... the OS X trash icon turns into an eject icon when a removable media icon is being dragged...
Say, doesn't that mean that the interface is modal? Saints preserve us.
(Alert readers will note that all but the most trivial of UIs pretty much has to have modes. But don't tell the pompous usability experts; especially don't tell the ones who are also Mac fans.)
What if you dialed the wrong number and got someone who is a terrorist? The logs dont show that you dialed the wrong number, They just show you're associated with terrorism.
If a log showing one seven second phone call is going to pose a problem for you, it's clearly not your only problem.
I'd be more worried, if I were going to worry, about someone tracking my cellular phone movements and deciding that either
my everyday comings and goings were suspicious
a one-time deviation from said comings and goings, co-incident with some notable event elsewhere, were an indication of my involvement in said event
This is a great deal more likely if I'm already one of the usual suspects.
How many of the items in your cart would you have removed the tags from prior to checkout -- assuming that you were a shoplifter, of course? And how much would the store be willing to trust that you weren't? I had occasion to buy some fitted sheets at WhALe MART the other week, and the cashier actually opened the package and searched through the folds to ensure that I hadn't slipped any small items in there.
Also, were you planning, on your way past the scanner, on stopping to obtain, and read, your receipt? Because I just came up with a really annoying prank involving a little bit of Scotch tape and an RFID tag for an expensive item.
Returning to the shoplifting idea for a moment, it'd be interesting to find out if moving the tag through the field of a reasonably portable magnet would induce enough current in its circuitry to kill it.
Why on earth would you have to swipe your card? Wouldn't it just have its own RFID tag?
Because I don't want my card's ID being sniffed and replayed for free groceries by the guy behind me in line?
For details,
see Effugas' comment almost immediately above the one you've replied to.
It'd be slightly less awful if I still had to type in a secret PIN, but nonetheless it reduces security by removing the current need for a "double swipe".
I think that the original phrase was "I couldn't care less" -- but someone was lazy in either their listening or their speaking -- and the mangled english became famous.
I'm pretty sure that the original version was common until the late 1980s, when, like all irritating things with perfectly reasonable alternatives, the "lazy" version began to take over.
If their publisher doesn't have any interest in making money off the work anymore, just what value does it hold for the author anymore?
Uhh, artistic value? And beyond that, don't forget:
It is still the author's creation.
There is more than one publisher in the world; another may be willing to pick it up at a future time.
And, further to number two, isn't it obvious that publishers could let books go out of print, or just sit on manuscripts, until their unavailability caused the author's copyright to expire and then publish, shafting the author?
In any event, your proposed law would establish a responsibility my part to surrender control of my creations and give them away for free for others to use in ways that could very well conflict with my original artistic intentions.
Under your scheme, the "ROI" for artists becomes even lower than it already is, while the risk of losing control of one's own work increases tremendously.
Bad things can happen to plastic (and the things sealed in it) over time. The first order of business should probably be to get the stuff out of whatever it's in and into something with good archival properties.
...a book copyright would expire when it was out of print --
i.e. when the publisher stops selling it, it's in the public domain.
Except that copyright tends to be held by the author, and it'd certainly be unreasonable to end an author's rights to his or her book just because a given publisher decided to stop printing it for whatever reason.
Would your scheme deny any copyright protection to unpublished work, or would it come into effect only when something was published?
It's the explanation that's the bogus part.
on
Build Your Own UFO
·
· Score: 1
It is said that 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof' I would say that a crude electrogravitic kite lifting an 18 gram payload is pretty extraordinary.
It's the "electrogravitic" part that's the extraordinary claim. You want us to believe that the rewired guts of a 14" colour monitor are distorting space instead of just ionizing some air.
If the experiment can be easily repeated and duplicated the argument is over.
And no doubt you'd have us believe that since anyone can light things on fire, the
phlogiston theory of combustion is proven.
Here's a pro-phlogiston article, by the way. Don't mind the printing date — look instead at how much it looks like all of the defenses of doomed crackpot theories that you can dredge up on the Web today.
Notwithstanding the confidence thus strongly expressed by these able and experienced chemists, I must take the liberty to say, that the experiments to which they allude appear to me to be very liable to exception, and that the doctrine of phlogiston easily accounts for all that they observed.
Both legally and ethically the right thing to do is to notify the owner of the offending machine
...assuming that you can determine who that person is. And, ethically, if you were walking down the street with a fire extinguisher and saw somebody's garbage can on fire, would you really, uhh, leave them a message on their answering machine?
The fire extinguisher in this case is ipconfig/release, I think. Bonus marks for picking the right interface on a machine with more than one NIC.
You must mean booze. Yeah, who would sell that? Or any form of tobacco.
is very counter productive to what most people care about, the profit margin.
Clearly, then, nobody would ever sell an unsafe product. The examples that I can think of, from cars lacking safety features to pharmaceuticals with serious side-effects (and let's not forget, from long ago, lead plumbing and even radium inhalers) must be misinformation planted by The Wicked Nanny State.
...forced sometimes by clients to make sure that nothing goes past a certain limit [...] stretch things [...] Canadian government [...] does not allow even that [...] accessibility is king
Nothing wrong with accessibility, especially since, properly done, it means having decently designed pages and valid HTML. The Canadian Government's Common Look and Feel rules, with their idiotic fixed-width tables and pathetic nagging alert boxes (all but "follow this link, are you sure?"), miss the boat.
Actually, about two thirds of the CLF is decent, sound, and defensible. But like anything done by committee, it's got some really nasty botches, too. I'd include a link, but I'm lazy, and, besides, it's a PDF (speaking of that last one third...).
You're wrong. What you're talking about would be a form of key escrow, which some agencies are eager to establish but which is still, in the general case, a threat rather than a fact.
Consider: when you generate a PGP (or GPG, or whatever) private key, you're doing it yourself, and you don't send a copy of it to anyone.
Now, if the crypto you're using is very lame, I suppose there might be a "master key" or small set thereof that could decrypt any message encrypted using that lame technique. But that would become obvious upon analysis, and open-sourced software especially wouldn't be around very long before someone noticed such a glaring flaw.
Mozilla currently has a preference setting for loading only images that come from the same domain as the page, as well as a "Warn me before loading an image" option. This is by analogy with its cookie-handling. It should be possible to defeat "bugs" using either this feature or a more convenient adaptation of it.
Presumably, this feature will appear in Netscape 6 and the AOL client, but you never know what marketing will object to...
Gasoline is actually more efficent both energy wise and economy wise.
So generate your electricity with gasoline engines. Probably not a perfect response, but it does raise another interesting point in favour of electric gadgets...
While using electricity, as you say, "...shift[s] the pollution to the power generation stations," that at least centralizes your work in improving energy generation. Say in ten years we figure out how to power engines with angel sneezes. Would we rather retrofit millions of automobiles, or thousands of power stations?
Electric tools (motors, heaters, lights) are front ends that don't care what their back ends (generators, batteries, fuel cells) are doing. Abstraction in action.
Consider the advantages for cities that are currently pollution-choked due to geography and weather (e.g. atmospheric effects trapping smog in valleys). Magically replace all gasoline-powered cars with electric ones, and then put generation plants sufficient to power them elsewhere, thus reducing the acute human impact of the resulting pollution. Meanwhile, you're working on those angel sneezes...
"Just press delete". That's fine in places where you have flat rate phone calls to download the stuff.
Even then, it's not fine. I guess my "Just press delete" graphic doesn't make as much sense to someone who didn't spend the summer of 1996 (?) wired up to news.admin.net-abuse.e-mail, where plenty of jokes were going around about exactly what, ideally, that Delete key would be hooked up to. That's why the background for the slogan is an over-saturated photo of a mushroom cloud: the idea is that we've just deleted the spammer.
the feet would be in a sort of stirrup which is connected to positional sensors AS WELL AS a force feedback system.
This is exactly what I was thinking. If flight simulators can mount a cabin on movable struts, why not just attach the struts right to the arms and legs of your player?
I'm thinking more of robotic arms than hydraulic pistons, of course. The person stands in boots that are attached to the end of two robotic arms, and then slips his/her arms into something similar (gotta simulate gun recoil and crawling...). Maybe have a fifth arm on a tight backpack that the players wear, just so you can mess with (and read motions of, not to mention support) the torso, and then maybe mount the whole thing on powered gimbals, so you can have 'em do a simulated faceplant, hanging there three feet off the floor, should the simulation demand it.
So, now you've basically strapped a person into this multi-armed contraption, with their various extremities individually supported and controlled. "All" that's left is to work out the force-feedback system so that they can walk realistically -- as the foot "hits the ground," the arm stops moving. As the foot is raised, the system freely allows that movement (possibly assisting it, to hide the fact that there's this giant steel arm strapped to your foot). As you walk forward, the arm lets you slide your foot back on a flat plane, to simulate the ground moving beneath your foot. Irregularities in the surface can be simulated by changing the height of the "ground" and angle at which the foot "rests". You can do stairs; mud can be simulated with "mushy" feedback.
Some problems:
acceleration, as others have pointed out. Maybe tilting the body on the gimbals would be reasonably convincing, but it'd never truly fool the player.
getting the feedback to work right.
the programming will be tricky, though maybe motion capture would help
getting the robot arms to work without lag will be another doozy
Apparently some people don't understand how the karma system works. It's not my fault that I'm +2, and I should not be penalized for this.
Apparently, some people don't know how moderation works. It's not the moderator's fault that every post you make isn't worth a +2, y'know. Surely you wouldn't want to make people with +2 thresholds read every single thing you write, just because you're attached to your (useless) "karma."
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Say, doesn't that mean that the interface is modal? Saints preserve us.
(Alert readers will note that all but the most trivial of UIs pretty much has to have modes. But don't tell the pompous usability experts; especially don't tell the ones who are also Mac fans.)
Is the most intelligent bot ever, and so on, why you could charge say $100? Tell me more.
I suspect that you'd have better luck charging $10 to spectators to watch someone famous play against the world champion chess program.
To continue the scenario:
And when the suspect refused to reveal what was in his pockets, that was probable cause for a search right there.
Remember, only criminals have anything to fear from the police, so STOP RESISTING!
If a log showing one seven second phone call is going to pose a problem for you, it's clearly not your only problem.
I'd be more worried, if I were going to worry, about someone tracking my cellular phone movements and deciding that either
This is a great deal more likely if I'm already one of the usual suspects.
Yes.
How many of the items in your cart would you have removed the tags from prior to checkout -- assuming that you were a shoplifter, of course? And how much would the store be willing to trust that you weren't? I had occasion to buy some fitted sheets at WhALe MART the other week, and the cashier actually opened the package and searched through the folds to ensure that I hadn't slipped any small items in there.
Also, were you planning, on your way past the scanner, on stopping to obtain, and read, your receipt? Because I just came up with a really annoying prank involving a little bit of Scotch tape and an RFID tag for an expensive item.
Returning to the shoplifting idea for a moment, it'd be interesting to find out if moving the tag through the field of a reasonably portable magnet would induce enough current in its circuitry to kill it.
Because I don't want my card's ID being sniffed and replayed for free groceries by the guy behind me in line? For details, see Effugas' comment almost immediately above the one you've replied to.
It'd be slightly less awful if I still had to type in a secret PIN, but nonetheless it reduces security by removing the current need for a "double swipe".
I'm pretty sure that the original version was common until the late 1980s, when, like all irritating things with perfectly reasonable alternatives, the "lazy" version began to take over.
Or perhaps I was just oblivious until then.
Uhh, artistic value? And beyond that, don't forget:
And, further to number two, isn't it obvious that publishers could let books go out of print, or just sit on manuscripts, until their unavailability caused the author's copyright to expire and then publish, shafting the author?
In any event, your proposed law would establish a responsibility my part to surrender control of my creations and give them away for free for others to use in ways that could very well conflict with my original artistic intentions.
Under your scheme, the "ROI" for artists becomes even lower than it already is, while the risk of losing control of one's own work increases tremendously.
Bad things can happen to plastic (and the things sealed in it) over time. The first order of business should probably be to get the stuff out of whatever it's in and into something with good archival properties.
Librarians, of course, already know this.
Except that copyright tends to be held by the author, and it'd certainly be unreasonable to end an author's rights to his or her book just because a given publisher decided to stop printing it for whatever reason.
Would your scheme deny any copyright protection to unpublished work, or would it come into effect only when something was published?
It's the "electrogravitic" part that's the extraordinary claim. You want us to believe that the rewired guts of a 14" colour monitor are distorting space instead of just ionizing some air.
And no doubt you'd have us believe that since anyone can light things on fire, the phlogiston theory of combustion is proven.
Here's a pro-phlogiston article, by the way. Don't mind the printing date — look instead at how much it looks like all of the defenses of doomed crackpot theories that you can dredge up on the Web today.
...and so on.
No? Well, it's how it's turned out in the real world, anyway...
Gambling's quite popular, actually. In the great capitalistic race to see who can shaft the most suckers, it's a front runner.
What about cable and DSL users? Unless they have static IPs (rare in my part of the world), won't they be using DHCP?
The fire extinguisher in this case is ipconfig /release, I think. Bonus marks for picking the right interface on a machine with more than one NIC.
You must mean booze. Yeah, who would sell that? Or any form of tobacco.
Clearly, then, nobody would ever sell an unsafe product. The examples that I can think of, from cars lacking safety features to pharmaceuticals with serious side-effects (and let's not forget, from long ago, lead plumbing and even radium inhalers) must be misinformation planted by The Wicked Nanny State.
Nothing wrong with accessibility, especially since, properly done, it means having decently designed pages and valid HTML. The Canadian Government's Common Look and Feel rules, with their idiotic fixed-width tables and pathetic nagging alert boxes (all but "follow this link, are you sure?"), miss the boat.
Actually, about two thirds of the CLF is decent, sound, and defensible. But like anything done by committee, it's got some really nasty botches, too. I'd include a link, but I'm lazy, and, besides, it's a PDF (speaking of that last one third...).
You're wrong. What you're talking about would be a form of key escrow, which some agencies are eager to establish but which is still, in the general case, a threat rather than a fact.
Consider: when you generate a PGP (or GPG, or whatever) private key, you're doing it yourself, and you don't send a copy of it to anyone.
Now, if the crypto you're using is very lame, I suppose there might be a "master key" or small set thereof that could decrypt any message encrypted using that lame technique. But that would become obvious upon analysis, and open-sourced software especially wouldn't be around very long before someone noticed such a glaring flaw.
Mozilla currently has a preference setting for loading only images that come from the same domain as the page, as well as a "Warn me before loading an image" option. This is by analogy with its cookie-handling. It should be possible to defeat "bugs" using either this feature or a more convenient adaptation of it.
Presumably, this feature will appear in Netscape 6 and the AOL client, but you never know what marketing will object to...
So generate your electricity with gasoline engines. Probably not a perfect response, but it does raise another interesting point in favour of electric gadgets...
While using electricity, as you say, "...shift[s] the pollution to the power generation stations," that at least centralizes your work in improving energy generation. Say in ten years we figure out how to power engines with angel sneezes. Would we rather retrofit millions of automobiles, or thousands of power stations?
Electric tools (motors, heaters, lights) are front ends that don't care what their back ends (generators, batteries, fuel cells) are doing. Abstraction in action.
Consider the advantages for cities that are currently pollution-choked due to geography and weather (e.g. atmospheric effects trapping smog in valleys). Magically replace all gasoline-powered cars with electric ones, and then put generation plants sufficient to power them elsewhere, thus reducing the acute human impact of the resulting pollution. Meanwhile, you're working on those angel sneezes...
Even then, it's not fine. I guess my "Just press delete" graphic doesn't make as much sense to someone who didn't spend the summer of 1996 (?) wired up to news.admin.net-abuse.e-mail, where plenty of jokes were going around about exactly what, ideally, that Delete key would be hooked up to. That's why the background for the slogan is an over-saturated photo of a mushroom cloud: the idea is that we've just deleted the spammer.
Newsgroups do breed in-jokes. Sorry about that...
Far enough that people start behaving responsibly on the network? Hey, I can dream...
Aside from the self-serving "free speach [sic]" arguments of the spammers themselves, I can't imagine anything bad to say about this.
Time to plug my spam solution again.
This is exactly what I was thinking. If flight simulators can mount a cabin on movable struts, why not just attach the struts right to the arms and legs of your player?
I'm thinking more of robotic arms than hydraulic pistons, of course. The person stands in boots that are attached to the end of two robotic arms, and then slips his/her arms into something similar (gotta simulate gun recoil and crawling...). Maybe have a fifth arm on a tight backpack that the players wear, just so you can mess with (and read motions of, not to mention support) the torso, and then maybe mount the whole thing on powered gimbals, so you can have 'em do a simulated faceplant, hanging there three feet off the floor, should the simulation demand it.
So, now you've basically strapped a person into this multi-armed contraption, with their various extremities individually supported and controlled. "All" that's left is to work out the force-feedback system so that they can walk realistically -- as the foot "hits the ground," the arm stops moving. As the foot is raised, the system freely allows that movement (possibly assisting it, to hide the fact that there's this giant steel arm strapped to your foot). As you walk forward, the arm lets you slide your foot back on a flat plane, to simulate the ground moving beneath your foot. Irregularities in the surface can be simulated by changing the height of the "ground" and angle at which the foot "rests". You can do stairs; mud can be simulated with "mushy" feedback.
Some problems:
Hmm. You could point one of those encheferating proxies at the New York Times Web pages and get that with very little effort...
Apparently, some people don't know how moderation works. It's not the moderator's fault that every post you make isn't worth a +2, y'know. Surely you wouldn't want to make people with +2 thresholds read every single thing you write, just because you're attached to your (useless) "karma."