but it doesn't sound like there's anything earth-shatteringly new here. I'm guessing there will be at least a few 'prior art' challenges to the patents.
...Turnbull’s government has also emphasized science that can be easily commercialized...
It seems to me that climate scientists would be a key part of any strategies, techniques, and technologies that are developed to either counteract or accommodate global warming. Future work in this area will be heavily commercialized, just as wind and solar power and electric vehicles are commercialized today. Sounds like Turnbull is thumbing his nose at a big economic opportunity. Not to mention that, in some sense, he seems to be selling out his fellow human beings for a bit of short-term political capital. Way to make your country's economy more durable, Mr. Turnbull!
Much as I hate Facebook, I strongly doubt this is FB-specific. I've experienced the same thing on other sites - YouTube and Slashdot to name just two. I suspect that any 'chewing gum for the eyes' kind of activity is the same, especially when it's passive absorption of infotainment provided by a blue-weighted light source such as the typical computer monitor.
Where are my mod points when I need them! I set out to mention indoctrination, and there you've already gone and done it for me.
I admire your sangfroid - you find the indoctrination 'unsettling', whereas I find it downright disturbing and more than a little bit scary.
Obligatory John Taylor Gatto quote: "...school has become the replacement for church, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith".
The last time I checked, fraud, extortion, and theft were all felonies. So stop all the chest-thumping and all the "OMG! the FCC!" nattering, and just enforce the fucking laws fer chrissake. Time to stop pretending that various service providers are somehow different than individuals who commit the same crimes. A corporation is a person before the law? Alright then, treat the corporations like persons - but go ALL the way, and start throwing asses in jails when and where appropriate. Some might say, "but in this case, we can only jail part of the person". I'm fine with that - how 'bout the head? Let's haul CEOs off in handcuffs. That'll cause a lot of second thoughts next time 'ripping off your own customers' is suggested as a viable business model.
You are right It should be 1.0936^(-11) Football fields.
That will get rid of any cultural confusion.
Not if you're Canadian, you insensitive clod!:) Our football fields are 110 yards long, so for us it's 9.9418^(-12) football fields. Then there are soccer-type 'football fields'...
What plugin does one need this time to install in order to maintain the functionality from previous FF?
As other posters have noted, the 'plugin' you require is Pale Moon. Install it into your OS, not into Firefox. Once that's done, Firefox becomes entirely irrelevant.
Locking a couple of executives up for endangering national security might be the single best thing anyone could do to prevent this type of thing in the future.
so I'll ask the question. Aren't there USB cameras available with sufficiently high resolution and sufficient light sensitivity to do the job? If so, couldn't one install a secure configuration of Linux on an SBC, (a Raspberry Pi perhaps), pack it into a suitable enclosure, and call the job done?
Granted, the camera might take a little longer to boot up than a purpose-built one, but in many cases that won't be much of a disadvantage. Also, non-geeks aren't going to put these things together. So maybe there's a business opportunity here to package a customized OpenWRT-based SBC with an off-the-shelf USB camera and sell 'truly secure' security cameras? Just a thought...
Keyboards should be replaced yearly given how disgusting they are.
With the right technique and knowledge, keyboards can be thoroughly cleaned. And by "cleaned", I mean soap-and-water - lots and lots of water, as in total immersion. I've washed several - both desktop and laptop keyboards - and they all worked fine afterwards. Besides, at more than a hundred bucks on sale, I'm not anxious to discard a keyboard because of a bit of grunge.
"The Machine Stops" by E.M Forster, ( http://archive.ncsa.illinois.e...), and "The Revolt of the Pedestrians" by David H. Keller. Extreme scenarios to be sure, but entertaining reading, and entirely relevant to the current discussion.
Lesson of the day... probably should have bought the honeywell.
Lesson of the day... probably should have connected an old bimetallic mercury switch thermostat in parallel with the IOT unit, set to 10 degrees Celsius or so... "Doesn't go that low", you say? Then simply tilt the thermostat a bit...
Old, simple, no-active-component technologies still have their place, even if only as a fail-safe for shiny-but-vulnerable microcontroller-based gadgets.
I'm guessing that the quadraphonic decoder you built was some version of the Dynaquad - am I correct? (I actually have a Dynaquad-encoded copy of The Beach Boys album 'Surf's Up'). And I think the link you provided is David Hafler's version of the same basic concept. Either one of these decoders could do fascinating things with even normal stereo recordings. I did a LOT of playing around with passive decoding in the early-to-mid-70's when I was a teenager - I just loved playing Dark Side of the Moon...
I also did some satisfying work on active versions of Hafler/Dynaquad decoders. The sound is both better and more amenable to adjustment. All you need are one or two decent quad op-amps, some capacitors and resistors, a solderless breadboard, a power supply of 18 volts or so, and an extra power amp or receiver with accompanying speakers. The op-amps are configured to provide the sum of the two stereo channels, (mono), and the difference between the two stereo channels, (L-R or R-L depending on your phasing). The two stereo channels are fed to one stereo amp and speakers, and the sum and difference outputs from the breadboard are fed to the other stereo amp and speakers. This setup prevents electrical interaction and impedance irregularities which occur in a fully passive setup like that in the link you provided, so the speakers sound better. And with separate volume, balance, and tone controls, you can more easily tailor the sound to your liking. Also, with extra op-amps it's easy to have both L-R and R-L. (On some recordings, having both of these can produce some interesting results). It's cheap, it's pretty easy, it uses 'junk' amps and speakers to good advantage, and it's lots of fun. At least, it's lots of fun for people like you and me...:) Plus, hooking everything up, troubleshooting any errors or other problems, tweaking the sound, and listening to the differences should keep the 'smart kids' interested for a while.
I got some new Polk bookshelf speakers just before Christmas, and I have several amps and additional pairs of speakers. It might just be time to start playing with passive 'quad' decoding again!
the solution to this is to completely decentralize our power, virtually destroying "the grid" by putting solar+battery at every home...
Thank you! I jumped on here to say pretty much the same thing. I'd just like to add that we can have our cake and eat it too. We can disconnect small local grids from the larger grids and use them to pool the local outputs from wind, solar, and possibly even nuclear generation. That way we can have independence down to the residence level, while being able to take advantage of the benefits of sharing power when necessary.
Another thing to consider is the dumpster-sized reactors that can provide power for 10K to 20K homes, or for factories. I don't love nuclear, but I also don't love AGW, and at least in the short term, nukes may be a necessary evil for rapidly cutting greenhouse gas emissions. (That, and foregoing cattle as a food source - but I digress).
The point being that continental power grids are dinosaurs and we need to hasten their extinction. We have much better alternatives at hand, and will develop even better ones at a faster rate if we get off our complacent asses and start using to full advantage the techniques and technologies currently available. Right now we're staring at an awesome and wildly varied smorgasbord of potentially planet-saving options while we continue to chow down on Big Macs.
He didn't put his own safety on the line to go help out his buddies, he just leant slightly on the joystick and told them what he saw.
Some operators actually launch missiles at people whom they've been observing for a while - it's not all just recon work.
A medal is supposed to be for actions performed, not for how warm and fuzzy you make others. Handing them out like tic tacs makes any medal worth less.
It turns out that, (just as with first responders such as paramedics), PTSD is common among drone operators. I have no opinion on whether the operators deserve medals - I'm not a military kind of guy, and I think we should be working harder on ways to stop wars altogether. But I don't think it's either fair or practical to ignore or minimize the psychological trauma suffered by those members of the military who, in 'service to their country', spy on people from afar and then kill them with the press of a button. Those who participate directly in killing at the behest of their government deserve at least some recognition of the lifelong emotional damage they're often subjected to.
It's good to know that Mozilla is trying to make lemonade with its lemon. But I don't want FFOS on a late-to-the-party SBC when I have a few Raspberry Pi boards lying around and will soon have an Odroid and an Arduino Micro as well.
No, what I want FFOS on is the viable smartphone they promised when FFOS was launched, so I can have some control over my own phone. I'm not interested in some lame IOT SBC, thanks just the same.
It's not even computer literacy. Especially since pair programming won't feed their inner geek, is impossible to fairly grade (who did more work, etc) and will lead to kids who can't grasp the concept pairing with the little egomaniacal sh*ts and hating it after hearing "like this, dummy" too many times.
It may not be computer literacy, and the metrics it generates may well be useless; but, (and I say this with only the smallest trace of exaggeration), it seems like a pretty good introduction to and indoctrination into the ways of the corporate workplace...
Wealth isn't just money - it also exists in things such as manufacturing efficiency. So when humans are replaced by robots, (for example), the owners of the factory have two choices - scooping all of the extra profits and leaving the displaced workers to fend for themselves, or sharing the profits with the workers who helped the owners get to the position where they could automate. With the huge efficiency increases in manufacturing and processing capacity that we are experiencing, it strikes me that we could keep everyone employed for 10 to 30 hours a week and all have very nice, fulfilling, and productive lives. Instead, we have lots of people working 60 or 80 hours or more per week just to stay afloat, lots more people stuck in perpetual poverty, and a few sensationally wealthy people.
And let's dispense with the 'deserved wealth' illusion. Yes, hard work and intelligence play a part in material success, but luck and social connections, (which are really just a manifestation of the aforementioned luck), play a much bigger role. There are lots of VERY smart, VERY hard-working people living in grinding poverty through no fault of their own - and then there are people like the Kardashians.
I walk to a street corner, flag a taxi, pay with cash - there's no record in anyone's computer systems about where I went or when.
You may be trolling, but I'll bite anyway. Do you also wear a mask and elevator shoes, and alter your gait, so the images from all those video cameras you passed on the way can't be quite as easily identified? Also, did you leave your phone behind, or at least pull the battery?
Slashdot Mirror
but it doesn't sound like there's anything earth-shatteringly new here. I'm guessing there will be at least a few 'prior art' challenges to the patents.
...Turnbull’s government has also emphasized science that can be easily commercialized...
It seems to me that climate scientists would be a key part of any strategies, techniques, and technologies that are developed to either counteract or accommodate global warming. Future work in this area will be heavily commercialized, just as wind and solar power and electric vehicles are commercialized today. Sounds like Turnbull is thumbing his nose at a big economic opportunity. Not to mention that, in some sense, he seems to be selling out his fellow human beings for a bit of short-term political capital. Way to make your country's economy more durable, Mr. Turnbull!
Much as I hate Facebook, I strongly doubt this is FB-specific. I've experienced the same thing on other sites - YouTube and Slashdot to name just two. I suspect that any 'chewing gum for the eyes' kind of activity is the same, especially when it's passive absorption of infotainment provided by a blue-weighted light source such as the typical computer monitor.
I'm still proud to say, I'm one of the last 3 folks on planet earth that does not have a FB account, nor have I ever had one....
You're one, and I'm another - I wonder who the third is. ;-)
Where are my mod points when I need them! I set out to mention indoctrination, and there you've already gone and done it for me.
I admire your sangfroid - you find the indoctrination 'unsettling', whereas I find it downright disturbing and more than a little bit scary.
Obligatory John Taylor Gatto quote: "...school has become the replacement for church, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith".
...capable of generating up to 30,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per year.
Gee - is that in everyday use, or only when it knows it's hooked up to a test station in a garage?
I'd say "many happy returns". But in this case I'll simply say "sod off, and may you have no more birthdays - ever".
The last time I checked, fraud, extortion, and theft were all felonies. So stop all the chest-thumping and all the "OMG! the FCC!" nattering, and just enforce the fucking laws fer chrissake. Time to stop pretending that various service providers are somehow different than individuals who commit the same crimes. A corporation is a person before the law? Alright then, treat the corporations like persons - but go ALL the way, and start throwing asses in jails when and where appropriate. Some might say, "but in this case, we can only jail part of the person". I'm fine with that - how 'bout the head? Let's haul CEOs off in handcuffs. That'll cause a lot of second thoughts next time 'ripping off your own customers' is suggested as a viable business model.
...integrating emotional feedback into VR environments heralds many new possibilities in the fields of medical research...
Not to mention potential use in medical treatment, possibly including help for depression and PTSD.
You are right It should be 1.0936^(-11) Football fields. That will get rid of any cultural confusion.
Not if you're Canadian, you insensitive clod! :) Our football fields are 110 yards long, so for us it's 9.9418^(-12) football fields. Then there are soccer-type 'football fields'...
What plugin does one need this time to install in order to maintain the functionality from previous FF?
As other posters have noted, the 'plugin' you require is Pale Moon. Install it into your OS, not into Firefox. Once that's done, Firefox becomes entirely irrelevant.
Locking a couple of executives up for endangering national security might be the single best thing anyone could do to prevent this type of thing in the future.
Mod parent up!
so I'll ask the question. Aren't there USB cameras available with sufficiently high resolution and sufficient light sensitivity to do the job? If so, couldn't one install a secure configuration of Linux on an SBC, (a Raspberry Pi perhaps), pack it into a suitable enclosure, and call the job done?
Granted, the camera might take a little longer to boot up than a purpose-built one, but in many cases that won't be much of a disadvantage. Also, non-geeks aren't going to put these things together. So maybe there's a business opportunity here to package a customized OpenWRT-based SBC with an off-the-shelf USB camera and sell 'truly secure' security cameras? Just a thought...
Agreed, provided whoever is responsible for changing the battery does so BEFORE that long vacation...
Keyboards should be replaced yearly given how disgusting they are.
With the right technique and knowledge, keyboards can be thoroughly cleaned. And by "cleaned", I mean soap-and-water - lots and lots of water, as in total immersion. I've washed several - both desktop and laptop keyboards - and they all worked fine afterwards. Besides, at more than a hundred bucks on sale, I'm not anxious to discard a keyboard because of a bit of grunge.
"The Machine Stops" by E.M Forster, ( http://archive.ncsa.illinois.e...), and "The Revolt of the Pedestrians" by David H. Keller. Extreme scenarios to be sure, but entertaining reading, and entirely relevant to the current discussion.
Lesson of the day... probably should have bought the honeywell.
Lesson of the day... probably should have connected an old bimetallic mercury switch thermostat in parallel with the IOT unit, set to 10 degrees Celsius or so... "Doesn't go that low", you say? Then simply tilt the thermostat a bit...
Old, simple, no-active-component technologies still have their place, even if only as a fail-safe for shiny-but-vulnerable microcontroller-based gadgets.
...how much governments are pushing to violate our privacy for what's, really, no additional security.
This has nothing to do with security, unless you're talking about the job security of TLA's and LEO's.
I'm guessing that the quadraphonic decoder you built was some version of the Dynaquad - am I correct? (I actually have a Dynaquad-encoded copy of The Beach Boys album 'Surf's Up'). And I think the link you provided is David Hafler's version of the same basic concept. Either one of these decoders could do fascinating things with even normal stereo recordings. I did a LOT of playing around with passive decoding in the early-to-mid-70's when I was a teenager - I just loved playing Dark Side of the Moon...
I also did some satisfying work on active versions of Hafler/Dynaquad decoders. The sound is both better and more amenable to adjustment. All you need are one or two decent quad op-amps, some capacitors and resistors, a solderless breadboard, a power supply of 18 volts or so, and an extra power amp or receiver with accompanying speakers. The op-amps are configured to provide the sum of the two stereo channels, (mono), and the difference between the two stereo channels, (L-R or R-L depending on your phasing). The two stereo channels are fed to one stereo amp and speakers, and the sum and difference outputs from the breadboard are fed to the other stereo amp and speakers. This setup prevents electrical interaction and impedance irregularities which occur in a fully passive setup like that in the link you provided, so the speakers sound better. And with separate volume, balance, and tone controls, you can more easily tailor the sound to your liking. Also, with extra op-amps it's easy to have both L-R and R-L. (On some recordings, having both of these can produce some interesting results). It's cheap, it's pretty easy, it uses 'junk' amps and speakers to good advantage, and it's lots of fun. At least, it's lots of fun for people like you and me... :) Plus, hooking everything up, troubleshooting any errors or other problems, tweaking the sound, and listening to the differences should keep the 'smart kids' interested for a while.
I got some new Polk bookshelf speakers just before Christmas, and I have several amps and additional pairs of speakers. It might just be time to start playing with passive 'quad' decoding again!
the solution to this is to completely decentralize our power, virtually destroying "the grid" by putting solar+battery at every home...
Thank you! I jumped on here to say pretty much the same thing. I'd just like to add that we can have our cake and eat it too. We can disconnect small local grids from the larger grids and use them to pool the local outputs from wind, solar, and possibly even nuclear generation. That way we can have independence down to the residence level, while being able to take advantage of the benefits of sharing power when necessary.
Another thing to consider is the dumpster-sized reactors that can provide power for 10K to 20K homes, or for factories. I don't love nuclear, but I also don't love AGW, and at least in the short term, nukes may be a necessary evil for rapidly cutting greenhouse gas emissions. (That, and foregoing cattle as a food source - but I digress).
The point being that continental power grids are dinosaurs and we need to hasten their extinction. We have much better alternatives at hand, and will develop even better ones at a faster rate if we get off our complacent asses and start using to full advantage the techniques and technologies currently available. Right now we're staring at an awesome and wildly varied smorgasbord of potentially planet-saving options while we continue to chow down on Big Macs.
He didn't put his own safety on the line to go help out his buddies, he just leant slightly on the joystick and told them what he saw.
Some operators actually launch missiles at people whom they've been observing for a while - it's not all just recon work.
A medal is supposed to be for actions performed, not for how warm and fuzzy you make others. Handing them out like tic tacs makes any medal worth less.
It turns out that, (just as with first responders such as paramedics), PTSD is common among drone operators. I have no opinion on whether the operators deserve medals - I'm not a military kind of guy, and I think we should be working harder on ways to stop wars altogether. But I don't think it's either fair or practical to ignore or minimize the psychological trauma suffered by those members of the military who, in 'service to their country', spy on people from afar and then kill them with the press of a button. Those who participate directly in killing at the behest of their government deserve at least some recognition of the lifelong emotional damage they're often subjected to.
It's good to know that Mozilla is trying to make lemonade with its lemon. But I don't want FFOS on a late-to-the-party SBC when I have a few Raspberry Pi boards lying around and will soon have an Odroid and an Arduino Micro as well.
No, what I want FFOS on is the viable smartphone they promised when FFOS was launched, so I can have some control over my own phone. I'm not interested in some lame IOT SBC, thanks just the same.
It's not even computer literacy. Especially since pair programming won't feed their inner geek, is impossible to fairly grade (who did more work, etc) and will lead to kids who can't grasp the concept pairing with the little egomaniacal sh*ts and hating it after hearing "like this, dummy" too many times.
It may not be computer literacy, and the metrics it generates may well be useless; but, (and I say this with only the smallest trace of exaggeration), it seems like a pretty good introduction to and indoctrination into the ways of the corporate workplace...
Wealth isn't just money - it also exists in things such as manufacturing efficiency. So when humans are replaced by robots, (for example), the owners of the factory have two choices - scooping all of the extra profits and leaving the displaced workers to fend for themselves, or sharing the profits with the workers who helped the owners get to the position where they could automate. With the huge efficiency increases in manufacturing and processing capacity that we are experiencing, it strikes me that we could keep everyone employed for 10 to 30 hours a week and all have very nice, fulfilling, and productive lives. Instead, we have lots of people working 60 or 80 hours or more per week just to stay afloat, lots more people stuck in perpetual poverty, and a few sensationally wealthy people.
And let's dispense with the 'deserved wealth' illusion. Yes, hard work and intelligence play a part in material success, but luck and social connections, (which are really just a manifestation of the aforementioned luck), play a much bigger role. There are lots of VERY smart, VERY hard-working people living in grinding poverty through no fault of their own - and then there are people like the Kardashians.
>
I walk to a street corner, flag a taxi, pay with cash - there's no record in anyone's computer systems about where I went or when.
You may be trolling, but I'll bite anyway. Do you also wear a mask and elevator shoes, and alter your gait, so the images from all those video cameras you passed on the way can't be quite as easily identified? Also, did you leave your phone behind, or at least pull the battery?