It reminds me of the experiment where someone wore mirror glasses that flipped the world upside-down. After a week or so, everything seemed normal.
I've always wondered what would happen if you could provide a 360 degree view to each eye. Would the user's brain eventually sew the edges of the input together into a full circle, or would it always appear like a wide mural?
Could you radically remap the view, like turn it into a radial image (picture looking up into a spherical mirror to get a 360 degree view)? Or would that just be too radical a shift?
To look at the world "like one big xray slide" you'd have to carry around a source of xrays and put them behind the subject, then use your xray sensitive eyes (good luck developing those) to detect the rays coming through the subject.
True, but there is the possibility of using xray backscatter imaging to see in the xray spectrum.
You'd still have to carry an xray flashlight and develop a reasonably sized detector, but you can get pretty good images (samples in the link) of the subjects surface without having to place the source behind the subject.
I ran across this article about procrastination [calpoly.edu] yesterday which I think sort of relates to what you're saying. You don't seem to suffer from the problem, but I'm posting the link here since someone looking for help and reading what you wrote may also find it insightful.
Thanks, I'm a terrible procrastinator. I'm busy right now, so I'll read that later.
So "between 80 percent and 90 percent are willing to... wash clothes in cold water, turn down water heater temperature, buy energy-efficient light bulbs, buy energy-efficient appliances, and buy energy-efficient cars."?
So how many are actually DOING any of those things?
Lots of us. I keep my thermostat at 65F in the winter, 78F in the summer, wash clothing in cold water, keep the hot water heater at 115F, use CF bulbs where I can, use motion sensor lights to keep on-time minimal (at least until the kids can be trained to keep 'em off), live close to work (7 miles, close enough to bike when I feel like trading gasoline use for elevated levels of carbon monoxide), and I drive an old, fairly efficent car (25mpg) rather than buying a new one, on the idea that the energy and economic costs of a new car would far outstip the fuel savings given my already light use of fuel.
But yes, there are a/lot/ of people standing around, willing to participate, but lacking in leadership.
Acting to correct the problem can be neutral or good (less the cost of change), not acting to correct the problem can be neutral or bad. The logical choice is to act, provided that the cost of the changes is less-bad than the projected outcome of not acting.
I believe security will be a huge problem for the industry for years and years and years
I think thats a pretty reasonable statement. Computer systems are very complex and subject to economic and human considerations. Mistakes will happen and compromises will be made in the interest of time and cost.
Lots of smart, clever and motivated people will be looking for mistakes and oversights in this system. They'll find ways to exploit it.
A lot of things, including a very secure operating system, are possible and even desirable. That doesn't mean that they are the solution that will be chosen in the kind of environment that we have. The solution that appears will probably be a sub-optimal but fairly effective use of the available resources.
A better UI solution would have a two-tiered model, say one that spiders large amounts of metadata in a single pass (say overnight),
You do have to be careful with spider downloads on freenet. There are a number of sites that contain porn that takes advantage of the high security nature of freenet (e.g., it is highly illegal in most countries).
It's not a huge risk becase of the link-sparse nature of freenet pages, but it is something you have to be aware of. Fortunately, if you make a mistake and pick up something illegal it's likely no one saw it and you can simply secure-delete it and be on your way.
Individuals with tender sensibilites may wish to purchase a pair of peril-sensititive sunglasses.
I'm the same way. I finally got tired of social ineptness in college and decided to make it an intellectual game. I spent hours and hours in the commons watching people interact, examining how people interacted and the expressions they used. I listened in on hours of mindless yammering small talk to see what made conversations interesting to people.
Through observation and practice I was able to bring up my social skills, at least with people who share similar interests or who do things I can ask them about. I'm still clueless about sports though.
It's something you can learn if you care to, it just doesn't come as a stock feature of some brains.
once you quit punching out kids, what happens to you is largely irrelevant.
True, but there is some evidence that having old people around to pass on culture and take care of the kids while the younger adults do the work aids in survival as well. So where the culture has family groups living together, the ability to be old and reasonably healthy might provide a breeding advantage.
The primary drawback of the creditboards.com information is that it is splattered across hundreds of message board posts. Start with the Index and Starting Point thread and spend at least 10 hours on self-education before posting any questions. As usual, most questions have been asked and answered many times before.
Yes, the credit reporting agencies already have that information, AND they already sell it if you have not Opted Out . This link is to the official site that lets you opt-out online, you can find the same link with Google keywords "opt out credit"
Those credit card offers in the mail that offer pre-approved cards are often based on information pulled from lists created and sold by the credit reporting agencies. This is an opt-out list, if you haven't told them not to sell your info, they are selling it to credit companies, insurance companies and debit collectors.
Yes, the credit reporting agencies already have that information, AND they already sell it if you have not Opted Out. This link is to the official site that lets you opt-out online, you can find the same link with Google keywords "opt out credit"
Those credit card offers in the mail that offer pre-approved cards are often based on information pulled from lists created and sold by the credit reporting agencies. This is an opt-out list, if you haven't told them not to sell your info, they are selling it to credit companies, insurance companies and debit collectors.
I am worried about someone with my same name trying to pass their credit card debt off on me
This isn't really much of a problem if you keep an eye on your credit reports. If something shows up that isn't yours, force the credit reporting agency to verify the entry. They'll try to avoid doing this because its troublesome for them and they don't really care if the info is right or not (as long as is right enough across millions of people to be useful to businesses). Force them to actually verify with the reporting creditor. If they verify it, contact that creditor (Via mail) and force them to verify that the debit is yours. They'll try to get out of that too, and may send you improper verification. Keep after them and force them to send proper verification and proof that they are authorized by the original creditor to collect the debit. If the debit is not yours, at this point you win.
Details about these processes and the laws that make them work can be found on the creditboards.com forums. In particular read about "Debit Verification" and the "The One-Two Punch". These are extremely effective techniques for getting inaccurate items off your credit record (or getting rid of reports from debit collectors who are not properly authorized to collect valid debits).
Hm, could such a malicious program wiggle the mouse periodically, or is windows smart enough to know the difference between user input and programmed mouse moves?
I'm guessing it wouldn't work, else your search would have been more successful.
Despite all this, I still can't bring myself to use it any more often than absolutely necessary, because the user interface is frankly awful. This is especially true on Windows, where QT Player retains a Mac OS brushed-metal design, instead of looking like any other Windows app. It's jarring.
It also refuses to take mouse clicks unless the window is already focused, so you have to click twice to skip over a song you don't want to hear or pause. Highly annoying.
I have to agree. I don't have an iPod, but everybody around the office was talkeing about how good iTunes was, so I gave it a try. What a POS. I used it for a couple of months to give it a fair chance, but every day I just hated it more.
I've switched back to WMP, not because WMP is a great player, but because, for the way I play music, it sucks the least. All music players I've used suck. Some suck horribly (Realplayer), some have an average level of suckage (iTunes), and some only kinda-sorta suck (WinAmp, WMP). Yes, I know many people hate WMP and would not put it in the same class as WinAmp, but they have different requirements than I do.
What wouldn't suck?
A player that can handle accessing multiple repositories of music, seamlessly merging seperate repositories (shared network directories, iTunes shares, removable media, etc) into the library it presents to me without listing dupes would not suck.
A player that is smart enough that when a repository of music is not available, does not complain or list resources from that repository, but keeps checking to see if it is available and quietly merges it into my available library when it does would not suck.
A player that will let me very easily downsample music to another format, regardless of DRM protections, and copy the new files to removable media (so I can put it on a flash card and play it on my portable player) would not suck.
A Player that can handle a library of 15,000 tracks and do a random shuffle from them without requiring many 10's of megs of ram would not suck.
A player that can work with MusicBrainz (or something similar) to identify tracks that are misidentified and fix the information as it is presented to me (repositories may be read-only, but I still want to have the right names for the tracks contained in them) would not suck.
A player that I can click 'Play' or 'Pause' on without having to click to focus the window first would not suck.
A player that comes with a skin that fits the selected OS look-n-feel would not suck.
Re:Interesting fact they glossed over.
on
The Story of Tron
·
· Score: 1
You'd think they would have hired someone to write some programs to handle some of that. Honestly, hand calculating movement from frame to frame? How stupid is that? Sure, if you're only doing a few frames it might not be worth the trouble, but for 21k frames?
You can often fix those bad motherboards; I desoldered the bad cap and soldered in a good replacement on a co-worker's Abit PIII motherboard, and he says it's worked fine since
I've done that a number of times as well. Note that most MOBO's use lead-free solder which requires a bit hotter temp than regular lead solder and also tend suck heat away from the soldering point pretty quick. This can make it tedious to get capacitors out. Use a high-wattage iron (45 to 90W works pretty well) or pick up one of those butane irons (iron, not torch!) and crank it up.
Perhaps someone should design a simple and easy to use coordination, reaction time and cognition test that could be used to profile a persons typical abilities. Test people once a week for a month when they are new hires and don't appear to be drunk/stoned/whatever, then again once a year (to calibrate for changes over time).
Any time the appear drunk/stoned or whatever at work, do a quick check with the kit and see if they are impared relative to their previous test results.
For most employers what is important is imparement during work times, so it should be reasonable to market tests that target that.
Slashdot Mirror
It reminds me of the experiment where someone wore mirror glasses that flipped the world upside-down. After a week or so, everything seemed normal.
I've always wondered what would happen if you could provide a 360 degree view to each eye. Would the user's brain eventually sew the edges of the input together into a full circle, or would it always appear like a wide mural?
Could you radically remap the view, like turn it into a radial image (picture looking up into a spherical mirror to get a 360 degree view)? Or would that just be too radical a shift?
To look at the world "like one big xray slide" you'd have to carry around a source of xrays and put them behind the subject, then use your xray sensitive eyes (good luck developing those) to detect the rays coming through the subject.
True, but there is the possibility of using xray backscatter imaging to see in the xray spectrum.
You'd still have to carry an xray flashlight and develop a reasonably sized detector, but you can get pretty good images (samples in the link) of the subjects surface without having to place the source behind the subject.
I ran across this article about procrastination [calpoly.edu] yesterday which I think sort of relates to what you're saying. You don't seem to suffer from the problem, but I'm posting the link here since someone looking for help and reading what you wrote may also find it insightful.
Thanks, I'm a terrible procrastinator. I'm busy right now, so I'll read that later.
So "between 80 percent and 90 percent are willing to... wash clothes in cold water, turn down water heater temperature, buy energy-efficient light bulbs, buy energy-efficient appliances, and buy energy-efficient cars."?
/lot/ of people standing around, willing to participate, but lacking in leadership.
So how many are actually DOING any of those things?
Lots of us. I keep my thermostat at 65F in the winter, 78F in the summer, wash clothing in cold water, keep the hot water heater at 115F, use CF bulbs where I can, use motion sensor lights to keep on-time minimal (at least until the kids can be trained to keep 'em off), live close to work (7 miles, close enough to bike when I feel like trading gasoline use for elevated levels of carbon monoxide), and I drive an old, fairly efficent car (25mpg) rather than buying a new one, on the idea that the energy and economic costs of a new car would far outstip the fuel savings given my already light use of fuel.
But yes, there are a
Hm, perhaps Pascals Wager applies?
Acting to correct the problem can be neutral or good (less the cost of change), not acting to correct the problem can be neutral or bad. The logical choice is to act, provided that the cost of the changes is less-bad than the projected outcome of not acting.
I believe security will be a huge problem for the industry for years and years and years
I think thats a pretty reasonable statement. Computer systems are very complex and subject to economic and human considerations. Mistakes will happen and compromises will be made in the interest of time and cost.
Lots of smart, clever and motivated people will be looking for mistakes and oversights in this system. They'll find ways to exploit it.
A lot of things, including a very secure operating system, are possible and even desirable. That doesn't mean that they are the solution that will be chosen in the kind of environment that we have. The solution that appears will probably be a sub-optimal but fairly effective use of the available resources.
What they really need is to rewrite it in java on rails. and post a making-of video.
Yes, with lightsabers.
A better UI solution would have a two-tiered model, say one that spiders large amounts of metadata in a single pass (say overnight),
You do have to be careful with spider downloads on freenet. There are a number of sites that contain porn that takes advantage of the high security nature of freenet (e.g., it is highly illegal in most countries).
It's not a huge risk becase of the link-sparse nature of freenet pages, but it is something you have to be aware of. Fortunately, if you make a mistake and pick up something illegal it's likely no one saw it and you can simply secure-delete it and be on your way.
Individuals with tender sensibilites may wish to purchase a pair of peril-sensititive sunglasses.
I'm the same way. I finally got tired of social ineptness in college and decided to make it an intellectual game. I spent hours and hours in the commons watching people interact, examining how people interacted and the expressions they used. I listened in on hours of mindless yammering small talk to see what made conversations interesting to people.
Through observation and practice I was able to bring up my social skills, at least with people who share similar interests or who do things I can ask them about. I'm still clueless about sports though.
It's something you can learn if you care to, it just doesn't come as a stock feature of some brains.
once you quit punching out kids, what happens to you is largely irrelevant.
True, but there is some evidence that having old people around to pass on culture and take care of the kids while the younger adults do the work aids in survival as well. So where the culture has family groups living together, the ability to be old and reasonably healthy might provide a breeding advantage.
The primary drawback of the creditboards.com information is that it is splattered across hundreds of message board posts. Start with the Index and Starting Point thread and spend at least 10 hours on self-education before posting any questions. As usual, most questions have been asked and answered many times before.
Another good resource about credit repair is GoodMortgage.com's How To Fix Credit Report Errors articles.
Heh, d'oh!
Yes, the credit reporting agencies already have that information, AND they already sell it if you have not Opted Out . This link is to the official site that lets you opt-out online, you can find the same link with Google keywords "opt out credit"
Those credit card offers in the mail that offer pre-approved cards are often based on information pulled from lists created and sold by the credit reporting agencies. This is an opt-out list, if you haven't told them not to sell your info, they are selling it to credit companies, insurance companies and debit collectors.
If you are interested in privacy, opt out now.
Yes, the credit reporting agencies already have that information, AND they already sell it if you have not Opted Out. This link is to the official site that lets you opt-out online, you can find the same link with Google keywords "opt out credit"
Those credit card offers in the mail that offer pre-approved cards are often based on information pulled from lists created and sold by the credit reporting agencies. This is an opt-out list, if you haven't told them not to sell your info, they are selling it to credit companies, insurance companies and debit collectors.
If you are interested in privacy, opt out now.
I am worried about someone with my same name trying to pass their credit card debt off on me
This isn't really much of a problem if you keep an eye on your credit reports. If something shows up that isn't yours, force the credit reporting agency to verify the entry. They'll try to avoid doing this because its troublesome for them and they don't really care if the info is right or not (as long as is right enough across millions of people to be useful to businesses). Force them to actually verify with the reporting creditor. If they verify it, contact that creditor (Via mail) and force them to verify that the debit is yours. They'll try to get out of that too, and may send you improper verification. Keep after them and force them to send proper verification and proof that they are authorized by the original creditor to collect the debit. If the debit is not yours, at this point you win.
Details about these processes and the laws that make them work can be found on the creditboards.com forums. In particular read about "Debit Verification" and the "The One-Two Punch". These are extremely effective techniques for getting inaccurate items off your credit record (or getting rid of reports from debit collectors who are not properly authorized to collect valid debits).
Hm, could such a malicious program wiggle the mouse periodically, or is windows smart enough to know the difference between user input and programmed mouse moves?
I'm guessing it wouldn't work, else your search would have been more successful.
What if you want the screensaver to come on, even if video is playing?
Despite all this, I still can't bring myself to use it any more often than absolutely necessary, because the user interface is frankly awful. This is especially true on Windows, where QT Player retains a Mac OS brushed-metal design, instead of looking like any other Windows app. It's jarring.
It also refuses to take mouse clicks unless the window is already focused, so you have to click twice to skip over a song you don't want to hear or pause. Highly annoying.
I have to agree. I don't have an iPod, but everybody around the office was talkeing about how good iTunes was, so I gave it a try. What a POS. I used it for a couple of months to give it a fair chance, but every day I just hated it more.
I've switched back to WMP, not because WMP is a great player, but because, for the way I play music, it sucks the least. All music players I've used suck. Some suck horribly (Realplayer), some have an average level of suckage (iTunes), and some only kinda-sorta suck (WinAmp, WMP). Yes, I know many people hate WMP and would not put it in the same class as WinAmp, but they have different requirements than I do.
What wouldn't suck?
A player that can handle accessing multiple repositories of music, seamlessly merging seperate repositories (shared network directories, iTunes shares, removable media, etc) into the library it presents to me without listing dupes would not suck.
A player that is smart enough that when a repository of music is not available, does not complain or list resources from that repository, but keeps checking to see if it is available and quietly merges it into my available library when it does would not suck.
A player that will let me very easily downsample music to another format, regardless of DRM protections, and copy the new files to removable media (so I can put it on a flash card and play it on my portable player) would not suck.
A Player that can handle a library of 15,000 tracks and do a random shuffle from them without requiring many 10's of megs of ram would not suck.
A player that can work with MusicBrainz (or something similar) to identify tracks that are misidentified and fix the information as it is presented to me (repositories may be read-only, but I still want to have the right names for the tracks contained in them) would not suck.
A player that I can click 'Play' or 'Pause' on without having to click to focus the window first would not suck.
A player that comes with a skin that fits the selected OS look-n-feel would not suck.
You'd think they would have hired someone to write some programs to handle some of that. Honestly, hand calculating movement from frame to frame? How stupid is that? Sure, if you're only doing a few frames it might not be worth the trouble, but for 21k frames?
Mm, lightcycles.
You can often fix those bad motherboards; I desoldered the bad cap and soldered in a good replacement on a co-worker's Abit PIII motherboard, and he says it's worked fine since
I've done that a number of times as well. Note that most MOBO's use lead-free solder which requires a bit hotter temp than regular lead solder and also tend suck heat away from the soldering point pretty quick. This can make it tedious to get capacitors out. Use a high-wattage iron (45 to 90W works pretty well) or pick up one of those butane irons (iron, not torch!) and crank it up.
So.. uh.. Whats the Windex for?
Man, the Dutch are so far ahead of us it's not funny.
Heh, from the article:
So... What exactly are they saying with that pricing?
Perhaps someone should design a simple and easy to use coordination, reaction time and cognition test that could be used to profile a persons typical abilities. Test people once a week for a month when they are new hires and don't appear to be drunk/stoned/whatever, then again once a year (to calibrate for changes over time).
Any time the appear drunk/stoned or whatever at work, do a quick check with the kit and see if they are impared relative to their previous test results.
For most employers what is important is imparement during work times, so it should be reasonable to market tests that target that.