Step 1: Assemble Bluetooth "sniper rifle" according to instructions Step 2: Remove Bluetooth antenna from assembly. Step 3: Buy real, working, sniper rifle. Step 4: Cram Bluetooth antenna up Parent Poster's ass. Step 5: Use actual gun to shoot people.
They're only hurting themselves here. I worked in a building with no windows a few years back, and the cubicle decorations were typical geek couture: Star Wars, Star Trek, Tolkien, Dilbert, Far Side, math puns, archaic computer hardware, and whiteboards crammed with crazy doodles. You'd be an idiot to think there weren't dungeon-masters there!
Everyone in the building had a high security clearance, and the vast majority of them were "free thinkers." The traits that made them most valuable in D&D also made them great analysts:
- quick lateral thinkers - work well on small teams ("parties") - open to new or contradictory data ("plot twists"/"betrayals") - efficient min-maxers - logical approach to difficult situations
I know if I ever go back to that kind of work, there'll be plenty of Elvish Paladins and Dwarven Mages and so forth. I wouldn't have it any other way!
I also grab episodes of LOST when I miss the broadcast. Since I watch Smallville with friends in a different town, I can't watch both at once. I stopped downloading episodes once I had a Hauppauge card (PVR-250) and DVD burner. Since I'm recording the TV show from my own cable feed, burning it to DVD, and watching it in my own home, I am pretty sure I'm within my legal rights.
And if my machine is down, or there's a power failure, well... then I'm not opposed to grabbing the HDTV torrent. And, dude? Hurley's completely sane now. Dude.
VME, or Volunteers for Medical Engineering, has been helping disabled persons for years now. One of their earliest projects, built by senior undergraduates of the JHU Mechanical Engineering Dept. was a curved keyboard that was activated with a "puffer" stick. The stick fit in the mouth like a traditional mouth stylus, but kicked a pulse of IR light onto a IR-sensitive keyboard. This allowed the user to greatly reduce neck strain and increase typing speed.
My guess is that an inquiry to the Mech.E. Dept. or VME will get you a load of useful info.
And, yes, I'm an undergrad there, and I'm doing my senior design project for VME, also. I'm working under the supervision of the keyboard's inventor. E-mail me with any serious inquiries.
The BASIC Stamp (II) is "open"; it just needs a programmer to port it. It sends and receives data over a serial port in the form of an ASCII text file, sent using the RS-232 protocol. I believe the compiler does compress whitespace, and I know it checks for errors before sending programs to the chip. So writing a compiler might be a b*tch, but if you've got a program that you know will compile, you can upload it with a Linux box and a perl script. But hey, kids... don't use the Stamp with an ungrounded laptop. RS-232 *requires* a common ground voltage, or you could cook some components or just crash the Stamp.
And what a stupid name, too! It's nothing but another buzzword from the media gods of vapid generalization and stereotyping. Find something with one syllable like "geek" before you go "girl profiling". Speaking of which... How is this any less innocent than a schoolteacher assuming all children who wear black are evil gunslinging hellhounds?
Athlete-worship and America's anti-intellectualism (whichever caused the other) are both to blame for the "socially acceptable" violence that occurs as the alpha males haze the underlings. The problem is that even in chimp research, every once in a long long while, the underling surprises the alpha male and kills him. Doesn't just rub his nose in shit, doesn't just throw him out of a tree... kills him. And then the whole family of chimps, enamored with their alpha male, ostracize the chimp who did it.
WAVE might give the nerds a chance to rat out the jocks (but who would wear a shirt that says, "I'm a Narc, guys!" to school?), but no matter what 20/20 hindsight they have, and no matter what they told the interviewers, the jocks never saw Columbine coming. Let me say that again:
THEY NEVER SAW IT COMING.
Any jock who beats up geeks knows that he's not as smart as they are. Bullying stems from insecurity. A bully who picks on a pensive geek is asking to be taken by surprise, in a devious, well-thought-out plan, that allows no revenge.
SO: we need to save these Darwin candidates from themselves. Turn them in, take the cash, buy hardware, and stay smart. The more bullies we stop young, the less we have to kill.
In short, WAVE won't ever find the dangerous geeks, but if its creators are smart, WAVE can be used to stop all of the violence.
My question is, how will this program affect bullying? Suppose I call in a "report" on one of the jocks. Will these reports be relied upon, or will they only serve where the teacher's intuition says they're right?
"Johnny? Oh, yes... Johnny listens to that Goth music. He could kill us all."
"Steven? No, no! Steven is on the football team! He'd never hurt anybody!"
If used intelligently (and I'm not holding my breath), this system could make the teachers more alert to the real sociopathic fuckers that gravitate towards harmless geeks and set them simmering. The problem is, of course, that it will end up working exactly like a Witch-hunt or a Red Scare: if suspected, a report means you're guilty. Every report will be believed, despite the amazingly small percentage of places where it's gotten bad enough to come to gunshots. Pinkerton, Inc., will make a lot of money selling this "cure" for the problem, and when the statistical incidence goes down even a little ("...lies, damn lies, and statistics"), they will get their cash and run.
On the other hand, it'd be sweet to see the Goth cliques cheat the system by all collectively reporting a bully as cunning, cruel, violent, and sociopathic.
"Is he capable of violence in your opinion?" "Oh, yeah... I mean, c'mon, he's on the football team because he likes blood!" "Could he plan an attack on the school?" "He always knows when teachers aren't going to be around, and waits until then to beat people up." "Does he use computers?" "Oh, yes, definitely. He likes that world wide web."
What's dangerous is that geeks will now be forced even further into hiding. The programming culture could be forced out of mainstream, and the price you will pay for a good job in the computer-oriented arts will be a childhood of torture.
Simple: if hardware is not proprietary, someone with an existing chip factory will make it cheaper than you can and sell their value-added package (motherboard) for less and put you out of business; hardware and true physical-domain engineering (EE, MechE, CivE, EnvE) and invention need to be proprietary so the inventors can be compensated for their work. The overhead on creating from scratch a chipset does not lend itself to the open source model. Digital items can be "made" by the user, who copies one off an FTP site. Hardware is made from real natural resources which cost money, and someone, somewhere, will find a way to charge overhead for them. Open Source works great for digital items, but not for hardware... sorry.
You misunderstand me... refer to my earlier post where I admit that it's less useful for cities where the sensors exist, but that it is expensive as a 5-assed monkey to install brand-new systems. Think about it in terms of Armpit, South Dakota: they have no existing traffic system, and then suddenly, everyone wants to live there. The city expands in a hurry, becomes Armpit City, SD, and suddenly has traffic problems (1920-1960... any major city in the USA). Smart cities install sensor grids as soon as possible, because the sensor grid is the only option. Today, a smart city will, if they're smart, implement the newer system, because it co$t$ le$$. Honestly, I didn't mean it would be cheaper for L.A. to dig up their existing network... Jurph [still an engineer. still a Bone Head. still right.]
Alright, so when will representatives realize that their job is not to dictate what their constituents want, but to ask them what they want, and how they want to implement it? Arizona is a notably weird state... but this is obviously a ploy, on the part of the representative, for publicity towards the issues that she would like to see debated on the road to the White House.
Bad luck to her... this is a totally political move, and has nothing to do with the issues actually being debated.
Well, actually, he was trying to use it as our apartment server, and the box is an Athlon K7 (700MHz) with around 128 Megs of RAM. As for "advanced" user, well... with the amount of hardware hacking he does (he's got 5 boxen, all of which he constantly swaps parts in for his purposes) and how amazingly un-friendly Plug & Pray is, he has learned more that a few tricks about handling Windows. It's just like any other sick, unruly, rabid animal... occasionally, the only solution it to drag it out back and shoot it.
Oh, Gawd... I already posted this to the guy who claimed his existing system was better.
Which is cheaper: 1) [Manpower to dig holes all over Boston and place sensors + time lost to detours + wiring a solid-state sensor grid into a computer + having to do it all again for each new section of roadway] * [resolution of the sensor grid]^2
OR
2) Buying a data collection system (computer, antenna, keyboard, monitor... mouse) that reads data from a satellite that's *already paid for*, and letting your citizens buy the sensors (phones)?
Come on now. Always think of infrastructure, cost to implement, future growth, and all of the real ugly real-world variables before flaming any large-scale project.
Jurph Mechanical Engineer / Professional Bone Head
It's a bad idea because of an existing system; but imagine how expensive and time consuming (both in terms of detours and costly manpower) it would be to implement this system in Boston or NYC. Using modern Fluid Dynamics and a modified version of Fluent (tm), these cities could take the data from cell phones and come up with a great picture of traffic.
As for being able to "see" a vehicle pulled over on the pavement, you should know better. A sensor grid with 1/2 mile resolution will detect "rubbernecking" and tell you where the accident is, and the smount of traffic in the next 1/2-mile long section will tell you if any lanes are blocked, but you can't tell what kind of accident it is until (a) an officer shows up and radios it in, or (b) a cab-driver radios it in, or (c) a civilian calls in on a cell phone.
As for Baltimore, DC, Atlanta, Boston, NYC, Hartford (oh God... not Hartford!), the cities all have major traffic problems every day, and to my knowledge, there's no system in place to gauge it yet. There are radar guns on overpasses on sections of I-95S, but not enough to establish the kind of resolution that a grid of cell phones would provide.
I agree that LA's system is cool, but think about the future and the economics of the situation before you flame any new large-scale project.
--Jurph (engineer by trade, geek by the grace of god)
My roommate installed Win2K after showing up to an M$ "employment information session" that they sponsored at our CS dept. He got a free Win2K disk, installed, and a week later, was running Win98 again. The Win2K disk is now a beer coaster, and we try not to use it. In the words of a friend, "I don't think even Microsoft could cause a beer to crash... but I'm not chancing it."
I have no experience with Novell, except that our school uses it (with Groupwise) to run many parts of the network, and a fault in Groupwise caused a geometrically increasing number of "bounced" e-mails which brought our network to its knees faster than a freshman with Napster.
My roommate runs a Mandrake box; it's got an uptime of two years and a Matrix screen saver.
I don't know much, but I think a third party evaluation would do us a lot of good.
Not likely that nanotech can end society; it may end society as we know it. But then, the personal computer has ended society the way our parents knew it. If you haven't read it, check out Neal Stephenson's book The Diamond Age. It's a great thought-experiment on nanotech, as well as a pretty good sci-fi read.
As for copy protection, manufacturing won't disappear, because of basic economics of technology: the manufacturers will be developing fast, cheap mass-production nanotech facilities (really just storage warehouses with hundreds of matter compilers) that can outdo any single, home-use matter compiler. Prices will go down, profits will be huge (companies pay for seawater, pumps, and a few programmers to run the matter compilers), and home units will still be grossly expensive. Much like stereo component CD-burners, the industry lobby will doubtless come up with a scheme to keep the prices of home-use compilers high until they've developed the next generation.
Eventually, home-use will take over, but the manufacturers will have plenty of time to pack up and get inside before it rains.
As for the benefits: medical technology like arterial plaque cleaners; information technology like a dispersed smog of weather nanites that beam back position, velocity, and air pressure to NOAA; diamond windows cheaper than glass; stronger and lighter materials revolutionizing spaceflight and all material intensive engineering; and more...
Don't be scared, it's just the future. Make friends while he's still a puppy.
Vanilla Ice? Is that they key to making Windows and AOL work?
Better not tell the RIAA... they'll sue the pants off of Bill Gates and Steve Case to "protect" Mr. Ice. Of course, they'll have to wait for the DoJ to finish with Bill and Steve separately, and the RIAA will want to finish this mess with MP3.com, which runs on NT servers, btw. Meanwhile, the MPAA, suing on behalf of Warner Brothers (CEO: Steve Case) will also be suing anyone who uses AOL to post the DeCSS code, as well as suing AOL (CEO: Steve Case) for storing the infringing material on their NT web servers (just like MP3.com). So AOL will have to pay its entire net worth to MPAA, which will give some back to Warner Bros., but some cash will end up being paid to Vanilla Ice's record label and their parent conglomerate, doubtless a servant of the RIAA.
Who gets the money? Some big company.
Whose money is it? It's mine. It's the extra $50 I paid for an OS; the extra $10 I paid for a $2 CD; the $20 a month I pay for low-speed access when sophomores in college get hi-speed access with their apartments and dorms for the same price. It was mine, and now they want it back... wait a sec.
Naked and petrified "David", a DaVinci sculpture, is priceless--any price you named would be countered by a higher bidder, be it Bill Gates, Ted Turner, or Italy. Yeah, all of Italy, the country.
He's naked, he's petrified.
Paging Natalie Portman... Ms. Portman, Line 1...
Re:Yes, the user really uploads their cd to mp3.co
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Yes, I upload information to them, and yes, it's information from a CD that I own. No, it's not the audio data from the entire CD. I tried a CD I knew they wouldn't have--my a cappella group's debut album--and they said they'd e-mail me when they got the CD.
Sorry, but relativism only gets you so far.
--jurph
Re:Before y'all get your panties in a twist...
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Okay, here are my devil's advocate responses to your extremely well-thought-out and (dear God!) rational reply. I almost hesitate to argue, because it's the first reasonable post I've seen in a while... but here goes:
MP3.com isn't going to claim they are entitled to "fair use." They'll claim that I am. RIAA can't sue Sony (the tape recorder manufacturer) or Maxell (the tape manufacturer) for the copy of "Led Zeppelin iii" I made for my car. Suppose I leave this at my friend's house, since he lives near the freeway and I only like listening to Zep when I drive long distances; is it wrong for me to keep it at his house so I can pick it up when I go? If he offers to let everyone in the neighborhood use his tool-shed as a depository for driving tapes, would he be at fault? We'll let the judge decide.
The real problem (as I see it) is where MP3.com got the MP3's. Their database is almost certainly CDDB, but I doubt that they actually own every album they stream. This is where I anticipate the trouble, since they would be in possession of copyrighted material that they didn't pay for. The chicken-egg argument then becomes:
MP3COM: "These MP3's are being used legitimately by customers!" RIAA: "Where did you get them, you rebel scum?" MP3COM: "We made them in advance, anticipating that they would eventually fall under fair use!" [in which case they're liable for any MP3's that haven't been accessed, as these have not been subject to any "fair use"] {OR} MP3COM: "We create them on-demand from our customers with a small warehouse of Jawas, CD burners, and a million phony subscriptions to BMG and a h4cK3d credit card number, d00d!" [in which case MP3.com can't sue them for anything, but, uhhhhhh.... let's hope the SPCJ doesn't complain]
But you see where it's going--MP3.com could have their ass covered. I recall an RIAA argument that says that using a CD burner in a computer is illegal (see last week's Baltimore City Paper) because the "intended use" is to copy data (vs. music, which is so different...). The RIAA has never tried a test-case, and it's easy to see why. MP3.com could end up testing the case and busting down all sorts of barriers.
Or the Emperor could rack them with intense agony utilising Dark Side Force Lightning, in which case all bets are off.
Alright, here's my proposal for sensible porn-blocking... open fire, please, and flame it as much as you want.
1) I approve of kids (18 and under) being "sheltered" by public libraries, but censorware should have an OFF button. If library card numbers were used as login ID's, your age would be known when you logged on.
2) Censorware (if/when it's used) MUST have an open-source black list. Under no circumstances should any political, ethnic, religious, or national group be "blacklisted" for their platform, even if that platform includes so-called "hate" speech, which is still protected under the 1st Amendment until it becomes a justifiable threat. I loathe the KKK, the Aryan Nation, and other racist groups, but I'll die to defend their right to be wrong.
3) A set of standards, similar to the ones we have for TV & Cable, should be adopted to decide and update the blacklist. The "Big 7" (the words you can't say in public media, thanx to the FCC) would be an okay starting point. A browser that "bleeps" these out of the HTML (as well as scrambling any *.jpg with a certain proportion of "skin" tones) would be helpful...
4) Most importantly, I feel that too little censorship is better than too much. There should be quick and easy ways for a librarian to override the blacklist so Johnny can do a project on syphillis for his high-school health class. Photos of genitalia may be important to the project. Oh well.
I feel the harm that is done from a little unrestricted "pornography" is far outweighed by the good done by unrestricted information.
I know I'm drawing a thin line on a slippery slope... but there is a happy medium somewhere, right?
Any slob can set up a web site, as long as people read, it will stay.
Until AOLScapeWarnerSoftCorp decides that it's not in their best interests. Someone above already mentioned limiting streaming video access from non-affiliated partners; plain HTML access could be next--easily. Remember that they have a captive audience because they have handed the internet to the user without the user having to learn for him/herself how to use it, so if they say to their legions of users,
"This is the internet! Ain't it great?"
then millions of AOLers will never see what us slashdotters look at day after day.
It wasn't so long ago that there was a law against having "big 7" control in one company: TV, radio, magazine, newspaper, cable, phone, and one other thing. I'm sure it would be "big 8" now, with ISPs included. But, as I recall, the big mediacorps lobbied away these laws a few years back. Now look at the mess... anyone got more detailed info?
Some ideas that might do you some good when dealing with your environment:
1) Give the case a rain-cover. Sure, if you buy a good water-tight case, it's water-tight, but you help immensely by putting a small angled roof over any exposed metal that's not 100% stainless.
2) Find some high-grade cooling fins (fins with an "i", not fans) to put on the box, and mount the hottest components the lowest in the case so they don't become a heat concentration in summer sunlight.
3) The outside of the case will doubtless be a hardshell material. If you can shelter the box (honestly, a large birdhouse roof would be enough) from direct sunlight, you'll extend its life immensely.
4) Come up with some code that keeps the hard drive "spun up," to avoid damaging parts on startup in the winter--just like in Alaska, where (I've heard) they leave some trucks running all winter. It's bad for the truck, but not as bad as having the pistons freeze to the cylinder walls. You could even have the processor crunch some heavy heavy numbers between clock cycles, just to keep the whole thing warm!
5) If you're ultra-paranoid, it's pretty easy to buy humidity and temperature probes for a computer. Since they're already networked, why not have them send status reports if their working conditions suck?
6) You may want one cooling fan internally. It won't do anything except keep the air moving, but that will increase your convection coefficient and keep the air around the processors from getting too hot. It will also increase heat loss via any cooling fins you mount.
I change my major account passwds weekly; one week I needed to know the seven wonders of the world, so for the first week I used
gwcgptoz3wow (Great Wall of China, Great Pyramid, Temple Of Zeus, 3 Wonders Of the World)
then I had to know a torsion formula for engineering:
theta_PLoverAE (theta = PL/AE)
onward to a new friend I met and whose birthday I needed to remember:
erica16june79
That way, after logging into my account for a week, I know my password and a useful fact. When I realize that I no longer recite the mnemonic to myself each time I login, I know it's time to change over.
I'm sorry, but I can't find the word "mediocracy" in any of my dictionaries. Do you mean "mediocrity?" Comments by the general public may be "mediocre," but they have the potential for brilliant insights that ignore academic conventions and traditions (the enemies of progress).
Or "meritocracy"? I agree that after the judgment of an article by experts outside your academic journal, there will be very few things that the experts inside your journal will be able to say to appear witty. They are the old guard, accustomed to weekly (or even quarterly) posts and counterposts for editing's sake. My 60+ year old Fluid Dynamics professor is one of the most brilliant minds in the field, and makes scads of money because our school pays him to stay on their staff and publish articles with their name. He has the system beat; why would he give his opinion for free...unless he is more passionate about the field of Fluid Dynamics than he is about his bank account?
If you're coining the phrase "mediocracy," do you really want it to mean "rule by the mediocre"? That implies a lack of progress and a "sinking" to the average standard--I contend that it does exist, but that it exists in the journals, and not in the new media.
Slashdot Mirror
Step 1: Assemble Bluetooth "sniper rifle" according to instructions
Step 2: Remove Bluetooth antenna from assembly.
Step 3: Buy real, working, sniper rifle.
Step 4: Cram Bluetooth antenna up Parent Poster's ass.
Step 5: Use actual gun to shoot people.
(Step 5 void where prohibited by law.)
They're only hurting themselves here. I worked in a building with no windows a few years back, and the cubicle decorations were typical geek couture: Star Wars, Star Trek, Tolkien, Dilbert, Far Side, math puns, archaic computer hardware, and whiteboards crammed with crazy doodles. You'd be an idiot to think there weren't dungeon-masters there!
Everyone in the building had a high security clearance, and the vast majority of them were "free thinkers." The traits that made them most valuable in D&D also made them great analysts:
- quick lateral thinkers
- work well on small teams ("parties")
- open to new or contradictory data ("plot twists"/"betrayals")
- efficient min-maxers
- logical approach to difficult situations
I know if I ever go back to that kind of work, there'll be plenty of Elvish Paladins and Dwarven Mages and so forth. I wouldn't have it any other way!
I also grab episodes of LOST when I miss the broadcast. Since I watch Smallville with friends in a different town, I can't watch both at once. I stopped downloading episodes once I had a Hauppauge card (PVR-250) and DVD burner. Since I'm recording the TV show from my own cable feed, burning it to DVD, and watching it in my own home, I am pretty sure I'm within my legal rights.
And if my machine is down, or there's a power failure, well... then I'm not opposed to grabbing the HDTV torrent. And, dude? Hurley's completely sane now. Dude.
VME, or Volunteers for Medical Engineering, has been helping disabled persons for years now. One of their earliest projects, built by senior undergraduates of the JHU Mechanical Engineering Dept. was a curved keyboard that was activated with a "puffer" stick. The stick fit in the mouth like a traditional mouth stylus, but kicked a pulse of IR light onto a IR-sensitive keyboard. This allowed the user to greatly reduce neck strain and increase typing speed.
My guess is that an inquiry to the Mech.E. Dept. or VME will get you a load of useful info.
And, yes, I'm an undergrad there, and I'm doing my senior design project for VME, also. I'm working under the supervision of the keyboard's inventor. E-mail me with any serious inquiries.
--Jurph
The BASIC Stamp (II) is "open"; it just needs a programmer to port it. It sends and receives data over a serial port in the form of an ASCII text file, sent using the RS-232 protocol. I believe the compiler does compress whitespace, and I know it checks for errors before sending programs to the chip. So writing a compiler might be a b*tch, but if you've got a program that you know will compile, you can upload it with a Linux box and a perl script.
But hey, kids... don't use the Stamp with an ungrounded laptop. RS-232 *requires* a common ground voltage, or you could cook some components or just crash the Stamp.
Peace,
jurph
And what a stupid name, too! It's nothing but another buzzword from the media gods of vapid generalization and stereotyping. Find something with one syllable like "geek" before you go "girl profiling". Speaking of which... How is this any less innocent than a schoolteacher assuming all children who wear black are evil gunslinging hellhounds?
Just wondering,
Jurph
...and I'll give you a T-Shirt.
Athlete-worship and America's anti-intellectualism (whichever caused the other) are both to blame for the "socially acceptable" violence that occurs as the alpha males haze the underlings. The problem is that even in chimp research, every once in a long long while, the underling surprises the alpha male and kills him. Doesn't just rub his nose in shit, doesn't just throw him out of a tree... kills him. And then the whole family of chimps, enamored with their alpha male, ostracize the chimp who did it.
WAVE might give the nerds a chance to rat out the jocks (but who would wear a shirt that says, "I'm a Narc, guys!" to school?), but no matter what 20/20 hindsight they have, and no matter what they told the interviewers, the jocks never saw Columbine coming. Let me say that again:
THEY NEVER SAW IT COMING.
Any jock who beats up geeks knows that he's not as smart as they are. Bullying stems from insecurity. A bully who picks on a pensive geek is asking to be taken by surprise, in a devious, well-thought-out plan, that allows no revenge.
SO: we need to save these Darwin candidates from themselves. Turn them in, take the cash, buy hardware, and stay smart. The more bullies we stop young, the less we have to kill.
In short, WAVE won't ever find the dangerous geeks, but if its creators are smart, WAVE can be used to stop all of the violence.
My question is, how will this program affect bullying? Suppose I call in a "report" on one of the jocks. Will these reports be relied upon, or will they only serve where the teacher's intuition says they're right?
"Johnny? Oh, yes... Johnny listens to that Goth music. He could kill us all."
"Steven? No, no! Steven is on the football team! He'd never hurt anybody!"
If used intelligently (and I'm not holding my breath), this system could make the teachers more alert to the real sociopathic fuckers that gravitate towards harmless geeks and set them simmering. The problem is, of course, that it will end up working exactly like a Witch-hunt or a Red Scare: if suspected, a report means you're guilty. Every report will be believed, despite the amazingly small percentage of places where it's gotten bad enough to come to gunshots. Pinkerton, Inc., will make a lot of money selling this "cure" for the problem, and when the statistical incidence goes down even a little ("...lies, damn lies, and statistics"), they will get their cash and run.
On the other hand, it'd be sweet to see the Goth cliques cheat the system by all collectively reporting a bully as cunning, cruel, violent, and sociopathic.
"Is he capable of violence in your opinion?"
"Oh, yeah... I mean, c'mon, he's on the football team because he likes blood!"
"Could he plan an attack on the school?"
"He always knows when teachers aren't going to be around, and waits until then to beat people up."
"Does he use computers?"
"Oh, yes, definitely. He likes that world wide web."
What's dangerous is that geeks will now be forced even further into hiding. The programming culture could be forced out of mainstream, and the price you will pay for a good job in the computer-oriented arts will be a childhood of torture.
Simple: if hardware is not proprietary, someone with an existing chip factory will make it cheaper than you can and sell their value-added package (motherboard) for less and put you out of business; hardware and true physical-domain engineering (EE, MechE, CivE, EnvE) and invention need to be proprietary so the inventors can be compensated for their work. The overhead on creating from scratch a chipset does not lend itself to the open source model.
Digital items can be "made" by the user, who copies one off an FTP site. Hardware is made from real natural resources which cost money, and someone, somewhere, will find a way to charge overhead for them. Open Source works great for digital items, but not for hardware... sorry.
--Jurph
physical domain engineer
perl newbie
You misunderstand me... refer to my earlier post where I admit that it's less useful for cities where the sensors exist, but that it is expensive as a 5-assed monkey to install brand-new systems. Think about it in terms of Armpit, South Dakota: they have no existing traffic system, and then suddenly, everyone wants to live there. The city expands in a hurry, becomes Armpit City, SD, and suddenly has traffic problems (1920-1960... any major city in the USA). Smart cities install sensor grids as soon as possible, because the sensor grid is the only option. Today, a smart city will, if they're smart, implement the newer system, because it co$t$ le$$. Honestly, I didn't mean it would be cheaper for L.A. to dig up their existing network... Jurph [still an engineer. still a Bone Head. still right.]
Wow. This is just too lame for words.
Alright, so when will representatives realize that their job is not to dictate what their constituents want, but to ask them what they want, and how they want to implement it? Arizona is a notably weird state... but this is obviously a ploy, on the part of the representative, for publicity towards the issues that she would like to see debated on the road to the White House.
Bad luck to her... this is a totally political move, and has nothing to do with the issues actually being debated.
It'll never fly.
Like I said, too lame for words.
--jurph
Well, actually, he was trying to use it as our apartment server, and the box is an Athlon K7 (700MHz) with around 128 Megs of RAM. As for "advanced" user, well... with the amount of hardware hacking he does (he's got 5 boxen, all of which he constantly swaps parts in for his purposes) and how amazingly un-friendly Plug & Pray is, he has learned more that a few tricks about handling Windows. It's just like any other sick, unruly, rabid animal... occasionally, the only solution it to drag it out back and shoot it.
Jurph
Oh, Gawd... I already posted this to the guy who claimed his existing system was better.
Which is cheaper:
1) [Manpower to dig holes all over Boston and place sensors + time lost to detours + wiring a solid-state sensor grid into a computer + having to do it all again for each new section of roadway] * [resolution of the sensor grid]^2
OR
2) Buying a data collection system (computer, antenna, keyboard, monitor... mouse) that reads data from a satellite that's *already paid for*, and letting your citizens buy the sensors (phones)?
Come on now. Always think of infrastructure, cost to implement, future growth, and all of the real ugly real-world variables before flaming any large-scale project.
Jurph
Mechanical Engineer / Professional Bone Head
It's a bad idea because of an existing system; but imagine how expensive and time consuming (both in terms of detours and costly manpower) it would be to implement this system in Boston or NYC. Using modern Fluid Dynamics and a modified version of Fluent (tm), these cities could take the data from cell phones and come up with a great picture of traffic.
As for being able to "see" a vehicle pulled over on the pavement, you should know better. A sensor grid with 1/2 mile resolution will detect "rubbernecking" and tell you where the accident is, and the smount of traffic in the next 1/2-mile long section will tell you if any lanes are blocked, but you can't tell what kind of accident it is until (a) an officer shows up and radios it in, or (b) a cab-driver radios it in, or (c) a civilian calls in on a cell phone.
As for Baltimore, DC, Atlanta, Boston, NYC, Hartford (oh God... not Hartford!), the cities all have major traffic problems every day, and to my knowledge, there's no system in place to gauge it yet. There are radar guns on overpasses on sections of I-95S, but not enough to establish the kind of resolution that a grid of cell phones would provide.
I agree that LA's system is cool, but think about the future and the economics of the situation before you flame any new large-scale project.
--Jurph
(engineer by trade, geek by the grace of god)
My roommate installed Win2K after showing up to an M$ "employment information session" that they sponsored at our CS dept. He got a free Win2K disk, installed, and a week later, was running Win98 again. The Win2K disk is now a beer coaster, and we try not to use it. In the words of a friend, "I don't think even Microsoft could cause a beer to crash... but I'm not chancing it."
I have no experience with Novell, except that our school uses it (with Groupwise) to run many parts of the network, and a fault in Groupwise caused a geometrically increasing number of "bounced" e-mails which brought our network to its knees faster than a freshman with Napster.
My roommate runs a Mandrake box; it's got an uptime of two years and a Matrix screen saver.
I don't know much, but I think a third party evaluation would do us a lot of good.
Not likely that nanotech can end society; it may end society as we know it. But then, the personal computer has ended society the way our parents knew it. If you haven't read it, check out Neal Stephenson's book The Diamond Age. It's a great thought-experiment on nanotech, as well as a pretty good sci-fi read.
As for copy protection, manufacturing won't disappear, because of basic economics of technology: the manufacturers will be developing fast, cheap mass-production nanotech facilities (really just storage warehouses with hundreds of matter compilers) that can outdo any single, home-use matter compiler. Prices will go down, profits will be huge (companies pay for seawater, pumps, and a few programmers to run the matter compilers), and home units will still be grossly expensive. Much like stereo component CD-burners, the industry lobby will doubtless come up with a scheme to keep the prices of home-use compilers high until they've developed the next generation.
Eventually, home-use will take over, but the manufacturers will have plenty of time to pack up and get inside before it rains.
As for the benefits:
medical technology like arterial plaque cleaners; information technology like a dispersed smog of weather nanites that beam back position, velocity, and air pressure to NOAA;
diamond windows cheaper than glass;
stronger and lighter materials revolutionizing spaceflight and all material intensive engineering;
and more...
Don't be scared, it's just the future. Make friends while he's still a puppy.
--jurph
Vanilla Ice? Is that they key to making Windows and AOL work?
Better not tell the RIAA... they'll sue the pants off of Bill Gates and Steve Case to "protect" Mr. Ice. Of course, they'll have to wait for the DoJ to finish with Bill and Steve separately, and the RIAA will want to finish this mess with MP3.com, which runs on NT servers, btw. Meanwhile, the MPAA, suing on behalf of Warner Brothers (CEO: Steve Case) will also be suing anyone who uses AOL to post the DeCSS code, as well as suing AOL (CEO: Steve Case) for storing the infringing material on their NT web servers (just like MP3.com). So AOL will have to pay its entire net worth to MPAA, which will give some back to Warner Bros., but some cash will end up being paid to Vanilla Ice's record label and their parent conglomerate, doubtless a servant of the RIAA.
Who gets the money? Some big company.
Whose money is it? It's mine. It's the extra $50 I paid for an OS; the extra $10 I paid for a $2 CD; the $20 a month I pay for low-speed access when sophomores in college get hi-speed access with their apartments and dorms for the same price. It was mine, and now they want it back...
wait a sec.
--jurph
Okay, I'll go out on a limb here...
Naked and petrified "David", a DaVinci sculpture, is priceless--any price you named would be countered by a higher bidder, be it Bill Gates, Ted Turner, or Italy. Yeah, all of Italy, the country.
He's naked, he's petrified.
Paging Natalie Portman... Ms. Portman, Line 1...
Yes, I upload information to them, and yes, it's information from a CD that I own. No, it's not the audio data from the entire CD. I tried a CD I knew they wouldn't have--my a cappella group's debut album--and they said they'd e-mail me when they got the CD.
Sorry, but relativism only gets you so far.
--jurph
Okay, here are my devil's advocate responses to your extremely well-thought-out and (dear God!) rational reply. I almost hesitate to argue, because it's the first reasonable post I've seen in a while... but here goes:
MP3.com isn't going to claim they are entitled to "fair use." They'll claim that I am. RIAA can't sue Sony (the tape recorder manufacturer) or Maxell (the tape manufacturer) for the copy of "Led Zeppelin iii" I made for my car. Suppose I leave this at my friend's house, since he lives near the freeway and I only like listening to Zep when I drive long distances; is it wrong for me to keep it at his house so I can pick it up when I go? If he offers to let everyone in the neighborhood use his tool-shed as a depository for driving tapes, would he be at fault? We'll let the judge decide.
The real problem (as I see it) is where MP3.com got the MP3's. Their database is almost certainly CDDB, but I doubt that they actually own every album they stream. This is where I anticipate the trouble, since they would be in possession of copyrighted material that they didn't pay for. The chicken-egg argument then becomes:
MP3COM: "These MP3's are being used legitimately by customers!"
RIAA: "Where did you get them, you rebel scum?"
MP3COM: "We made them in advance, anticipating that they would eventually fall under fair use!"
[in which case they're liable for any MP3's that haven't been accessed, as these have not been subject to any "fair use"]
{OR}
MP3COM: "We create them on-demand from our customers with a small warehouse of Jawas, CD burners, and a million phony subscriptions to BMG and a h4cK3d credit card number, d00d!"
[in which case MP3.com can't sue them for anything, but, uhhhhhh.... let's hope the SPCJ doesn't complain]
But you see where it's going--MP3.com could have their ass covered. I recall an RIAA argument that says that using a CD burner in a computer is illegal (see last week's Baltimore City Paper) because the "intended use" is to copy data (vs. music, which is so different...).
The RIAA has never tried a test-case, and it's easy to see why. MP3.com could end up testing the case and busting down all sorts of barriers.
Or the Emperor could rack them with intense agony utilising Dark Side Force Lightning, in which case all bets are off.
--Jurph
Alright, here's my proposal for sensible porn-blocking... open fire, please, and flame it as much as you want.
1) I approve of kids (18 and under) being "sheltered" by public libraries, but censorware should have an OFF button. If library card numbers were used as login ID's, your age would be known when you logged on.
2) Censorware (if/when it's used) MUST have an open-source black list. Under no circumstances should any political, ethnic, religious, or national group be "blacklisted" for their platform, even if that platform includes so-called "hate" speech, which is still protected under the 1st Amendment until it becomes a justifiable threat. I loathe the KKK, the Aryan Nation, and other racist groups, but I'll die to defend their right to be wrong.
3) A set of standards, similar to the ones we have for TV & Cable, should be adopted to decide and update the blacklist. The "Big 7" (the words you can't say in public media, thanx to the FCC) would be an okay starting point. A browser that "bleeps" these out of the HTML (as well as scrambling any *.jpg with a certain proportion of "skin" tones) would be helpful...
4) Most importantly, I feel that too little censorship is better than too much. There should be quick and easy ways for a librarian to override the blacklist so Johnny can do a project on syphillis for his high-school health class. Photos of genitalia may be important to the project. Oh well.
I feel the harm that is done from a little unrestricted "pornography" is far outweighed by the good done by unrestricted information.
I know I'm drawing a thin line on a slippery slope... but there is a happy medium somewhere, right?
--Jurph
Any slob can set up a web site, as long as people read, it will stay.
Until AOLScapeWarnerSoftCorp decides that it's not in their best interests. Someone above already mentioned limiting streaming video access from non-affiliated partners; plain HTML access could be next--easily. Remember that they have a captive audience because they have handed the internet to the user without the user having to learn for him/herself how to use it, so if they say to their legions of users,
"This is the internet! Ain't it great?"
then millions of AOLers will never see what us slashdotters look at day after day.
It wasn't so long ago that there was a law against having "big 7" control in one company: TV, radio, magazine, newspaper, cable, phone, and one other thing. I'm sure it would be "big 8" now, with ISPs included. But, as I recall, the big mediacorps lobbied away these laws a few years back. Now look at the mess... anyone got more detailed info?
Jurph
Some ideas that might do you some good when dealing with your environment:
1) Give the case a rain-cover. Sure, if you buy a good water-tight case, it's water-tight, but you help immensely by putting a small angled roof over any exposed metal that's not 100% stainless.
2) Find some high-grade cooling fins (fins with an "i", not fans) to put on the box, and mount the hottest components the lowest in the case so they don't become a heat concentration in summer sunlight.
3) The outside of the case will doubtless be a hardshell material. If you can shelter the box (honestly, a large birdhouse roof would be enough) from direct sunlight, you'll extend its life immensely.
4) Come up with some code that keeps the hard drive "spun up," to avoid damaging parts on startup in the winter--just like in Alaska, where (I've heard) they leave some trucks running all winter. It's bad for the truck, but not as bad as having the pistons freeze to the cylinder walls. You could even have the processor crunch some heavy heavy numbers between clock cycles, just to keep the whole thing warm!
5) If you're ultra-paranoid, it's pretty easy to buy humidity and temperature probes for a computer. Since they're already networked, why not have them send status reports if their working conditions suck?
6) You may want one cooling fan internally. It won't do anything except keep the air moving, but that will increase your convection coefficient and keep the air around the processors from getting too hot. It will also increase heat loss via any cooling fins you mount.
Hope this helps.
--jurph
I change my major account passwds weekly; one week I needed to know the seven wonders of the world, so for the first week I used
gwcgptoz3wow
(Great Wall of China, Great Pyramid, Temple Of Zeus, 3 Wonders Of the World)
then I had to know a torsion formula for engineering:
theta_PLoverAE (theta = PL/AE)
onward to a new friend I met and whose birthday I needed to remember:
erica16june79
That way, after logging into my account for a week, I know my password and a useful fact. When I realize that I no longer recite the mnemonic to myself each time I login, I know it's time to change over.
--Jurph
I'm sorry, but I can't find the word "mediocracy" in any of my dictionaries. Do you mean "mediocrity?" Comments by the general public may be "mediocre," but they have the potential for brilliant insights that ignore academic conventions and traditions (the enemies of progress).
Or "meritocracy"? I agree that after the judgment of an article by experts outside your academic journal, there will be very few things that the experts inside your journal will be able to say to appear witty. They are the old guard, accustomed to weekly (or even quarterly) posts and counterposts for editing's sake. My 60+ year old Fluid Dynamics professor is one of the most brilliant minds in the field, and makes scads of money because our school pays him to stay on their staff and publish articles with their name. He has the system beat; why would he give his opinion for free...unless he is more passionate about the field of Fluid Dynamics than he is about his bank account?
If you're coining the phrase "mediocracy," do you really want it to mean "rule by the mediocre"? That implies a lack of progress and a "sinking" to the average standard--I contend that it does exist, but that it exists in the journals, and not in the new media.
cheers,
jurph