They're not old enough to make these decisions on their own. And you're telling me that they're adult enough to surf the web unwatched while at school? This is exactly why I think keylogging is neccesary for kids at school and home. Would I care if my 14 yr old son was checking out playboy sites? No - O'd be more worried if he wasn't. But I'd sure as hell want to know if he's talking to someone called 'hotchik' on some chat room wanting to talk about how often tosses off and wanting to meet up - because it could easily be some sleasy 40 yr old pedophile grooming him up.
Having just seen a U.S based documentary about exactly this, it worried me about my nephews, who are in that 9-14 yr old group where they're still a bit too gullible & trusting. I Don't actually have any of my own kids wo worry about yet, but when I do you can be sure I will be keeping an unobtrusive eye on them - ignoring most things until it looks excessively dangerous or overly twisted.
It's not te same world it was when I was growing up - there was no easy way for a potentially dangerous stranger to get into my close confidence without at least one of my parents or a school teacher meeting them at some time. The internet changes all that. I don't want to ne a net nazi, but I would want my (future) kids to be shielded from the worst the web has to offer until they are mature enough to deal with it, without it jading their world view too much, or leading them into real physical danger.
Geez, you sound like my nephew - those are the exact two games he wants to get. I keep telling him he'll be bored in about 10 minutes of ther train simulator, and rollercoaster tycoon in about an hour, but I don't think he believes me.
Regarding Video cards - This is the one area that PCs will continue to dominate games - console games simply can not match the crisp sharp resolution that a PC monitor offers. tv (not even 640x480 @25hz interlaced) vs 1600x1200 @ 60hz? No competition. There's still plenty of room for improvment in vid card speed until we can get photorealistic 60 fps at that res - but a console will never get there until they start sticking them on monitors and adding a keyboard - at which time it stops being a console and starts being a serious computer.
Unless the majority of your ancestors are gnetically Japanese ( ie. about 15/16), you will never assimilate. You can live in Japan 20 years, marry a Japanese wife, speak the language perfectly, but you will *never* be Japanese, and new Japanese will still remark at how well you use chopsticks.
Furthermore, any kids you have that are born in Japan will still need to carry a "gaijin card" (Alien registration card) as will your grandkids. I met 3rd generation "immigrants" in Japan in the alien registration office (that you have to go to each year to renew your card) that sure looked Japanese (but were actually of Korean descent), but still apparently had to go through this beuraucratic process on a regular basis.
Even Japanese/Brazillians moving back to Japan have difficulty apparently - and they have either 1 parent or several grandparents that are Japanese.
I have heard that it's easier to become a citizen though if your father/grandfathers are Japanese (as opposed to your mother being Japanese)
Doesn't it occur to anyone that making a super fast self assembling potentially AI cabable organic based computer might be a bad idea? I can just see those zombie PCs running around now - "Need more brains - must eat brains..."
The only thing that will save us is if they're running windows.
But it is commonly "known" that Authur C. Clarke that came up with the geosync idea. (Less well known is that Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1903) proposed similar ideas with space elevator speculations so all your geosync are belong to Russia!)
There's also newton's law to consider. Is this a troll?? Which law would you be talking about exactly? Seriously - the rocket doesn't "push" against the platform when it takes off - it's the mass of the exaust gas being flung out "real fast" from the rocket nozzle that is the "opposite reaction" that sends a rocket skywards. If a rocket is just hanging in the air by straps or something and launched, instead of sitting on a base plate then it would take off exactly the same as if it was sitting on a launch pad. In fact, a lot of the engineering done on NASA's launch pad was involved with how to redirect all that hot gas away from the pad via a huge duct so it doesn't turn the pad (and the rocket standing on it) into smouldering ash.
I stopped reading them after I read about 6 of them, then heard a rumor he was under contract to write 22 or so of them. Good story for the first few, but then it started getting bogged down and taking a whole book to move the plot forward amonth or so, and that's just too slow for me. I like a book with a definite endpoint. (I do remember wishing when I was 10 that the neverending story really was, but that just goes to show - be careful what you wish for...)
NASA denies that they didn't fake the moon landings. I knew it! There is just no way that they could possibly have developed the technology to land on the moon!
What about that flesh-eating sore throat thing that existed a few years ago? I think that one actually digests the victim's throat and kills you pretty quick if I recall.
The owner of the first elevator can prevent other people from building a second elevator for less money than he can by refusing to lift their ribbon...but he can't keep them from doing it for the same price as it cost to put the first one up. Actually, the second elevator to go up would realise huge savings in the cost of the raw materials, and would not have as huge a financing cost to pay off.
By the time the second elevator went up, the cost per kilo of nano tubes should have dramatically decreased, if for no other reason that there had already been some serious manufacturing and research gains made by producing the first elevator - a bit like the way that the purchaser of the very latest model PC hardware is effectively subsidising the buyers of the same model 6 months later.
The real problem is that there are too many damn wireless standards and protocols. Bluetooth, 802.11a, 802.11b and 802.11g already exist, with 802.11h to 802.11z coming real soon too, no doubt. Why do we need a "USB wireless" protocol shouting for room too? Mobile phones will bo doubt be also crying out for more and more spectrum at time goes on, that will probably eat into the open spectrun gradually.
Having just bought two Netgear 56mhz 802.11g cards,(one for a laptop & 1 for a desktop) I was really pissed off to find that despite all the hype, getting the things to talk to each other is not at all "simple and tranaparent" as sales people and the industry in general would have you believe. Apparently buggy drivers (that needed updating before they establish a connection at all in Win XP, Ok, my bad - I should be using Linux - but I wanted to see them working in an environment I know well first These are cards that apparently have won awards from pcWorld.
Range is *far* shorter than the suppposedly possible 200 meters in ideal conditions. I struggle to stay connected at 10 meters when in the next room - and the wall is only a light internal wall. The signal strneth fluctuates between "medium" and "very weak" and the coneection is always dropping out.
All these different standards are competing in the same "open" wireless spectrum - along with God knows what poxy wireless phones and microwave ovens etc. that are already in there. Doesn't it make a lot more sense to have just the one damn standard and stick with it? At least 802.11g is downward compatible - why do we need bluetooth at all? Why not just use and improve the existing 802.11x standards so that at least wireless devices don't completely stomp all over each other. Better yet - have a standard where *all* the traffic uses the same packet switching mechanism,(like ip in tcp/ip) so that even if they are differnet protocols, they are all recognised and don't cause any more interference with each other than say two 802.11x cards would, in a well defined and consistent set of channels/bands.
Also, why don't wireless cards give you any idea if there is interference or "something else" using the freqwuencies or channels that the card wants to use.
Welcome to the two laws of international relations I discovered while working & travelling overseas...
1) Everyone, everywhere are human beings, and generally have the same feelings, fears, hopes and dreams, much closer to yourself than you'd originally think, despite cultural differences.
2) No country in the world has a monopoly on assholes.
should we spend a couple hundred thousand saving your baby that is born 2 months premature
Having been a 3 month & 1 week premature baby, I say the answer to this is definitely yes. I was fortunate in that I had a good system to look after me, so I didn't end up blind ( from poor oxygen regulation) or have any number of other problems associated with such an early birth. I have paid a *lot* more than that in taxes over the years, so I feel my debt to society is already paid off, with hopefully quite a bit more to be squeezed out of me by the govornment should some of my current projects pay off.
Actually I seem to remember it was the other way round - the $5 note was replaced first, then the $10 note etc. Top 5 reasons for going from boring monochrome paper to plastic colourful money:
1) it lasts a lot longer for notes that change hands a lot - a $5.00 paper note would get chewed up in something like 6 months, but the plastic vertions lasts a lot longer before it has to be replaced.
2) you never get a nasty crumpled greasy dirty note - the plastic notes are all but impossible to crease and don't retain dirt etc. nearly as well as paper.
3) we love the beach - and paper money generally doesnt. With the plastic notes you can go for a surf with the money to buy your lunch in your boardies, without having to take a wallet & leave it on the beach.
4) you can put the notes in the oven to shrink them down & make fun keyring tags ( actually I think that only worked with the first plastic notes - and I don't endorse defacing currency)
5) It was a great excuse to get republicly minded and replace the Queen's head with a bunch of other people no-one knows (but should).
6) Tourists (especially Americans who are used to all money being green) can't help but think of it as monopoly money ( because of all the pretty colors) and spend it accordingly.
7) All the pretty colors help in identification to prevent you buying a $100 kebab after a beery night out.
8) you can sticky tape two $100 notes together and make a cheezy pair of "$200" shades with the little plastic windows.
9)even the dodgiest back street dealers warez dealers take "plastic money"
10) it has a tendancy to stop filthy rich bastards lighting their cigars off $100 notes. I don't think it's absorbtive qualities are too good either, for any other mis-uses that might tempt the overly rich.
PDF It isn't a fully open standard as in free to use for anything ( as far as I know), but it is at least a fully published standard. You can download the full PDF specs from the WEB and create your own documents, or read existing documents (as long as they aren't encrypted)
One problem is that the PDF format is oriented around presentation rather than content managment. It is possible to read a PDF document, but it is hard to reconstruct it into en easily editable object, because the text is arbitarily broken into seperate blocks for layout, a bit like how you send drawing instructions to the screen. This would especially be a problem for spreadsheets and the like.
Jet is truly shit - I mean really really crap. Use it accross a network - have the network connection flake out, and watch your oh-so precious database get corrupted so you can't log into it any more, or recover it either.
where do I find a cut-rate DBA if I only have 25 employees? 10 employees? 5 employees?
Do you do your own fillings too, instead of going to the dentist?
You hire me (a profrssional database programmer) to write a database for you. It's actually cheaper to get a pro to do it than spend ages mucking around doing it the wrong way.
I can write one much faster than you, or your non-professional programming employees - allowing them to get on with the jobs they do best. Having say, a manager fumbling around for a month trying to create a simple database is a lot more expensive than hiring a professional that can do it in a fraction of the time.
Too often, I have seen non-programming profrssionals, in say,the risk analysis or the HR department, or some other non-IT department spend months trying to create a database that will meet some need that they have. Because it dosn't initially look like a very difficult problem, they usually start developing it themselves, but it gets more and more complex, (as these things do) and ends up consuming a lot of the time they should be spending on something else - resulting in an application that is kludgy, has a poorly designed relational schema, or outright broken - gives the wrong answers when they try to get reports etc. out because they don't understand say, joins properly. Unfortunately, by the time a database gets to this point, the users are loathe to throw it away and get it done properly in say, Oracle or Syabse - and the powers that be say "just fix it" so you wind up with a piece of crap legacy database that lingers for a few years until it really blows up due to size or multi-user constraints, and finally gets done properly. very expensive way to build a database. There is usually lots of office politics (often associated with empire building) attached to such apps too, making them even harder to get rid of, or fix the right way.
For simpler stuff like the bolwing team scores and gardining stuff that you mentioned, use the age old spreadsheet solution. Having a badly designed database can get you into a lot worse trouble than a kludgy spreadsheet.
Self database design is a bit like self dentistry - not a good idea unless you really know what you are doing. It's too easy to mis-capture the business processes and objects, resulting in a horrible design that is inflexible, unwieldy, or just plain gives the wrong ansewers.
If I recall correctly, ethanol that is used in a fuel cell actually has to be watered down to about 5 percent so that it works correctly without damaging the fuel cell. The micro-fuel cells that they are going to use for laptops etc. will actually solve this problem by recycling the water output of the fuel cell to dilute the 100% ethanol in the fuel cartridge to the right concentration for it to work in the fuel cell.
Hence, you could use ethanol produced from just the brewing process without the energy expensive distillation step. Distillation is only needed to create a more concentrated fuel to reduce transport costs and to obtain a better energy density - the fuel cell uses it at about 5% concentration, but just brewing without distilling can obtain up to about 15% I think.
I think sunbeam can show prior art - I have a chrome & bakelite 1955 Sunbeam Toaster. You drop bread in slot 1, and it lowers slowly & toasts automatically.
Slashdot Mirror
They're not old enough to make these decisions on their own. And you're telling me that they're adult enough to surf the web unwatched while at school?
This is exactly why I think keylogging is neccesary for kids at school and home.
Would I care if my 14 yr old son was checking out playboy sites? No - O'd be more worried if he wasn't. But I'd sure as hell want to know if he's talking to someone called 'hotchik' on some chat room wanting to talk about how often tosses off and wanting to meet up - because it could easily be some sleasy 40 yr old pedophile grooming him up.
Having just seen a U.S based documentary about exactly this, it worried me about my nephews, who are in that 9-14 yr old group where they're still a bit too gullible & trusting. I Don't actually have any of my own kids wo worry about yet, but when I do you can be sure I will be keeping an unobtrusive eye on them - ignoring most things until it looks excessively dangerous or overly twisted.
It's not te same world it was when I was growing up - there was no easy way for a potentially dangerous stranger to get into my close confidence without at least one of my parents or a school teacher meeting them at some time. The internet changes all that. I don't want to ne a net nazi, but I would want my (future) kids to be shielded from the worst the web has to offer until they are mature enough to deal with it, without it jading their world view too much, or leading them into real physical danger.
Geez, you sound like my nephew - those are the exact two games he wants to get. I keep telling him he'll be bored in about 10 minutes of ther train simulator, and rollercoaster tycoon in about an hour, but I don't think he believes me.
Regarding Video cards - This is the one area that PCs will continue to dominate games - console games simply can not match the crisp sharp resolution that a PC monitor offers. tv (not even 640x480 @25hz interlaced) vs 1600x1200 @ 60hz? No competition. There's still plenty of room for improvment in vid card speed until we can get photorealistic 60 fps at that res - but a console will never get there until they start sticking them on monitors and adding a keyboard - at which time it stops being a console and starts being a serious computer.
Unless the majority of your ancestors are gnetically Japanese ( ie. about 15/16), you will never assimilate.
You can live in Japan 20 years, marry a Japanese wife, speak the language perfectly, but you will *never* be Japanese, and new Japanese will still remark at how well you use chopsticks.
Furthermore, any kids you have that are born in Japan will still need to carry a "gaijin card" (Alien registration card) as will your grandkids.
I met 3rd generation "immigrants" in Japan in the alien registration office (that you have to go to each year to renew your card) that sure looked Japanese (but were actually of Korean descent), but still apparently had to go through this beuraucratic process on a regular basis.
Even Japanese/Brazillians moving back to Japan have difficulty apparently - and they have either 1 parent or several grandparents that are Japanese.
I have heard that it's easier to become a citizen though if your father/grandfathers are Japanese (as opposed to your mother being Japanese)
Doesn't it occur to anyone that making a super fast self assembling potentially AI cabable organic based computer might be a bad idea? I can just see those zombie PCs running around now - "Need more brains - must eat brains..."
The only thing that will save us is if they're running windows.
64 bit address space is enough address space for anybody!
But it is commonly "known" that Authur C. Clarke that came up with the geosync idea.
(Less well known is that Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1903) proposed similar ideas with space elevator speculations
so all your geosync are belong to Russia!)
There's also newton's law to consider.
Is this a troll?? Which law would you be talking about exactly?
Seriously - the rocket doesn't "push" against the platform when it takes off - it's the mass of the exaust gas being flung out "real fast" from the rocket nozzle that is the "opposite reaction" that sends a rocket skywards. If a rocket is just hanging in the air by straps or something and launched, instead of sitting on a base plate then it would take off exactly the same as if it was sitting on a launch pad.
In fact, a lot of the engineering done on NASA's launch pad was involved with how to redirect all that hot gas away from the pad via a huge duct so it doesn't turn the pad (and the rocket standing on it) into smouldering ash.
I stopped reading them after I read about 6 of them, then heard a rumor he was under contract to write 22 or so of them. Good story for the first few, but then it started getting bogged down and taking a whole book to move the plot forward amonth or so, and that's just too slow for me. I like a book with a definite endpoint. (I do remember wishing when I was 10 that the neverending story really was, but that just goes to show - be careful what you wish for...)
I use VNC and it works great!
NASA denies that they didn't fake the moon landings.
I knew it! There is just no way that they could possibly have developed the technology to land on the moon!
Or was your use of a double negative inadvertant?
What about that flesh-eating sore throat thing that existed a few years ago? I think that one actually digests the victim's throat and kills you pretty quick if I recall.
The owner of the first elevator can prevent other people from building a second elevator for less money than he can by refusing to lift their ribbon...but he can't keep them from doing it for the same price as it cost to put the first one up.
Actually, the second elevator to go up would realise huge savings in the cost of the raw materials, and would not have as huge a financing cost to pay off.
By the time the second elevator went up, the cost per kilo of nano tubes should have dramatically decreased, if for no other reason that there had already been some serious manufacturing and research gains made by producing the first elevator - a bit like the way that the purchaser of the very latest model PC hardware is effectively subsidising the buyers of the same model 6 months later.
The real problem is that there are too many damn wireless standards and protocols.
Bluetooth, 802.11a, 802.11b and 802.11g already exist, with 802.11h to 802.11z coming real soon too, no doubt. Why do we need a "USB wireless" protocol shouting for room too? Mobile phones will bo doubt be also crying out for more and more spectrum at time goes on, that will probably eat into the open spectrun gradually.
Having just bought two Netgear 56mhz 802.11g cards,(one for a laptop & 1 for a desktop) I was really pissed off to find that despite all the hype, getting the things to talk to each other is not at all "simple and tranaparent" as sales people and the industry in general would have you believe.
Apparently buggy drivers (that needed updating before they establish a connection at all in Win XP, Ok, my bad - I should be using Linux - but I wanted to see them working in an environment I know well first These are cards that apparently have won awards from pcWorld.
Range is *far* shorter than the suppposedly possible 200 meters in ideal conditions.
I struggle to stay connected at 10 meters when in the next room - and the wall is only a light internal wall. The signal strneth fluctuates between "medium" and "very weak" and the coneection is always dropping out.
All these different standards are competing in the same "open" wireless spectrum - along with God knows what poxy wireless phones and microwave ovens etc. that are already in there.
Doesn't it make a lot more sense to have just the one damn standard and stick with it? At least 802.11g is downward compatible - why do we need bluetooth at all? Why not just use and improve
the existing 802.11x standards so that at least wireless devices don't completely stomp all over each other. Better yet - have a standard where *all* the traffic uses the same packet switching mechanism,(like ip in tcp/ip) so that even if they are differnet protocols, they are all recognised and don't cause any more interference with each other than say two 802.11x cards would, in a well defined and consistent set of channels/bands.
Also, why don't wireless cards give you any idea if there is interference or "something else" using the freqwuencies or channels that the card wants to use.
Welcome to the two laws of international relations I discovered while working & travelling overseas...
1) Everyone, everywhere are human beings, and generally have the same feelings, fears, hopes and dreams, much closer to yourself than you'd originally think, despite cultural differences.
2) No country in the world has a monopoly on assholes.
should we spend a couple hundred thousand saving your baby that is born 2 months premature
Having been a 3 month & 1 week premature baby, I say the answer to this is definitely yes. I was fortunate in that I had a good system to look after me, so I didn't end up blind ( from poor oxygen regulation) or have any number of other problems associated with such an early birth.
I have paid a *lot* more than that in taxes over the years, so I feel my debt to society is already paid off, with hopefully quite a bit more to be squeezed out of me by the govornment should some of my current projects pay off.
The US doesn't produce anything anymore
Well you still seem to have the fast food industry and express courier delivery sewn up...
oops - can't count!
top *10* reasons, of course.
Actually I seem to remember it was the other way round - the $5 note was replaced first, then the $10 note etc.
Top 5 reasons for going from boring monochrome paper to plastic colourful money:
1) it lasts a lot longer for notes that change hands a lot - a $5.00 paper note would get chewed up in something like 6 months, but the plastic vertions lasts a lot longer before it has to be replaced.
2) you never get a nasty crumpled greasy dirty note - the plastic notes are all but impossible to crease and don't retain dirt etc. nearly as well as paper.
3) we love the beach - and paper money generally doesnt. With the plastic notes you can go for a surf with the money to buy your lunch in your boardies, without having to take a wallet & leave it on the beach.
4) you can put the notes in the oven to shrink them down & make fun keyring tags ( actually I think that only worked with the first plastic notes - and I don't endorse defacing currency)
5) It was a great excuse to get republicly minded and replace the Queen's head with a bunch of other people no-one knows (but should).
6) Tourists (especially Americans who are used to all money being green) can't help but think of it as monopoly money ( because of all the pretty colors) and spend it accordingly.
7) All the pretty colors help in identification to prevent you buying a $100 kebab after a beery night out.
8) you can sticky tape two $100 notes together and make a cheezy pair of "$200" shades with the little plastic windows.
9)even the dodgiest back street dealers warez dealers take "plastic money"
10) it has a tendancy to stop filthy rich bastards lighting their cigars off $100 notes. I don't think it's absorbtive qualities are too good either, for any other mis-uses that might tempt the overly rich.
PDF It isn't a fully open standard as in free to use for anything ( as far as I know), but it is at least a fully published standard.
You can download the full PDF specs from the WEB and create your own documents, or read existing documents (as long as they aren't encrypted)
One problem is that the PDF format is oriented around presentation rather than content managment.
It is possible to read a PDF document, but it is hard to reconstruct it into en easily editable object, because the text is arbitarily broken into seperate blocks for layout, a bit like how you send drawing instructions to the screen.
This would especially be a problem for spreadsheets and the like.
Jet is truly shit - I mean really really crap.
Use it accross a network - have the network connection flake out, and watch your oh-so precious database get corrupted so you can't log into it any more, or recover it either.
where do I find a cut-rate DBA if I only have 25 employees? 10 employees? 5 employees?
Do you do your own fillings too, instead of going to the dentist?
You hire me (a profrssional database programmer) to write a database for you. It's actually cheaper to get a pro to do it than spend ages mucking around doing it the wrong way.
I can write one much faster than you, or your non-professional programming employees - allowing them to get on with the jobs they do best. Having say, a manager fumbling around for a month trying to create a simple database is a lot more expensive than hiring a professional that can do it in a fraction of the time.
Too often, I have seen non-programming profrssionals, in say,the risk analysis or the HR department, or some other non-IT department spend months trying to create a database that will meet some need that they have. Because it dosn't initially look like a very difficult problem, they usually start developing it themselves, but it gets more and more complex, (as these things do) and ends up consuming a lot of the time they should be spending on something else - resulting in an application that is kludgy, has a poorly designed relational schema, or outright broken - gives the wrong answers when they try to get reports etc. out because they don't understand say, joins properly.
Unfortunately, by the time a database gets to this point, the users are loathe to throw it away and get it done properly in say, Oracle or Syabse - and the powers that be say "just fix it" so you wind up with a piece of crap legacy database that lingers for a few years until it really blows up due to size or multi-user constraints, and finally gets done properly. very expensive way to build a database. There is usually lots of office politics (often associated with empire building)
attached to such apps too, making them even harder to get rid of, or fix the right way.
For simpler stuff like the bolwing team scores and gardining stuff that you mentioned, use the age old spreadsheet solution. Having a badly designed database can get you into a lot worse trouble than a kludgy spreadsheet.
Self database design is a bit like self dentistry - not a good idea unless you really know what you are doing.
It's too easy to mis-capture the business processes and objects, resulting in a horrible design that is inflexible, unwieldy, or just plain gives the wrong ansewers.
If I recall correctly, ethanol that is used in a fuel cell actually has to be watered down to about 5 percent so that it works correctly without damaging the fuel cell. The micro-fuel cells that they are going to use for laptops etc. will actually solve this problem by recycling the water output of the fuel cell to dilute the 100% ethanol in the fuel cartridge to the right concentration for it to work in the fuel cell.
Hence, you could use ethanol produced from just the brewing process without the energy expensive distillation step. Distillation is only needed to create a more concentrated fuel to reduce transport costs and to obtain a better energy density - the fuel cell uses it at about 5% concentration, but just brewing without distilling can obtain up to about 15% I think.
there's an old saying I heard somewhere once.
If you owe the bank a millon, you're in trouble.
If you oew the bank a billion, the bank's in trouble.
The sacry thing is that if/when the whole house of cards that is the US ecconomy collapses, it's going to take the world with it.
I think sunbeam can show prior art - I have a chrome & bakelite 1955 Sunbeam Toaster. You drop bread in slot 1, and it lowers slowly & toasts automatically.
Imagine what it would be like trying to remember addresses under ipv6...