moderatorrater said -
Oh, um, yeah, me too. It was totally D&D that kept me from getting the girls.;) Well, actually, it got me the girl - indirectly. The people I played D&D with introduced me to a larger circle of friends, one of whom was the young woman who, 20 years ago, became my wife. (She still is!)
Um - hate to argue, but I must disagree. In C you can cast a pointer to a physical address. Example:
void * device_register = 0x1000032L;
Of course, this only works for a kernel that is completely resident in physical memory, and is running in the most privileged mode of the processor. As a matter of fact, I used this exact technique when I wrote a device driver for an arcane video card with memory-mapped control registers for the Digital "v7m" flavor of Unix that ran on PDP-11's. (This was back in the early '80s.)
Some of you old-timers, or those of you who read lots of classic science fiction, may remember the opening chapter of Robert Heinlein's Stranger In A Strange Land. The (slightly far-fetched) premise was that the first manned mission to Mars was crewed with three (four?) married couples (one of which was a "marriage of convenience" between a Lunar exploration hero and an older female engineering genius), who had been picked for a high "psycho-compatibility index". In the end, an adulterous relationship on-board resulted in the birth of Michael Valentine Smith, the "Man from Mars", and the murder and suicide of two sides of the love triangle. The rest of the humans died off from various causes, M.V. Smith was raised by the Martian natives, and World War III intervened to prevent mankind from sending another expedition until Smith was a young adult (with vast mental powers resulting from speaking Martian as his native tongue).
In my home town (Toledo, Ohio), the county auditor has already done (almost) exactly this! One year (1998?) there was a state Division of Highways "intersection survey" by GPS-equipped vans which photographed each intersection. The auditor arranged to mount an additional camera facing out the side of the van, and photographed each building in the county.
All these are available at the auditor's web site, along with the pertinent ownership, tax, and renovation information.
As a part-time real estate investor, I find this information invaluable; as a resident, I shrug off the privacy concerns (as has been already discussed in this thread).
Do you know how much money it costs to make a David Hasselhoff record even remotely listenable?
Um... at my local grocery store, a sixpack of Heinekin's is about $7; at the bottle store just around the corner, a fifth of Black Velvet is under $20. So for under $35, I can make anything sound remotely listenable.
In addition to these suggestions about an initial consultation, also be aware that there are "legal insurance" plans available in the USA (and possibly other countries). One that I am familiar with is Pre-Paid Legal Services, Inc.. [ObDisclaimer: My wife and I are Marketing Affiliates of theirs.] I'm sure there are many other fine ones.
For a monthly fee of around $25 US, you are given representation by top-flight legal firms in your state, and all the telephone consultation you need.
ObAnecdote: When some legal firm representing our regional power utility sent us a letter claiming that our dog bit a utility worker, I just faxed it to our PPLSI representative, along with my explanation ("The dog hasn't bitten anybody. It's a load of bunk!"), and the problem went away. Could I have afforded to be sued? Nope. Was I sued, or even served with any official paperwork? Nope.
An important extension to this idea is the ease which which the information can be mined today.
Let's extend the telephone directory example: 30 years ago, if I wanted to find everyone who lived on "Main St.", I would have to hire many (error prone) people to laboriously read that book, page by page, and manually copy down the information on the people who matched. Today, get that same phone book on a CD-ROM, use a trivial text search program, and they all appear in seconds.
Or say I wanted to know who had moved away from "Main St." in the last year. Before, have people search the current and previous years' books by hand, make two manual lists, and then manually compare them. Today, import the data into a couple of tables, and do the join. Again, results in seconds instead of weeks.
So I would argue that, while people object to the quantity of information gleaned about them (which arguably is not greater than was available in the near past), what they object to even more is the ease of analysis of that information.
<SEMI_PARANOID_RANT> And this is what the sellers of data collection systems, the owners of huge transnational databases, and the "security apparatus" of our governments ignore or gloss over - they can now draw conclusions about you, your lifestyle, your economic habits, and much more trivially. </SEMI_PARANOID_RANT>
When the 11/780 came out, it made CG possible (without getting 1 grant per image)-- look at the SIGGRAPH proceedings before and then after
1982 or 3.
Ahh, nostalgia! I worked as an undergraduate slave^H^H^H^H^Hassistant at the Ohio State University Computer Graphics Research Group, under Charles Csuri, in 1982-1983. Our main system was an 11/780 running BSD 4.1, with a "Big Frame Buffer" (1024x768, 24bit color and 8bit Z-buffer, IIRC)
Don't laugh, youngster, we did world class work on that machine (just s-l-o-o-o-w-l-y, like about 15 min. compute time per frame). Check out the SIGGRAPH 1983 proceedings for some samples, and look here for more history (along with some vintage images).
I would recommend Perl/Tk. Portable (Win9x, W2K, *nix, at least). Graphical. Gives a (fairly gentle) introduction to object-oriented programming. May even have some utility in the "real" world.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, actually, it got me the girl - indirectly. The people I played D&D with introduced me to a larger circle of friends, one of whom was the young woman who, 20 years ago, became my wife. (She still is!)
Gary Gygax, Hail and Farewell!
Of course, this only works for a kernel that is completely resident in physical memory, and is running in the most privileged mode of the processor. As a matter of fact, I used this exact technique when I wrote a device driver for an arcane video card with memory-mapped control registers for the Digital "v7m" flavor of Unix that ran on PDP-11's. (This was back in the early '80s.)
Some of you old-timers, or those of you who read lots of classic science fiction, may remember the opening chapter of Robert Heinlein's Stranger In A Strange Land. The (slightly far-fetched) premise was that the first manned mission to Mars was crewed with three (four?) married couples (one of which was a "marriage of convenience" between a Lunar exploration hero and an older female engineering genius), who had been picked for a high "psycho-compatibility index". In the end, an adulterous relationship on-board resulted in the birth of Michael Valentine Smith, the "Man from Mars", and the murder and suicide of two sides of the love triangle. The rest of the humans died off from various causes, M.V. Smith was raised by the Martian natives, and World War III intervened to prevent mankind from sending another expedition until Smith was a young adult (with vast mental powers resulting from speaking Martian as his native tongue).
All these are available at the auditor's web site, along with the pertinent ownership, tax, and renovation information.
As a part-time real estate investor, I find this information invaluable; as a resident, I shrug off the privacy concerns (as has been already discussed in this thread).
Um... at my local grocery store, a sixpack of Heinekin's is about $7; at the bottle store just around the corner, a fifth of Black Velvet is under $20. So for under $35, I can make anything sound remotely listenable.
For a monthly fee of around $25 US, you are given representation by top-flight legal firms in your state, and all the telephone consultation you need.
ObAnecdote: When some legal firm representing our regional power utility sent us a letter claiming that our dog bit a utility worker, I just faxed it to our PPLSI representative, along with my explanation ("The dog hasn't bitten anybody. It's a load of bunk!"), and the problem went away. Could I have afforded to be sued? Nope. Was I sued, or even served with any official paperwork? Nope.
Let's extend the telephone directory example: 30 years ago, if I wanted to find everyone who lived on "Main St.", I would have to hire many (error prone) people to laboriously read that book, page by page, and manually copy down the information on the people who matched. Today, get that same phone book on a CD-ROM, use a trivial text search program, and they all appear in seconds.
Or say I wanted to know who had moved away from "Main St." in the last year. Before, have people search the current and previous years' books by hand, make two manual lists, and then manually compare them. Today, import the data into a couple of tables, and do the join. Again, results in seconds instead of weeks.
So I would argue that, while people object to the quantity of information gleaned about them (which arguably is not greater than was available in the near past), what they object to even more is the ease of analysis of that information.
<SEMI_PARANOID_RANT> .
And this is what the sellers of data collection systems, the owners of huge transnational databases, and the "security apparatus" of our governments ignore or gloss over - they can now draw conclusions about you, your lifestyle, your economic habits, and much more trivially
</SEMI_PARANOID_RANT>
Don't laugh, youngster, we did world class work on that machine (just s-l-o-o-o-w-l-y, like about 15 min. compute time per frame). Check out the SIGGRAPH 1983 proceedings for some samples, and look here for more history (along with some vintage images).
I would recommend Perl/Tk. Portable (Win9x, W2K, *nix, at least). Graphical. Gives a (fairly gentle) introduction to object-oriented programming. May even have some utility in the "real" world. ;-)