Seems to me that when a new technology comes along, you should not just ban it by default. You should examine it. Warn people you fear it might be risky, and see if it actually causes a problem.
If it does cause a problem, fix it, or if you have to, ban it, but not before. Like people, the tech should be innocent until proven guilty.
Yes, Segway used some sneaky lobbying but I understand why. The rules for old tech said "no motors on the sidewalk." They developed a whole new kind of motorized vehicle and claim it's very different, so why not give it a shot?
One place I can see the device making a difference is in hilly cities like San Francisco. It could replace the cable car for many people. Yes, it's good for you to hike the hill but for those that live on the top, the hill does reduce the trips they make down to the valley, or they take a car, and this on the sidewalk would be better.
Of course, in many cities outside the USA, the streets are designed for non-cars. In Beijing, the streets mostly have a central car lane, which has a barrier between it and the bike and parking lanes, and then there is the sidewalk.
That's what we should have here, and the Segway could go in the bike lanes no problem. And other electric vehicles too.
And if you look at the photo galleries you will see where I point out only a small percentage of the population goes unclothed. However, that doesn't mean that nude or interestingly costumed using a phone in the middle of the desert doesn't make for an interesting photo. It is true that because of this, there are more nude people in Burning Man photos than there are at Burning Man. But this should not be surprising.
Well, my understanding from those who went in the early days that for several years Burning Man wasn't about anything, not about art or tech but just catharsis, so it had no particular embrace of technology. But very shortly after arriving on the Playa, the theme camps arose, and the art cars, and of course the fire-oriented art which begins the love affair with tech.
Burning Man changes every year, and while the old one is gone the new one isn't so much worse or better but different. I like the marriage of tech and art that it has become devoted to, myself.
Free of rules and laws, yes, much more so than ordinary society, though less than the smaller Burning mans of the past.
But free of Technology? What Burning Mans have you been to? Burning Man is crawling with technology, it's in love with technology, and has been the 7 times I have been.
Trying to build a new startup to reinvent the phone call. Just means I had familiarity with the tech to build the phone, since what I am doing is somewhat orthogonal to VoIP. Hey, I'm always ready for programmers willing to work for lottery tickets (options.)
And I am also chairman of the EFF, a free speech group you may have heard about in/. sometimes. That's even more fun.
Technically it's called a kiosk today, but most people still call it a phone booth. I wanted a real booth, but couldn't find one cheap and locally when I was hunting, so Brent bought the pedestal and kiosk.
It's a Tachyon dish, 2 megabits down, 512k up. The latency is annoying, but you can work around it if the parties know not to speak on top of one another.
There was some mention as I recall about debating solar powering it. Part of the mystique of it was to look like a phone booth sticking out of the desert, yet with no wires, no power going into it. (Alas, we did have to expose a small 802.11 antenna.)
So a solar panel could have been added but it would have been out of place on the image I wanted to create. Indeed, one way to do the panel would be just a bit more powerful than the phone needed, so to recharge the battery a bit, and then just die when the battery ran out, and start again at dawn.
A traditional (superman) booth could have a panel on the roof that nobody would see, though a horizontal panel is not as efficient as one tilted to the latitude.
Actually, I am curious about this. I wasn't here when the page went up. (My mother was desperately calling because her PVR had crashed. Don't we all sysadmin for our families blind over the phone?)
But now that I come to it the traffic is indeed heavy but the load average is less than 1, so I am not sure what failed earlier on.
Actually, a lot of Burning Man is about the marriage of art and technology. There's no fear of tech, and it's proof that there are lots of people who do combine technology and art. That's part of why I go. I do too many projects at Burning Man. Some are pure tech as art (like the phone.) Some are a mixture like digital photography. One I did this year was a star map, which while I used Photoshop to build it, was really 99% graphic arts. And many others are like this.
If political spam is, well not allowed, but actually done as a service by the elections officials as a means to allow registered candidates to, for free, reach registered voters who have not opted out of their communications, I think it can be a good thing.
The great flaw in the political system is how candidates must raise money to buy advertising to push their messages at voters indiscriminately. Mostly TV. We've built a vastly more efficient medium on the internet for doing that. If we can reform campaign finance for real with the internet it could be the biggest thing we do with it.
I notice this paper still uses terms like "vulnerability." Instead of calling these things holes or vulnerabilities, the term I prefer is "window." As in, "Somebody found a window into the IIS web server" and so on.
And certainly against Microsoft. Not hard to root for them against MS. I love my Tivo too, but when the time comes, they are doing things to make me jump to another system like MythTV, Freevo or even commercial systems like BeyondTV etc.
Tivo has:
a) Followed the wishes of hollywood, and made it hard to get video out of the box even though a PC card would have recorded it plainly to disk.
b) Only put in 30 second skip as a hidden feature (that goes away every reboot) and not put in more advanced commercial elimination
c) Put in monitoring technologies that today strip your identity off the data they send up but need not do so forever.
d) Locked up units version 2 and later to make them very difficult to modify or improve.
e) Not provided any software improvements for version 1 owners in quite some time.
f) Designed their new system that does let you move video to a PC to require you to have a dongle! Then it lets you burn it to a DVD where you could read it back, so it's not security, it's just a pain in the ass.
Tivo does a good job but they are on the path to being a lesser citizen. The cable companies are using their monopolies to control what PVR you have with cable in many locations (though cable card holds hope.) The rest of the world may decide to move to open source pvrs.
The bad news on the trademark front
on
The Saga of Katie.com
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Book titles can't be coyprighted and are pretty hard to trademark.
It's pretty hard to get a trademark on a common name like "Katie" and the USPTO made a specific ruling several years ago that adding ".com" to a generic term did not turn it into a unique coined term that could be made into a broad trademark.
Trademarks have to be specific. You can trademark your name, but only in a specific field of business that you are acting in. Two people can own the same trademark in two different fields. Delta Airlines and Delta Hotels, for example. Penguin books and Penguin computing.
Now normally, KJ has one big leg up. The normal test for trademark infringement is "is the public being confused?" And they clearly are. But there was that very specific ruling from the US trademark office about.com names that goes against her. However, I don't know how it applies in the USA.
Book titles are a special case. Two people can use the very same book title! My father wrote a novel "Act of God" and there are several novels by that name, all legit.
Unfortunately, the push on Penguin to "do the right thing" doesn't seem to be working.
I mean it seems cute and all, but what does it buy you that, for example, sending a UDP packet with an access code in it (perhaps specific to the time of day and other parameters) doesn't get you?
His job, he says was to find computer misuse. The boss wasn't misusing the computer, he was possibly misusing his time. If he had been playing solitaire with a deck of cards, would that be misuse of his desk? Of the cards?
No, misuse of the computer, if you ask me, would involve installing spyware and trojans on other people's computer, looking at their files, flooding the network, running a porn site.
This sysadmin scares me, if he doesn't think you are doing your job properly, then even after he has told your boss about it he thinks he can install spyware on your computer and watch you. What other thing that bothers him would make him feel justified in doing crap like this?
I would fire him on the spot, possibly consider pressing charges. While employers do own their computers and thus you don't have as much privacy from your employer as you should have, this guy was not authorized by the employer, and what he did is possibly illegal.
Spinning down the drive is of course doable, but the goal is to stop anything from wanting to access it again, including running programs which were executed from that drive, and future programs that might get invoked.
You can of course boot from the silent medium (network drive or flash) but that's slow and more limited.
Ordinary operations -- displaying slideshows, surfing the web, playing media, running most cronjobs, should not try to wake up the disk.
Is to create totally silent linux boxes out of old laptops for applications where you want this silence. Media servers, living room web browsing station etc.
There are linux distros that will boot and run from CD-rom, but of course they access the noisy cd-rom all the time.
There are network based distros but they go so overboard, they want to get everything from the LAN, which is not so fast and slow to boot up.
In fact, in many cases the hard drive in the laptop is still there, it's just not perfectly silent.
I would like a distro which booted from hard drive (or CD-rom, or floppy) and after loading what it wanted, and mounting network filesystems, shut down the noisy boot device for good, or at least until some unusual activity called for it.
Combining challenge/response with cpu stamps, java and other factors. It allows the problem to change over time, requires no new software at the sender's end (which is the big non-starter) and still allows anonymous mail.
In dense cities. In particular in cities like San Francisco (assuming it can hill climb) where parking is at a premium. A vehicle this size, like a motorcycle, can park perpendicular on the street, in those tiny little slots between driveways that can't fit any regular car and which are fairly plentiful. Or perhaps in designated motorcycle parking.
That makes a big difference in quick city trips, which are actually a lot of trips for urban dwellers. They are far under 20 miles, and the biggest hassle is getting through traffic and parking.
In addition, many people have a single car garage and could fit a small vehicle on the street in those spare short spaces where a full sized vehicle would not make sense.
Of course a motorcycle can also fit these applications though they don't have a cargo area and don't fit the style of many.
It amazes me how expensive these things are
on
70 Megapixel Webcam
·
· Score: 5, Informative
This isn't the first such camera. They call this one a bargain because the PanoScan was around $27,000 for its first model.
Other people have made cameras like this for far less at home. You can make a basic one for $50 in parts. All you need is a single line (or 3 colour line) scanner element as found in most scanners, a camera to put it in with a big lens, and a stepper motor to spin it instead of rolling it along the scanner bed.
You can even spin it by hand if you have something measuring how you turn it to expose each scanline right.
My favourite application was the guy who took pictures of the moon using a single line scanner. He put the scanner into the eyepiece of a fixed telescope. Then, he had the earth rotate, thus passing the scanner over the surface of the moon to record an image.
The reason he could only do the moon is the scanner elements from hand scanners are not that light sensative. They expect a bright light to light up the object.
Of course, 70 megapixels is nothing. I have been doing giant stitched panoramas much bigger than that for a long time though I don't put them that size on the web.
However the first image of burning man on this page is 210 megapixels. You need to see it printed out, which you can if you come to Burning Man.
Burning Man doesn't do it. John Gilmore does it. He provides the Tachyon dish, that he owns. Clif Cox actually brings in and installs the dish, along with a lot of the 802.11 network.
The Playanet folks used to build their own 802.11 network deliberately disconnected from the one connected to John's dish, since some people in the city felt it was better to stay off the internet for a while while at BM. (A sentiment I understand, actually.) But in the end almost nobody used the PlayaNet and everybody was using IBM (Internet Burning Man) so there is only one network now.
John has donated this service at some other conferences he goes to. However, there have been others also bringing satellite internet, though not sharing it with the community.
Last year I and some others brought some VoIP phones and set them up. They worked, though with very long latency.
Any shoe that's not a perfect device is taking power from your stride, compressing and expanding the rubber etc.
The only issue is whether you can get some electricity, rather than just heat, from this work. And not increase the total work in a way that would be noticed.
There were some projects to make battery chargers in shoes I recall, but they couldn't actually get as much power as they had hoped from pezio. Springs probably would be noticed.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems to me that when a new technology comes along, you should not just ban it by default. You should examine it. Warn people you fear it might be risky, and see if it actually causes a problem.
If it does cause a problem, fix it, or if you have to, ban it, but not before. Like people, the tech should be innocent until proven guilty.
Yes, Segway used some sneaky lobbying but I understand why. The rules for old tech said "no motors on the sidewalk." They developed a whole new kind of motorized vehicle and claim it's very different, so why not give it a shot?
One place I can see the device making a difference is in hilly cities like San Francisco. It could replace the cable car for many people. Yes, it's good for you to hike the hill but for those that live on the top, the hill does reduce the trips they make down to the valley, or they take a car, and this on the sidewalk would be better.
Of course, in many cities outside the USA, the streets are designed for non-cars. In Beijing, the streets mostly have a central car lane, which has a barrier between it and the bike and parking lanes, and then there is the sidewalk.
That's what we should have here, and the Segway could go in the bike lanes no problem. And other electric vehicles too.
Finally we can attain the privacy advocate's dream?
No longer will we have to show our driver's licence for all the crazy purposes people ask to see it today.
And if you look at the photo galleries you will see where I point out only a small percentage of the population goes unclothed. However, that doesn't mean that nude or interestingly costumed using a phone in the middle of the desert doesn't make for an interesting photo. It is true that because of this, there are more nude people in Burning Man photos than there are at Burning Man. But this should not be surprising.
Well, my understanding from those who went in the early days that for several years Burning Man wasn't about anything, not about art or tech but just catharsis, so it had no particular embrace of technology. But very shortly after arriving on the Playa, the theme camps arose, and the art cars, and of course the fire-oriented art which begins the love affair with tech.
Burning Man changes every year, and while the old one is gone the new one isn't so much worse or better but different. I like the marriage of tech and art that it has become devoted to, myself.
Free of rules and laws, yes, much more so than ordinary society, though less than the smaller Burning mans of the past.
But free of Technology? What Burning Mans have you been to? Burning Man is crawling with technology, it's in love with technology, and has been the 7 times I have been.
Trying to build a new startup to reinvent the phone call. Just means I had familiarity with the tech to build the phone, since what I am doing is somewhat orthogonal to VoIP. Hey, I'm always ready for programmers willing to work for lottery tickets (options.)
/. sometimes. That's even more fun.
And I am also chairman of the EFF, a free speech group you may have heard about in
It is linked to in the articles. Jeff Pulver's WiSIP phone is what I had.
Technically it's called a kiosk today, but most people still call it a phone booth. I wanted a real booth, but couldn't find one cheap and locally when I was hunting, so Brent bought the pedestal and kiosk.
It's a Tachyon dish, 2 megabits down, 512k up. The latency is annoying, but you can work around it if the parties know not to speak on top of one another.
There was some mention as I recall about debating solar powering it. Part of the mystique of it was to look like a phone booth sticking out of the desert, yet with no wires, no power going into it. (Alas, we did have to expose a small 802.11 antenna.)
So a solar panel could have been added but it would have been out of place on the image I wanted to create. Indeed, one way to do the panel would be just a bit more powerful than the phone needed, so to recharge the battery a bit, and then just die when the battery ran out, and start again at dawn.
A traditional (superman) booth could have a panel on the roof that nobody would see, though a horizontal panel is not as efficient as one tilted to the latitude.
Actually, I am curious about this. I wasn't here when the page went up. (My mother was desperately calling because her PVR had crashed. Don't we all sysadmin for our families blind over the phone?)
But now that I come to it the traffic is indeed heavy but the load average is less than 1, so I am not sure what failed earlier on.
Actually, a lot of Burning Man is about the marriage of art and technology. There's no fear of tech, and it's proof that there are lots of people who do combine technology and art. That's part of why I go. I do too many projects at Burning Man. Some are pure tech as art (like the phone.) Some are a mixture like digital photography. One I did this year was a star map, which while I used Photoshop to build it, was really 99% graphic arts. And many others are like this.
If political spam is, well not allowed, but actually done as a service by the elections officials as a means to allow registered candidates to, for free, reach registered voters who have not opted out of their communications, I think it can be a good thing.
The great flaw in the political system is how candidates must raise money to buy advertising to push their messages at voters indiscriminately. Mostly TV. We've built a vastly more efficient medium on the internet for doing that. If we can reform campaign finance for real with the internet it could be the biggest thing we do with it.
More details in this blog entry on political spam
Ok, a funny joke, but still.
I notice this paper still uses terms like "vulnerability." Instead of calling these things holes or vulnerabilities, the term I prefer is "window." As in, "Somebody found a window into the IIS web server" and so on.
The plural is left as an exercise to the reader.
And certainly against Microsoft. Not hard to root for them against MS. I love my Tivo too, but when the time comes, they are doing things to make me jump to another system like MythTV, Freevo or even commercial systems like BeyondTV etc.
Tivo has:
a) Followed the wishes of hollywood, and made it hard to get video out of the box even though a PC card would have recorded it plainly to disk.
b) Only put in 30 second skip as a hidden feature (that goes away every reboot) and not put in more advanced commercial elimination
c) Put in monitoring technologies that today strip your identity off the data they send up but need not do so forever.
d) Locked up units version 2 and later to make them very difficult to modify or improve.
e) Not provided any software improvements for version 1 owners in quite some time.
f) Designed their new system that does let you move video to a PC to require you to have a dongle! Then it lets you burn it to a DVD where you could read it back, so it's not security, it's just a pain in the ass.
Tivo does a good job but they are on the path to being a lesser citizen. The cable companies are using their monopolies to control what PVR you have with cable in many locations (though cable card holds hope.) The rest of the world may decide to move to open source pvrs.
Book titles can't be coyprighted and are pretty hard to trademark.
.com names that goes against her. However, I don't know how it applies in the USA.
It's pretty hard to get a trademark on a common name like "Katie" and the USPTO made a specific ruling several years ago that adding ".com" to a generic term did not turn it into a unique coined term that could be made into a broad trademark.
Trademarks have to be specific. You can trademark your name, but only in a specific field of business that you are acting in. Two people can own the same trademark in two different fields. Delta Airlines and Delta Hotels, for
example. Penguin books and Penguin computing.
Now normally, KJ has one big leg up. The normal test for trademark infringement is "is the public being confused?" And they clearly are. But there was that very specific ruling from the US trademark office about
Book titles are a special case. Two people can use the very same book title! My father wrote a novel "Act of God" and there are several novels by that name, all legit.
Unfortunately, the push on Penguin to "do the right thing" doesn't seem to be working.
I mean it seems cute and all, but what does it buy you that, for example, sending a UDP packet with an access code in it (perhaps specific to the time of day and other parameters) doesn't get you?
His job, he says was to find computer misuse. The boss wasn't misusing the computer, he was possibly misusing his time. If he had been playing solitaire with a deck of cards, would that be misuse of his desk? Of the cards?
No, misuse of the computer, if you ask me, would involve installing spyware and trojans on other people's computer, looking at their files, flooding the network, running a porn site.
This sysadmin scares me, if he doesn't think you are doing your job properly, then even after he has told your boss about it he thinks he can install spyware on your computer and watch you. What other thing that bothers him would make him feel justified in doing crap like this?
I would fire him on the spot, possibly consider pressing charges. While employers do own their computers and thus you don't have as much privacy from your employer as you should have, this guy was not authorized by the employer, and what he did is possibly illegal.
Spinning down the drive is of course doable, but the goal is to stop anything from wanting to access it again, including running programs which were executed from that drive, and future programs that might get invoked.
You can of course boot from the silent medium (network drive or flash) but that's slow and more limited.
Ordinary operations -- displaying slideshows, surfing the web, playing media, running most cronjobs, should not try to wake up the disk.
Is to create totally silent linux boxes out of old laptops for applications where you want this silence. Media servers, living room web browsing station etc.
There are linux distros that will boot and run from CD-rom, but of course they access the noisy cd-rom all the time.
There are network based distros but they go so overboard, they want to get everything from the LAN, which is not so fast and slow to boot up.
In fact, in many cases the hard drive in the laptop is still there, it's just not perfectly silent.
I would like a distro which booted from hard drive (or CD-rom, or floppy) and after loading what it wanted, and mounting network filesystems, shut down the noisy boot device for good, or at least until some unusual activity called for it.
Combining challenge/response with cpu stamps, java and other factors. It allows the problem to change over time, requires no new software at the sender's end (which is the big non-starter) and still allows anonymous mail.
It's at this page on cpu stamps and challenge response.
In dense cities. In particular in cities like San Francisco (assuming it can hill climb) where parking is at a premium. A vehicle this size, like a motorcycle, can park perpendicular on the street, in those tiny little slots between driveways that can't fit any regular car and which are fairly plentiful. Or perhaps in designated motorcycle parking.
That makes a big difference in quick city trips, which are actually a lot of trips for urban dwellers. They are far under 20 miles, and the biggest hassle is getting through traffic and parking.
In addition, many people have a single car garage and could fit a small vehicle on the street in those spare short spaces where a full sized vehicle would not make sense.
Of course a motorcycle can also fit these applications though they don't have a cargo area and don't fit the style of many.
This isn't the first such camera. They call this one a bargain because the PanoScan was around $27,000 for its first model.
Other people have made cameras like this for far less at home. You can make a basic one for $50 in parts. All you need is a single line (or 3 colour line) scanner element as found in most scanners, a camera to put it in with a big lens, and a stepper motor to spin it instead of rolling it along the scanner bed.
You can even spin it by hand if you have something measuring how you turn it to expose each scanline right.
Check out this guy who built one on the cheap.
My favourite application was the guy who took pictures of the moon using a single line scanner. He put the scanner into the eyepiece of a fixed telescope. Then, he had the earth rotate, thus passing the scanner over the surface of the moon to record an image.
The reason he could only do the moon is the scanner elements from hand scanners are not that light sensative. They expect a bright light to light up the object.
Of course, 70 megapixels is nothing. I have been doing giant stitched panoramas much bigger than that for a long time though I don't put them that size on the web.
However the first image of burning man on this page is 210 megapixels. You need to see it printed out, which you can if you come to Burning Man.
Burning Man doesn't do it. John Gilmore does it. He provides the Tachyon dish, that he owns. Clif Cox actually brings in and installs the dish, along with a lot of the 802.11 network.
The Playanet folks used to build their own 802.11 network deliberately disconnected from the one connected to John's dish, since some people in the city felt it was better to stay off the internet for a while while at BM. (A sentiment I understand, actually.) But in the end almost nobody used the PlayaNet and everybody was using IBM (Internet Burning Man) so there is only one network now.
John has donated this service at some other conferences he goes to. However, there have been others also bringing satellite internet, though not sharing it with the community.
Last year I and some others brought some VoIP phones and set them up. They worked, though with very long latency.
Any shoe that's not a perfect device is taking power from your stride, compressing and expanding the rubber etc.
The only issue is whether you can get some electricity, rather than just heat, from this work. And not increase the total work in a way that would be noticed.
There were some projects to make battery chargers in shoes I recall, but they couldn't actually get as much power as they had hoped from pezio. Springs probably would be noticed.