So this program does what now? If I look at the images in the article, I'd interpret them as showing the dude's *beard* was added afterwards. That's some serious pixar-render-farm shit that I doubt they're doing in a cave in Pakistan.
There are already over 2B active cellphones in the world, and there will be more by the end of 2008... an interesting comparison of market penetration.
If you respond to one of those messages with "STOP" they'll opt you out. Sprint's policy is to have opt-out instructions in all outbound marketing SMS; if you call them to complain they'll generally take it pretty seriously.
You'd think someone would RTFA before posting: the librarian was at public library in Newton, MA, not at Brandeis. There's a big difference when the library in question belongs to 'the people'. Also, mod -1 for old news.
So this whole "an execution saves us $100M" concept is kind of troubling -- it's based on estimates that an execution deters a certain number of murders. Say, 10, at $10M per murdered person.
Some people also estimate that an execution deters zero murders -- after all, the vast majority are committed in the heat of the moment.
If zero murders are prevented by execution, then each execution really costs us millions of dollars in fees for a constitutionally-entitled defense and appeal.
So the comparison at the heart of this blather is potentially bogus, as are many monetary estimates of impact of things like piracy (and to a lesser degree, malicious hackers).
What you're really talking about with HDTV is a higher resolution signal -- 1080 lines instead of 520 (forget the exact figure). So in theory it doesn't matter whetether you're sending this through a projector or a regular CRT, or plasma, or lcd rear-projector.
I agree that projectors are a great way to go -- even if the resolution isn't as good, you can make the picure *really* huge in a big (and dark) enough room. And if your projector can handle the resolution then you can have an HDTV signal on your projector, assuming you have a signal coming in over broadcast or cable, and an HDTV tuner.
I just saw a true HDTV signal on an HDTV-capable tv for the first time last week. It rocks. Better-looking than DVD by a long shot.
When I was in college I decided to give all my old Lego to some young cousins who would have more time to appreciate them than I did. So I packed them all up in a big suitcase and flew out to visit. En route, the suitcase was affixed with a big luggage tag.
When I got there, my cousin, who was probably about five, looked at the suitcase and said "Hey! It says LEGO on it!!". Sure enough -- the routing code printed on the tag in big letters was 0637 -- "LEGO" upside down.
I love it when randomness works in interesting ways.
This is categorically false. The same control system which is handling the cell handoff is the same control system which is sending messages to the billing system.
I should have phrased my post more clearly to point out that the cell-skipping aspect was somewhat peripheral to the main point that these guys were trying to make to me, which was that in their experience, cellphones work just fine from an airplane at heights they've flown at, and they don't cause any of the electronics typically used in commercial or civilian aviation to act strangely. I have no way of verifying any of these claims independently, though I'd like to give it a shot if anyone wants to take me for a spin in their plane.
The cell-skipping thing certainly has that ring of urban legend to it -- it sounds plausible enough to be passed around by a bunch of pilots (not to mention modded up on/.) who are unfamiliar with the mechanics of cellular transmission.
Along the same lines, could problems with billing arise if the celluar signal is being handled by a series of non-adjacent cells? Or does the 'cell-to-cell' layer deal with large groups of cells, rather than just those immediately adjacent to each other? What about the 'overloading the network' thing that was mentioned in another post?
I've talked to a number of pilots (three) with both commercial and private experience who have confirmed this issue -- at the proper altitude and speed, your signal bounces from one cell to the next slow enough to keep up with a call, but fast enough to avoid being billed. They had used phones successfully at general avation flights/speeds, which are generally lower & slower than commercial jets. It's worth noting that these guys were flying planes with pretty sophisticated electronics.
As far as safety issues go, they told me there was a *single* case where a cellphone *may* have been involved, and the ban was a typical FAA knee-jerk reaction. Not that I would advocate toying around with safety issues on commercial aircraft, but it seems like something they could test effectively, and from what I can tell, they have not.
While not exactly at the front of the pack on wireless, Dartmouth has had a number of interesting contributions to the field:
- DCTS/DTSS: Dartmouth developed an early timesharing system in the late 60's
- BASIC: Kemeney & Kurtz, a pair of professors, wrote Beginner's All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code in 1964. It's easy to dismiss BASIC, but a lot of people got their start with it.
- Synclavier: Jon Appelton, currently the head of Dartmouth's electroacoustic music program, developed this digital synth in '78 at New England Digital. It was widely used through the 90's.
- Networked Campus: Dartmouth adopted a "port for every pillow" philosophy in 1984 and wired the whole campus with appletalk. They got a lot of mileage out of that network.
- Required computers: Dartmouth has mandated computer ownership for all students since (i think) the class of '91. Having it mandatory means students can get financial aid for their computers, if necessary
- blitzmail: dartmouth wrote an email program in '84 (?). nothing amazing or groundbreaking, but the the widespread adoption of "blitz" in combination with the mandatory computers and ubiquitous networking had a huge effect on the campus social scene, and did a lot to bring dartmouth grads into the information age.
I developed a website for a real estate agency to sell lofts in downtown Boston. Showcasing the properties online allows a prospective buyer to check the place out before making an appointment to see it, which reduces the amount of time wasted for everyone involved.
The target audience for these properties tend to be net-savvy, so this clearly isn't representative of the market as a whole, but I think it's an indicator of where things will go.
I've volunteered to teach computers on a couple of occasions, for both kids and adults. My favorite demo is to bring the guts of an old laptop in a paper bag, dump them out on a table, and explain all the components as I plug them into each other. I've always gotten a big "wow!" when I hit the power at the end and it boots up.
Also, a lot of non-technical people are unaware that "computer" was originally the job description of a human -- women (mostly) who sat around doing trig to calculate artillery trajectories, or math for encryption, or whatever.
The frustrating and misguided attitude towards open source tools I've seen at a number of large companies and consulting firms runs something like this: there are no companies behind these tools, and we don't pay for them, therefore there's no support them, and we can't sue anyone if the shit hits the fan. Ergo, they're useless.
It's this kind of attitude you need to overcome as much as the actual cost/benefit stuff.
It's great to see my EFF membership dues at work here. I had wondered why Felten backed off so quickly the first time around -- looks like they may have been waiting to get their ducks in line, legally speaking.
What's more, the "speech" in question was mere anonymous insults: the lowest form of speech you can get (excluding pornography and flag burning, which aren't even speech).
Flag burning has been protected by the supreme court. That's why there's a big push to amend the constitution to outlaw it.
Wow, i *love* my eTrex! I mostly use it for driving around, and i've been able to find some great shortcuts.
Cool bonus: "open source", roll-your-own accessories for it. Check out pfranc.com -- this guy will send you adapters that he presses in his home plastic molding system on the honor system. You can then use the adapters to make serial cables for half the cost of the retail version. He calls it the first "sharehardware" project.
In the big North American cities, there are pages of classified ads that have nothing but companies' names.
I live in a big north american city, and read newspapers from some others, but haven't seen classifieds that just have company names in them. Do you have any examples? This just strikes me as odd.
Re:Been thinking about morality lately
on
Congress@Work
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· Score: 1
Dr. Laura's degree is in physiology. She has little or no professional training in counselling or any related field. If you're interested in finding out why some people consider her to be an abusive hypocrite, check out stop dr. laura. (or with the catchy flash intro)
Contacting your representative...
on
Congress@Work
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· Score: 2
If this pisses you off, do something. If you live in the US, take a few minutes to fax, write or call your representative. Don't email them unless you know for certain that your rep reads *all* email. Reps' email inboxes are routinely flooded by groups about particular issues, and many of them warn that they just don't read any email at all.
I know it's archaic, and a big pain in the ass, but these ppl take phonecalls and faxes seriously. There's a fleet of kiss-ass little interns who keep a running tally of letters, faxes and calls. (My rep sends me back personalized, hand-signed form letters for each different issue)
Constituent opinion (particularly people in their districts) matters, and you can believe that the "pro-family", anti-freedom forces are lining up to support bills like this one. Those are folks that use the phone and fax.
Don't let the bad guys get the upper hand.
Maybe someone with a little spare time can google up an online fax-your-rep service for everyone here. Does EFF have one?
IANAL, but my understanding of US law from a little googling (see this chat with a lawyer) is this: breaking & entering in the real world is "1) entering, 2) a private dwelling, 3) at night, 4) with intent to remove property"
US Internet law is based on that. The two key ideas are authorization and intent. Authorization is obviously really murky, but the burden is on you. I doubt that any lawyer, judge, or cop would consider connecting to someone's wide open database to be authorized, regarless what would seem to be common sense. And intent? You know what your intent is, but but everyone else is going to assume the worst.
If you're in the US, the risk of your actions being considered criminal is real. The FBI does not have a sense of humor, and doesn't care what your intentions are. Federal judges can't give you a lighter sentence because you mean well.
Consider this: what if your actions are construed as destructive or intrusive, just through some freak accident because someone's having a bad day, or there's an asshole or an idiot in the client's company or in the consulting firm that's leaving everything wide open?
Do you have the time or the money to explain yourself to some feds? Multiply some small but non-zero probability factor by several hundred thousand dollars plus whatever value you'd assign to a year in prison. That's how you should do the cost/benefit analysis.
I'm advocating a grim, "being nice gets you nowhere" sort of position, but the potential downside to the situation is horrible. There's an Assistant US Attorney somewhere itching to make a name for him or herself by prosecuting a "hacker" case. Don't put yourself in a position where you could make it onto their radar screen. The deck is stacked completely in their favor. Read a register article about the feds' tactics if you want get scared.
I use my @alum.my_university.edu account when job hunting b/c it's one of those so-called "elite" name brand schools, and I'm always looking for that extra edge when trying to score a job... you never know when it's going to catch someone's eye.
Another advantage is that it makes it easy to remember how to reach some of my friends.
Also, in four years i've had no spam on the account, school-related or otherwise, that I'm not directly responsible for. Kind of surprising, really, when you consider how aggresive the school is at exploiting other methods of begging for cash.
Slashdot Mirror
So this program does what now? If I look at the images in the article, I'd interpret them as showing the dude's *beard* was added afterwards. That's some serious pixar-render-farm shit that I doubt they're doing in a cave in Pakistan.
No two ways about it. Especially the old-school players like VZW, who have that MaBell attitude.
There are already over 2B active cellphones in the world, and there will be more by the end of 2008... an interesting comparison of market penetration.
If you respond to one of those messages with "STOP" they'll opt you out. Sprint's policy is to have opt-out instructions in all outbound marketing SMS; if you call them to complain they'll generally take it pretty seriously.
You'd think someone would RTFA before posting: the librarian was at public library in Newton, MA, not at Brandeis. There's a big difference when the library in question belongs to 'the people'. Also, mod -1 for old news.
So this whole "an execution saves us $100M" concept is kind of troubling -- it's based on estimates that an execution deters a certain number of murders. Say, 10, at $10M per murdered person.
Some people also estimate that an execution deters zero murders -- after all, the vast majority are committed in the heat of the moment.
If zero murders are prevented by execution, then each execution really costs us millions of dollars in fees for a constitutionally-entitled defense and appeal.
So the comparison at the heart of this blather is potentially bogus, as are many monetary estimates of impact of things like piracy (and to a lesser degree, malicious hackers).
What you're really talking about with HDTV is a higher resolution signal -- 1080 lines instead of 520 (forget the exact figure). So in theory it doesn't matter whetether you're sending this through a projector or a regular CRT, or plasma, or lcd rear-projector.
I agree that projectors are a great way to go -- even if the resolution isn't as good, you can make the picure *really* huge in a big (and dark) enough room. And if your projector can handle the resolution then you can have an HDTV signal on your projector, assuming you have a signal coming in over broadcast or cable, and an HDTV tuner.
I just saw a true HDTV signal on an HDTV-capable tv for the first time last week. It rocks. Better-looking than DVD by a long shot.
Like my parents used to say... "It's not that we're so angry that you did [insert bad thing here], it's that you lied to us about it.
When I was in college I decided to give all my old Lego to some young cousins who would have more time to appreciate them than I did. So I packed them all up in a big suitcase and flew out to visit. En route, the suitcase was affixed with a big luggage tag.
When I got there, my cousin, who was probably about five, looked at the suitcase and said "Hey! It says LEGO on it!!". Sure enough -- the routing code printed on the tag in big letters was 0637 -- "LEGO" upside down.
I love it when randomness works in interesting ways.
Come on -- haven't they been hit by slashdot before?
I should have phrased my post more clearly to point out that the cell-skipping aspect was somewhat peripheral to the main point that these guys were trying to make to me, which was that in their experience, cellphones work just fine from an airplane at heights they've flown at, and they don't cause any of the electronics typically used in commercial or civilian aviation to act strangely. I have no way of verifying any of these claims independently, though I'd like to give it a shot if anyone wants to take me for a spin in their plane.
The cell-skipping thing certainly has that ring of urban legend to it -- it sounds plausible enough to be passed around by a bunch of pilots (not to mention modded up on /.) who are unfamiliar with the mechanics of cellular transmission.
Along the same lines, could problems with billing arise if the celluar signal is being handled by a series of non-adjacent cells? Or does the 'cell-to-cell' layer deal with large groups of cells, rather than just those immediately adjacent to each other? What about the 'overloading the network' thing that was mentioned in another post?
I've talked to a number of pilots (three) with both commercial and private experience who have confirmed this issue -- at the proper altitude and speed, your signal bounces from one cell to the next slow enough to keep up with a call, but fast enough to avoid being billed. They had used phones successfully at general avation flights/speeds, which are generally lower & slower than commercial jets. It's worth noting that these guys were flying planes with pretty sophisticated electronics.
As far as safety issues go, they told me there was a *single* case where a cellphone *may* have been involved, and the ban was a typical FAA knee-jerk reaction. Not that I would advocate toying around with safety issues on commercial aircraft, but it seems like something they could test effectively, and from what I can tell, they have not.
While not exactly at the front of the pack on wireless, Dartmouth has had a number of interesting contributions to the field:
- DCTS/DTSS: Dartmouth developed an early timesharing system in the late 60's
- BASIC: Kemeney & Kurtz, a pair of professors, wrote Beginner's All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code in 1964. It's easy to dismiss BASIC, but a lot of people got their start with it.
- Synclavier: Jon Appelton, currently the head of Dartmouth's electroacoustic music program, developed this digital synth in '78 at New England Digital. It was widely used through the 90's.
- Networked Campus: Dartmouth adopted a "port for every pillow" philosophy in 1984 and wired the whole campus with appletalk. They got a lot of mileage out of that network.
- Required computers: Dartmouth has mandated computer ownership for all students since (i think) the class of '91. Having it mandatory means students can get financial aid for their computers, if necessary
- blitzmail: dartmouth wrote an email program in '84 (?). nothing amazing or groundbreaking, but the the widespread adoption of "blitz" in combination with the mandatory computers and ubiquitous networking had a huge effect on the campus social scene, and did a lot to bring dartmouth grads into the information age.
I'm sure there's more i'm missing here... anyone?
the site is here: www.loftsboston.com
The target audience for these properties tend to be net-savvy, so this clearly isn't representative of the market as a whole, but I think it's an indicator of where things will go.
Also, a lot of non-technical people are unaware that "computer" was originally the job description of a human -- women (mostly) who sat around doing trig to calculate artillery trajectories, or math for encryption, or whatever.
It's this kind of attitude you need to overcome as much as the actual cost/benefit stuff.
I hope this is successful.
Flag burning has been protected by the supreme court. That's why there's a big push to amend the constitution to outlaw it.
Cool bonus: "open source", roll-your-own accessories for it. Check out pfranc.com -- this guy will send you adapters that he presses in his home plastic molding system on the honor system. You can then use the adapters to make serial cables for half the cost of the retail version. He calls it the first "sharehardware" project.
I live in a big north american city, and read newspapers from some others, but haven't seen classifieds that just have company names in them. Do you have any examples? This just strikes me as odd.
Dr. Laura's degree is in physiology. She has little or no professional training in counselling or any related field. If you're interested in finding out why some people consider her to be an abusive hypocrite, check out stop dr. laura. (or with the catchy flash intro)
I know it's archaic, and a big pain in the ass, but these ppl take phonecalls and faxes seriously. There's a fleet of kiss-ass little interns who keep a running tally of letters, faxes and calls. (My rep sends me back personalized, hand-signed form letters for each different issue)
Constituent opinion (particularly people in their districts) matters, and you can believe that the "pro-family", anti-freedom forces are lining up to support bills like this one. Those are folks that use the phone and fax.
Don't let the bad guys get the upper hand.
Maybe someone with a little spare time can google up an online fax-your-rep service for everyone here. Does EFF have one?
US Internet law is based on that. The two key ideas are authorization and intent. Authorization is obviously really murky, but the burden is on you. I doubt that any lawyer, judge, or cop would consider connecting to someone's wide open database to be authorized, regarless what would seem to be common sense. And intent? You know what your intent is, but but everyone else is going to assume the worst.
Consider this: what if your actions are construed as destructive or intrusive, just through some freak accident because someone's having a bad day, or there's an asshole or an idiot in the client's company or in the consulting firm that's leaving everything wide open?
Do you have the time or the money to explain yourself to some feds? Multiply some small but non-zero probability factor by several hundred thousand dollars plus whatever value you'd assign to a year in prison. That's how you should do the cost/benefit analysis.
I'm advocating a grim, "being nice gets you nowhere" sort of position, but the potential downside to the situation is horrible. There's an Assistant US Attorney somewhere itching to make a name for him or herself by prosecuting a "hacker" case. Don't put yourself in a position where you could make it onto their radar screen. The deck is stacked completely in their favor. Read a register article about the feds' tactics if you want get scared.
Watch your ass if you want to be nice.
Another advantage is that it makes it easy to remember how to reach some of my friends.
Also, in four years i've had no spam on the account, school-related or otherwise, that I'm not directly responsible for. Kind of surprising, really, when you consider how aggresive the school is at exploiting other methods of begging for cash.