day ending Saddam's despotic regime seems like the right thing to do, even though it will cost a lot of suffering because it should prevent the truly evil suffering Saddam was imposing on his own people. The Iraqis will at least get a shot at running their own country in a democratic fashion rather than having a dictator impose further rape, murder and torture on them.
That being said, what's the "No War In Iraq" camp's answer to Saddam? That's the part I don't get. If toppling his regime through military force isn't the right answer, what is the right answer? I haven't heard one yet, usually there's a lot of shrill, one-sided political analysis of what the US has done in the past and nothing more. I can't help but think that failure to posit alternatives is complicity in Saddam's crimes.
From what I recall, one thing that was kind of disturbing about the drug was that it worked so well that it appeared to have no side effects. Traditional sleep deprivation (ie, just staying awake and not sleeping) and heavy stimulant usage all have psychosis-like side effects (paranoia, hallucinations, etc) as well as big "crashes" of long sleeps to catch up (further worsened by the use of barbituates or tranquilizers). These are all well-known to be really harsh on your phsyical and mental well-being. Anyone who's ever met a hard-core tweaker can tell you about that (and anyone who has who isn't one can tell you how far away you want to stay from them).
I don't doubt that it might have longer-term psychological effects, but it doesn't appear to have any of the negative physical consequences associated with more familiar forms of sleep avoidance.
What I wonder about, though, is what's the mind of a 40 year old like if they've "added" an extra 2 years of living by using a drug like this? Does your mind age too fast? Do you feel 42? Wiser? More bored, tired, angry, ?
There are probably hidden side-effects from this, but they don't sound like they'd be evident without many years of repeated long-term waking "sessions" to find out.
I've read a few references about a fairly new drug that's been given to narcoleptics and been adopted by others that really seems to be a stay-awake drug that has few known side effects. Unlike stimulants that crank you up, this new drug simply keeps you from getting sleepy.
Non-narcoleptic users reported being able to stay awake for 4-5 days straight without any sleep. When they stop taking the drug, they get tired as per normal and sleep a normal 8 hours and wake up rested and "normal."
I think this is pretty revolutionary -- we talk about free time as being important, but what would it be like to get 10 additional hours a day? Feel like watching that 3 hour DVD, but its 11 PM and you know you'll be shot the next day if you do? What if the bigger worry was whether you had enough DVDs to occupy your time between 2 and 6 AM?
They don't know what the long term psychological impact of sleep deprivation like this would be, but there's no apparent physical problems reported by people who have been up 3-5 days. None of the paranoia and other psychotic behavior typically associated with long-term stimulant use and other sleep deprivation.
The amount of extra free time would be truly amazing, even if you only stayed "up" 2-3 nights a week, you could be gaining the equivilent of 50 days free time a year.
This has been making my life a living hell for the past 2 months, every night my parents go on and check to see if i have any homework and won't let me do anything till it's done
No offense to anyone, but how is Slashdot supposed to have credibility on "adult" issues like security, intellectual property, and technology when a story has some kid whining about his parents not letting him out to play until his homework is done?
I think it's pretty pathetic and this kid is pretty pathetic, too. When I was kid before computers, you didn't get to play outside until your homework was done, either. Mom and dad checked the assignments, grades, etc frequently to make sure you weren't fucking up.
If grades came back low at the end of the semester for anything but gym, freedoms were further curtailed until they went back up. If they went up and stayed up, greater freedoms were granted.
I'm glad they did this because -- *gasp* -- that's a lot how the real world works, except that nobody pays as much attention along the way, it all comes down to the the final exam.
Both today and yesterday, Slashdot has been very slow. It's had me fine-toothing the T1s, the firewall, the web cache and anything else to find the problem. After browsing other sites I'm convinved its just Slashdot. It almost seems like they've lost some of their http front-ends or something.
I was told that we could not send a consultant a gift when he or she was hospitalized or had suffered a family tragedy.
Usually this is derived from a rule that prevents the giving of any gifts to vendors, which makes business sense although not always common sense.
I've had vendors bend over backwards for me in situations where I was in a real jam -- I know they lost money or endured some hardships most vendors wouldn't have, and it would have been nice to have paid for an inexpensive lunch or some other gesture. I'll make up some of it on a personal level out of my own pocket, but only to the tune of a couple of cocktails.
Ya know - your parents toaster that they got when they were married still works, but you go through one every year or two?
I was in a Williams Sonoma store the other day and they had a toaster that was like $120. Hand-made in England, it was made of all these top-notch parts. But it didn't pop up the toast automatically, you had to *manually* lift it up when it was done.
I asked the salesgirl how she expected me to pay this much for a manual toaster. She said it'd outlast me and that my kids'd be able to use it. I told her that I still had a problem with the price -- a functional automatic toaster from Target is $15 and lasts me about 4 years (I eat toast about twice a week). At that rate, I'd have a cheap toaster for 25 years and still have spent less replacing them than the toaster she was trying to sell.
Needless to say I didn't buy it, but be assured, if you're looking for the toaster to end all toasters, they'll sell you one.
Dunno if they'd start a fire or could be made out of less microwave-hostile material, but RFID tags would be even better, because the microwave could read the tag without barcode reading problems.
Make the RFID sturdy enough to withstand being microwaved and give it some kind of temperature probe ability and not only would you get an accurate time auto-set into the microwave, but you could have the food cooked to the ideal serving temperature as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I got burned by Apple on some rebates (back when the B&W G3 came out). We bought like 5 of them for an office, I sent in the rebates to Apple with all the appropriate documentation.
The rebate deal was a free internal zip or $50. I sent in three zips and two $50s. I got two zip drives and none of the money.
I didn't complain because work bought the PCs and for my efforts I got two internal zip drives, but would have appreciated a third zip drive and $100.
I guess my point is that rebate reliability is all over the map, even with big companies with big budgets and big reputations. Which is partly why I never buy based on rebate pricing. I know I'll fuck up half the time sending it in and they'll fuck up the other half not sending the rebate.
MOHAA multiplayer is fun, although I'd like to see some objectives that involve taking/holding territory and not just hitting the button for 10 seconds.
It'd also be nice if there was some way of adding "lightweight" objectives to the team matches. Those are amusing, but they're often just a lot of chaotic shooting and dying.
Both would be more fun if some of the levels were designed to be more defensable. As it is they're virtually undefensable swiss cheese with a lot of needless rooms that most people never go in.
...but maybe it doesn't have to. Why not a dual platform solution?
Sun has Solaris for x86 and the last I checked they were still pushing a lot of Solaris on Sparc.
It doesn't sound like it would be all that expensive or complicated for Apple to support x86 hardware in addition to PPC, especially if they take the Sun model and get real selective about what will and won't run. They can use many of the low-level drivers from FreeBSD x86, which will ease most of their hardware burden.
The biggest work IMHO would be making the graphics layer work with PC graphics cards, but then again Apple already has a ton of experience with nVidia and ATI already -- couple that with a "limited menu" for supported hardware and you're off the races.
The purpose of making something like this available? It'd send a signal to CPU vendors that they are ready, willing and able to support other CPUs *now*, not just through in-house portability boxes. It'd also give them an opportunity to improve their portability capabilities.
Would it make a huge dent in Windows? Probably not, but there's always a chance that it grab enough trendsetters and mindshare leaders that it could possibly move into places where it hasn't existed.
It sounds good on the surface, and everyone likes the idea of spammers spending some quality time in a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
But...it won't work. It's just too easy to move (if its not already moved) these operations offshore to countries where pissed off AOL users aren't a concern. And that's if you can trace the messages and the trail doesn't go cold at some open relay or owned box.
Furthermore, it only invites a lot of unwanted government regulation of email. If DMCA, the Patriot Act and others aren't enough for you, can you imagine having to license an SMTP server?
What we need (and I've started to see this gain more prominance in comments to these stories) is better enforcement of fraud and racketeering laws. Most SPAM is criminal, and the best way to find the crooks is to FOLLOW THE MONEY TRAIL! The one way the crooks behind spam allow themselves to be tracked is through the mechanism that allows them to collect money from their victims.
If you can eliminate the crooks who are behind most spam, you should see a big reduction in spam. Not everything will go away, but enough should to make a big impact on the people who make a living doing the spamming. If they can't make a buck selling spam services, they might move on to something else.
If the government won't enforce the criminal laws spammers are already breaking, why should we expect them do a very good job enforcing anti-spam laws, except of course where it benefits Ashcroft et al.
The fiber I had run in our building is in a metal jacket (similar to BX armored cable) which is in a plastic jacket. I'm not sure, but I think it's as durable as liquidtight conduit, which itself is OK for direct burial.
Anyway, the jackets provide a lot of strain relief. I think you'd have to bend/pull hard enough to break the jacket to trash the fibers. Plus, there's multiple strands. I don't think you pull any significant distance of fiber without having at least 3x the maximum number of strands you ever plan to use.
When I've seen them lay fiber along the side of the freeway its usually in a super tough, thick plastic jacket and usually has tons of redundant strands. I think you'd have to shear it to damage the strands.
I thought it sounded like BS, too, but they apparently have pretty good data from Native Americans and other "primitive" peoples.
They didn't eat just plants, either, they ate a lot of meat. And both edible plants and animals were far more abundant then than they are now.
It has a rather depressing article about three middle-age professionals who have been unemployed for several years. Two have technology backgrounds, although only one appears to have anything approaching a hands-on technology job.
Regardless, the whole personal downward spiral was presented, including ugly spousal relationships, disappearing financial futures, McJobs, and so on.
One guy had a job as some kind of "New Media/New Economy" guru, one guy had a PhD in physical chemistry but became an "IT Consultant" and another guy was a banker.
The banker was in the best situation, kids college funds and his retirement were pretty squared away, it was mainly maintaining his current standard of living that was at risk.
The New Media/Economy guy (who has a set of computer books, "Einstein's Manuals" or something, written pre-Dummies) seems fairly finished. He's working at the Gap for $10 and it seems unlikely that his particular speciality will ever be revived.
The IT Consultant was hard to judge. He's obviously smart (PhD), but what kind of an IT Consultant is he? He was one of those guys that moved into IT in the 90s from another tech field and probably got pretty advanced positions due to his educational background and general intelligence relative to what was available in the job market now. The bummer for him is that he's looking for those same, $150K jobs and they're gone forever. If he was looking for techmonkey work he might do better, but it wouldn't support the $2.5k mortgage.
What I can't decide is if the economy is permanently shrunk or if the "new economy" portion + excessive profits part only. It's scary, anyway.
he could hardly ever get to the magical 10,000 steps that everyone should take a day becuase it is set in our genetics by our ancestors who HAD to walk a lot. They didn't have the option of just sitting all day.
Slightly OT, but I seem to remember reading someplace that our "ancestors" (as in more primative hunter-gatherer societies) actually had a lot of time to just sit around. I don't remember the source, but I seem to recall that they only spent 4-6 hours per day obtaining necessities.
A friend of mine is a lawyer who also attended post-law school tax school (grad school for lawyers?).
He swears by tax programs for ordinary people's taxes and says they generally do a good job, although there are places where hand-tuning can help.
The analogy he made was programming -- tax software is like a high level language. It's great for most stuff, although there are places where hand-tuned assembly can help, and some places where its necessary.
Just use the drug dealer's trick. Don't hide it in your house, hide it outside your house in some publicly accessable area. Yes, it leaves the device more vulnerable but it also leaves you less culpable since it wasn't in your posession.
An electronic device that needs power is trickier, but a wireless device mitigates some of that since you don't even have to touch it to use it. The right kind of device could run for a long time without external power (batteries, solar) or the right hiding place could provide it with power (hidden in wall, behind an outlet or something).
First of all, anyone running a science class who thinks that forcing a bunch of rote formula memorization is "learning" isn't doing very much teaching.
Second of all, everybody that actually makes a living with math and science cheats every day, by referring to reference books, studies, conferring with others, and so on.
We should be teaching people how to *learn* by using reference materials, not waste storage neurons on things that are already written down.
FWIW, when I was in college (circa 1985), the physics teacher allowed us to bring in a 3x5 card with anything we want written on it. We got the guy with the best penmanship in our study group to write ALL the formulas we could think of, complete with notes, examples and so on on a 8x11 sheet of paper which we then reduced on a photocopier to 3x5.
Again, you could call this cheating, or you could give us credit for innovation.
That was pretty good, but it was missing the Death Star from Star Wars. It'd also be interesting to see a US Navy aircraft carrier on there for comparison.
I was surprised at how tiny the Star Trek ships were.
This cracks me endlessly. I have two domains registered, one has a vaguely professional sounding name associated with it and the other has a crypto-anarchist name associated with it.
Both of them get sent junk snail mail, and I've even gotten some sales calls to the crypto-anarchist name.
Sales: I'd like to know if ____ is interested in updating their postage meter to a new Pitney-Bowes Mailmaster 1000.
Me: Actually, ____ is more interested in burning Pitney-Bowes machines in the street as part of our worldwide campaign to forment revolution.
Sales: Well, if you are interested in a better postage meter, will you give us a call?
It's pretty funny. I wonder if people with domains like "fuckoffasshole.com" get called, too...
My take on the cyclical nature of the record industry is that we're at about the same point in the trough as we were in the late 1970s.
The early 1960s were the blossoming of a new rock n roll sound that was in many was fundamentally different. It reached a zenith in about 1970 and just got beaten to death with theme and variation by the late 1970s.
The late 1970s (in the UK) and early 1980s in the US saw the blossoming of another new era in music ("alternative" -- hate the word, but its vague enough to sum it all up). This reached its zenith in the early 90s and has been pounded to death by the same cycle of theme and variation.
Anyway, my theory is that we're at the tail-end of the alternative thing and nothing worthwhile has really come up to replace it, so we're malcontent while we feed on the imitators and leftovers.
None of this is to say there weren't bands that broke moulds or did things out of cycle (the Velvet Underground was astonishingly ahead of their time) or bands that don't manage to be original in a time of dreary lack of originality, but that doesn't also invalidate the general trend.
I'll buy into this troll.
I, like a number of other Americans, have had deep misgivings about the war in Iraq. On one had, Saddam is a really brutal dictator with a proven track record of killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, not even counting the empire-building military misadventures of the Iran-Iraq war and the invasion of Kuwait. And the grab for nukes, chemical and biological weapons which are further chilling due to his past regional aggression.
On the other hand, the US has its own dodgy track record of trying to impose a political and social template that can wreak havoc of its own, and that's when we have been altruistically motivated.
With that in mind, while not entirely satisified we're doing the right thing for the right reasons, at the end of the day ending Saddam's despotic regime seems like the right thing to do, even though it will cost a lot of suffering because it should prevent the truly evil suffering Saddam was imposing on his own people. The Iraqis will at least get a shot at running their own country in a democratic fashion rather than having a dictator impose further rape, murder and torture on them.
That being said, what's the "No War In Iraq" camp's answer to Saddam? That's the part I don't get. If toppling his regime through military force isn't the right answer, what is the right answer? I haven't heard one yet, usually there's a lot of shrill, one-sided political analysis of what the US has done in the past and nothing more. I can't help but think that failure to posit alternatives is complicity in Saddam's crimes.
From what I recall, one thing that was kind of disturbing about the drug was that it worked so well that it appeared to have no side effects. Traditional sleep deprivation (ie, just staying awake and not sleeping) and heavy stimulant usage all have psychosis-like side effects (paranoia, hallucinations, etc) as well as big "crashes" of long sleeps to catch up (further worsened by the use of barbituates or tranquilizers). These are all well-known to be really harsh on your phsyical and mental well-being. Anyone who's ever met a hard-core tweaker can tell you about that (and anyone who has who isn't one can tell you how far away you want to stay from them).
I don't doubt that it might have longer-term psychological effects, but it doesn't appear to have any of the negative physical consequences associated with more familiar forms of sleep avoidance.
What I wonder about, though, is what's the mind of a 40 year old like if they've "added" an extra 2 years of living by using a drug like this? Does your mind age too fast? Do you feel 42? Wiser? More bored, tired, angry, ?
There are probably hidden side-effects from this, but they don't sound like they'd be evident without many years of repeated long-term waking "sessions" to find out.
I've read a few references about a fairly new drug that's been given to narcoleptics and been adopted by others that really seems to be a stay-awake drug that has few known side effects. Unlike stimulants that crank you up, this new drug simply keeps you from getting sleepy.
Non-narcoleptic users reported being able to stay awake for 4-5 days straight without any sleep. When they stop taking the drug, they get tired as per normal and sleep a normal 8 hours and wake up rested and "normal."
I think this is pretty revolutionary -- we talk about free time as being important, but what would it be like to get 10 additional hours a day? Feel like watching that 3 hour DVD, but its 11 PM and you know you'll be shot the next day if you do? What if the bigger worry was whether you had enough DVDs to occupy your time between 2 and 6 AM?
They don't know what the long term psychological impact of sleep deprivation like this would be, but there's no apparent physical problems reported by people who have been up 3-5 days. None of the paranoia and other psychotic behavior typically associated with long-term stimulant use and other sleep deprivation.
The amount of extra free time would be truly amazing, even if you only stayed "up" 2-3 nights a week, you could be gaining the equivilent of 50 days free time a year.
This has been making my life a living hell for the past 2 months, every night my parents go on and check to see if i have any homework and won't let me do anything till it's done
No offense to anyone, but how is Slashdot supposed to have credibility on "adult" issues like security, intellectual property, and technology when a story has some kid whining about his parents not letting him out to play until his homework is done?
I think it's pretty pathetic and this kid is pretty pathetic, too. When I was kid before computers, you didn't get to play outside until your homework was done, either. Mom and dad checked the assignments, grades, etc frequently to make sure you weren't fucking up.
If grades came back low at the end of the semester for anything but gym, freedoms were further curtailed until they went back up. If they went up and stayed up, greater freedoms were granted.
I'm glad they did this because -- *gasp* -- that's a lot how the real world works, except that nobody pays as much attention along the way, it all comes down to the the final exam.
Remember the 68k->PPC changeover at Apple when they used to ship fat binaries, those with code for both PPC and 68K?
Why wouldn't this be an option? Or maybe that weird dynamic recompilation stuff that the Alphas had for running x86 stuff in emulation?
Both today and yesterday, Slashdot has been very slow. It's had me fine-toothing the T1s, the firewall, the web cache and anything else to find the problem. After browsing other sites I'm convinved its just Slashdot. It almost seems like they've lost some of their http front-ends or something.
I was told that we could not send a consultant a gift when he or she was hospitalized or had suffered a family tragedy.
Usually this is derived from a rule that prevents the giving of any gifts to vendors, which makes business sense although not always common sense.
I've had vendors bend over backwards for me in situations where I was in a real jam -- I know they lost money or endured some hardships most vendors wouldn't have, and it would have been nice to have paid for an inexpensive lunch or some other gesture. I'll make up some of it on a personal level out of my own pocket, but only to the tune of a couple of cocktails.
Ya know - your parents toaster that they got when they were married still works, but you go through one every year or two?
I was in a Williams Sonoma store the other day and they had a toaster that was like $120. Hand-made in England, it was made of all these top-notch parts. But it didn't pop up the toast automatically, you had to *manually* lift it up when it was done.
I asked the salesgirl how she expected me to pay this much for a manual toaster. She said it'd outlast me and that my kids'd be able to use it. I told her that I still had a problem with the price -- a functional automatic toaster from Target is $15 and lasts me about 4 years (I eat toast about twice a week). At that rate, I'd have a cheap toaster for 25 years and still have spent less replacing them than the toaster she was trying to sell.
Needless to say I didn't buy it, but be assured, if you're looking for the toaster to end all toasters, they'll sell you one.
Dunno if they'd start a fire or could be made out of less microwave-hostile material, but RFID tags would be even better, because the microwave could read the tag without barcode reading problems.
Make the RFID sturdy enough to withstand being microwaved and give it some kind of temperature probe ability and not only would you get an accurate time auto-set into the microwave, but you could have the food cooked to the ideal serving temperature as well.
Presumably these will be equipped with an 802.11g-spot?
Yes, except you won't know where to find it, and the equipment will always fake a link light, so even if you think you've found it, you can't be sure.
Handhelds supplanting PCs is more about handhelds becoming the functional equivilent of PCs, if not PCs themselves.