You're absolutely right! I'm lucky in that my mom had cancer and she had a great oncologist. He told me "your mom only has a 10% chance of surviving if we treat her." So we pulled the plug! Whew, glad we saved the insurance companies thousands of bucks.
Is your website a business? If so the ADA should apply.
I can start a private club that only allows white people.
I can't start a business that only sells to white people.
The same thing applies to people with disabilities. According to (most) law, physical disability is just like race. Physical disability is something that just happens to someone, often when they are born. They usually have no control over it. Just like race. Of course, there are exceptions when someone physically can't do something (like drive a car) that there is no parellel to with the race analogy.
The ADA is a great law (in its purpose, anyway) and I can't believe people don't understand why. (I'm not talking about you)
Agree with your general web comments. Disagree with your ADA remark.
Not allowing access to your store because of someone's browser is one thing. That's like having a car repair shop that only services Volkswagens.
Not allowing access to your store because of who someone is (through no fault of their own) is another. That's like having a car repair shop that only services white people.
I know nobody will ever read this because the article is old and I'll have a -1 moderation total but here goes:
Salon.com blows. It's a worthless website/magazine. Here are its sections:
1) Crappy books for pseudointellectuals 2) Crappy films for pseudointellectuals (mostly foreign) and scathing reviews of mainstream films 3) Crappy "lifestyle" articles for pseudointellectuals about things that don't matter in the least, like Venezualan baseball scouting or price fixing for model agencies 4) Ultraliberal news reporting 5) An Americanized British tabloid "People" section
Get it? It's a cornucopia of unrelated items only brought together by the fact that stupid overeducated people would be interested in them. Kinda like a bunch of random topics like computers, libertarianism, anime, and sci-fi movies being brought together under the umbrella of dorks being interested in them.. oops
Re:Micropayments maybe? - Re:Charging for content.
on
Salon in Dire Straits
·
· Score: -1
Fictionwise.com is a very profitable ebook company (you read right) that uses micropayments.
The main thing that microsoft has that mozilla doesn't have is (a monopoly, and) human factors psychologists working for them. Microsoft has probably the best human factors/psychology/human-computer interaction squad in the world. This is very noticable and makes using mozilla a pain for me, sometimes.
It's the little things like selecting large areas of text (double clicking selects the entire paragraph for you, instead of a line in mozilla, which is worthless). The tabbed interface is also vastly overrated in an environment like windows or macos, where the OS does it for you (didn't everyone complain when Opera and StarOffice did pretty much the same thing)? For unix it may be useful.
I'm very impressed overall though. I wish they could have just added some IE compliance because many very popular web pages use IE-features (which IS a de facto standard, I'm sorry to say). It's annoying not to be able to use java menus because mozilla wants to use w3 standards only. Why doesn't mozilla just convert feet and inches into meters for you?
The biggest clue, to me, is that Mozilla is pretty much the exact same experience as IE, with some things done the "open source" way: ie, not using MS standards, using open source code, etc. A notable exception that proves my above point about human factors is that in mozilla's one major new feature, the tabbed interface, they don't even allow the standard hotkey, which would be control-tab. Everything else they just copied from IE, but they couldn't copy this one. I think they should run some user-interface trials at some mozilla parties, and maybe it can become the best browser ever.
Note that I'm extremely impressed with Mozilla, though. It'll probably become my main browser at version 1.1 or so.
The bottleneck is how your eyes are (probably) right now! This implant replaces or enhances the receptors (rods and cones) in the eye, which send signals to other neurons that send signals to the brain (here's a decent diagram; this implant replaces the cells on the top). As far as the brain is concerned, these receptors don't exist; all the brain cares about are the signals that are sent through the neurons. Of course, this implant, or any implant like it, can't do anything to enhance or create more neurons, so you'll never ever get "super-vision" with implants like this. The only thing retinal implants can do is replace damaged cells.
As has been hinted at, the only way these works is REPLACING retinal cells that have been there up to adulthood. If someone has been blind their entire life or since they were very young, they will NOT get "normal" sight, ever. The neural and brain connections will not have formed. They can get some (and can tell when the lights are on, for example). Oliver Sachs wrote a very good story about this in An Anthropologist on Mars, an excellent book!
The only way you'll get "super vision" anytime soon is through external devices, such as infrared goggles or binoculars or whatnot. We might be able to miniaturize them so that they aren't a hassle, and might even fit in the eye, but they'll still essentially be external devices.
If we're going to "enhance" the eye on its terms (through the retina, etc), we'll have to "enhance" the brain too. That won't happen in my lifetime, I'm sure!
Wow. I don't know anything about computer programming and I have no idea what a "blowolf cluster" is, so I get pretty excited when I can contribute something to slashdot.
Anyway, this kind of thing is called "biofeedback" and was pretty popular in the 80's (although it's still used today). I haven't studied this specifically but I believe it's pretty effective in changing autonomic behaviors (ie behaviors that you don't have to think about), such as heart rate, skin temperature, headaches, reducing nicotine cravings, etc.
One of the keys to traditional biofeedback is to have immediate feedback so that you know exactly when you're doing something "right" -- such as lowering your heart rate and such. I doubt you could really tell when your dragon is going slightly faster in this game until you've won or lost. It's like if you play chess and make an awful move but still win; it might reinforce you to make that awful move again in the future. If you play this game enough and are competitive at it I'm sure you'd eventually improve though.
I'd buy this game if it came out for the Gamecube.:-)
I can't believe this guy got modded up. Do you guys mod up anyone who makes a bunch of crap up?
PalmOS5 will be out soon and that's the only truth this guy included in his post. However, this fact is pretty overrated. PDA's are not bought for their upgradability (or if they are, they are by stupid people); in fact, although most PDA's are upgradable today very few people actually upgrade them. The only PDA so far that has had a major upgrade released for it is the Compaq Ipaq, and there have been many problems with it. When you buy your PDA, buy it for what it can do out of the box, not what it can do in the future.
ALL apps support Sony's 320x320 resolution. If there's some bad programming in the app you can reset the Clie to work as if it were 160x160 resolution. If you mean few apps are built especially for Sony's 320x320 resolution, you're wrong again. It took a few months, but most popular apps are made especially for Sony's hi-res, including even many games. Even though the NR-series has only been out in the US for days, there are already programs popping up for the 480x320 resolution (which can still run any program ever fine).
It has approximately the same battery life as PPC devices. If you're waiting for PalmOS5 devices, you'll see around the same battery life, if not less.
The Memory Stick is the smallest flash media device available except for the extremely expensive Secure Digital format. Memory Sticks used to be expensive, but they're now about the same as Compact Flash. Note that Palm and PPC devices use the much more expensive SD (Secure Digital) format. Memory Stick and Secure Digital both have 128mb limits at the moment, so you're "does not hold too much data" argument is moot. Memory Stick is also not any more proprietary than the main competitor, Secure Digital. Sony was the developer of Memory Stick and pushes it, just like Panasonic (along with Toshiba) developed Secure Digital and pushes that. Both formats charge fairly large license fees. Non-Sony products are popping up all over that use Memory Sticks (especially in Japan). Portable and set-top DVD players, car stereos, and even Sony's next-gen WEGA Tv's have memory stick slots.
Sony has pretty much dropped MagicGate and ATRAC3 outside of asia. You don't need to touch either of these to get everything out of a clie.
Sony makes the best Palm-based PDA's. The only downside to the NR-series, in my opinion, is the size (which isn't as big as Pocket PC's or even some PalmOS units, but is bigger than, say, Sony's T-series).
Yeah totally dude!!! The supermarket mafia is tracking you through your fingerprints!!! They can tell wherever you and whatever you buy and who you sleep with and what you read!!! (They sell this info to the evil shadow government!!!)
Ignore the fact that all the fingerprint is for is to link to your CREDIT CARD: a number that DOES NOT CHANGE and is linked to your NAME and your ADDRESS and your SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER and all kinds of other PERSONAL INFORMATION and which millions of people use every day anyway WITHOUT using fingerprints!
PS I was being sarcastic:-(
Re:Disclaimer? - Not Necessary
on
Worst Buy
·
· Score: -1
They DON'T NEED a disclaimer. Imagine if I'm setting up a web site for a car dealership and I accidently put down "$147.50" instead of "$14,750.00" for a brand new car. Do I have to sell everyone a brand new car for $147.50? Of course not. That's ridiculous. I don't need a disclaimer. Many companies would have gone out of business due to simple typographic errors if that were the case.
The only reason Best Buy could POSSIBLY be at fault if it's true that they intentionally mislead customers, WHICH I DOUBT. It's pretty clear that they gain nothing by publishing incorrect prices, and since they have thousands of items for sale on their web store, a 0.1% error rate or so isn't too bad.
Hint to everyone: stop trying to rip off companies.
I don't believe the Nokia plays MP3's. Besides that, Sony Ericsson's new phone (the P800) has all of these features and runs the same OS as that Nokia phone. Plus, it has some nice little features like a jog dial (which is so useful if you've used a PDA).
Flash movies in the middle of a site (or as a "splash page") suck ass, but the link they give for a site made with the beta of the new flash is kind of nice. It's much faster and easier on the eyes than similarly-formatted sites like orbitz or travelocity.
Of course I haven't seen everything that these flash-sites can do, or will do, but I approve so far.
Just like Ebay, Paypal is successful (and I mean by # of users and money exchanged, not profit-wise, which only ebay has attained) because they were first. Both charge higher rates than their competitors without any better service or features.
Ebay has a bunch of users because their business model requires that many people come together in one place; Yahoo Auctions, for example, are horrible in comparison if only 1/2 the people use them (and the #'s aren't even that high).
PayPal just basically rode off Ebay's success and Ebay's lack of making any decent alternatives (BillPoint started off way too expensive and full of hassles).
Does anyone remember the LONG period where PayPal gave $5 to each user and $5 for each referral, even if you never used their service? I had a slightly popular website and made nearly $200 off of referrals. I've used PayPal, but only as a sender, so I've never given PayPal a dime back.
I think PayPal is near the peak of its popularity; once ebay's BillPoint starts getting more users (as Ebay is pushing it more on users and the fees are more reasonable for the market) and better alternatives arise (like citibank's c2it for a bad example), PayPal will decline in popularity. They haven't reached anything near a profit yet and I doubt they ever will.
>> If I were ever to buy hardware from a country other than my own I'd go through every single mm of it with a fine tooth comb
Umm, you mean every piece of hardware you own? Did you go through every mm of your car with a fine tooth comb? The alternator probably has a Mexican "overheat now" button and the air bag probably has a Danish "don't deploy now" switch.
Don't forget to put your non-hardware items under the microscope. Your boxers are probably made of Taiwanese "constrict now" microfibers.
Slashdot Mirror
You're absolutely right! I'm lucky in that my mom had cancer and she had a great oncologist. He told me "your mom only has a 10% chance of surviving if we treat her." So we pulled the plug! Whew, glad we saved the insurance companies thousands of bucks.
(PS I hope you burn in hell)
If you're close enough to TOUCH the person... why not just give a business card or TALK to the person???
What about people with no arms and no mouths? Refer to the previous article about the ADA, you insensitive bastard.
Is your website a business? If so the ADA should apply.
I can start a private club that only allows white people.
I can't start a business that only sells to white people.
The same thing applies to people with disabilities. According to (most) law, physical disability is just like race. Physical disability is something that just happens to someone, often when they are born. They usually have no control over it. Just like race. Of course, there are exceptions when someone physically can't do something (like drive a car) that there is no parellel to with the race analogy.
The ADA is a great law (in its purpose, anyway) and I can't believe people don't understand why. (I'm not talking about you)
Agree with your general web comments. Disagree with your ADA remark.
Not allowing access to your store because of someone's browser is one thing. That's like having a car repair shop that only services Volkswagens.
Not allowing access to your store because of who someone is (through no fault of their own) is another. That's like having a car repair shop that only services white people.
Get it to render my bank's account page properly and then maybe it will be "feature complete"
>> ...if you are in the u.k. then you'll probably not have that many hours..
Don't forget to make time for the dentist! =(
He asked "how do I juggle getting my degree from university while running my own successful company?"
He didn't ask "how do I juggle smoking pot and flipping burgers on the weekend" =(
HEY DORKWEED, MAYBE IF YOU DIDN'T PLAY 6-8 OTHER "RTS" GAMES YOU'D LIKE WARCRAFT 3 AND YOUR GIRLFRIEND WOULDN'T BE SO FAT
I know nobody will ever read this because the article is old and I'll have a -1 moderation total but here goes:
Salon.com blows. It's a worthless website/magazine. Here are its sections:
1) Crappy books for pseudointellectuals
2) Crappy films for pseudointellectuals (mostly foreign) and scathing reviews of mainstream films
3) Crappy "lifestyle" articles for pseudointellectuals about things that don't matter in the least, like Venezualan baseball scouting or price fixing for model agencies
4) Ultraliberal news reporting
5) An Americanized British tabloid "People" section
Get it? It's a cornucopia of unrelated items only brought together by the fact that stupid overeducated people would be interested in them. Kinda like a bunch of random topics like computers, libertarianism, anime, and sci-fi movies being brought together under the umbrella of dorks being interested in them.. oops
Fictionwise.com is a very profitable ebook company (you read right) that uses micropayments.
The main thing that microsoft has that mozilla doesn't have is (a monopoly, and) human factors psychologists working for them. Microsoft has probably the best human factors/psychology/human-computer interaction squad in the world. This is very noticable and makes using mozilla a pain for me, sometimes.
It's the little things like selecting large areas of text (double clicking selects the entire paragraph for you, instead of a line in mozilla, which is worthless). The tabbed interface is also vastly overrated in an environment like windows or macos, where the OS does it for you (didn't everyone complain when Opera and StarOffice did pretty much the same thing)? For unix it may be useful.
I'm very impressed overall though. I wish they could have just added some IE compliance because many very popular web pages use IE-features (which IS a de facto standard, I'm sorry to say). It's annoying not to be able to use java menus because mozilla wants to use w3 standards only. Why doesn't mozilla just convert feet and inches into meters for you?
The biggest clue, to me, is that Mozilla is pretty much the exact same experience as IE, with some things done the "open source" way: ie, not using MS standards, using open source code, etc. A notable exception that proves my above point about human factors is that in mozilla's one major new feature, the tabbed interface, they don't even allow the standard hotkey, which would be control-tab. Everything else they just copied from IE, but they couldn't copy this one. I think they should run some user-interface trials at some mozilla parties, and maybe it can become the best browser ever.
Note that I'm extremely impressed with Mozilla, though. It'll probably become my main browser at version 1.1 or so.
BREW is obsolete, everyone is using java or symbian or proprietary systems. More phones use PalmOS or PPC (in the works) than BREW.
The bottleneck is how your eyes are (probably) right now! This implant replaces or enhances the receptors (rods and cones) in the eye, which send signals to other neurons that send signals to the brain (here's a decent diagram; this implant replaces the cells on the top). As far as the brain is concerned, these receptors don't exist; all the brain cares about are the signals that are sent through the neurons. Of course, this implant, or any implant like it, can't do anything to enhance or create more neurons, so you'll never ever get "super-vision" with implants like this. The only thing retinal implants can do is replace damaged cells.
As has been hinted at, the only way these works is REPLACING retinal cells that have been there up to adulthood. If someone has been blind their entire life or since they were very young, they will NOT get "normal" sight, ever. The neural and brain connections will not have formed. They can get some (and can tell when the lights are on, for example). Oliver Sachs wrote a very good story about this in An Anthropologist on Mars, an excellent book!
The only way you'll get "super vision" anytime soon is through external devices, such as infrared goggles or binoculars or whatnot. We might be able to miniaturize them so that they aren't a hassle, and might even fit in the eye, but they'll still essentially be external devices.
If we're going to "enhance" the eye on its terms (through the retina, etc), we'll have to "enhance" the brain too. That won't happen in my lifetime, I'm sure!
Wow. I don't know anything about computer programming and I have no idea what a "blowolf cluster" is, so I get pretty excited when I can contribute something to slashdot.
:-)
Anyway, this kind of thing is called "biofeedback" and was pretty popular in the 80's (although it's still used today). I haven't studied this specifically but I believe it's pretty effective in changing autonomic behaviors (ie behaviors that you don't have to think about), such as heart rate, skin temperature, headaches, reducing nicotine cravings, etc.
One of the keys to traditional biofeedback is to have immediate feedback so that you know exactly when you're doing something "right" -- such as lowering your heart rate and such. I doubt you could really tell when your dragon is going slightly faster in this game until you've won or lost. It's like if you play chess and make an awful move but still win; it might reinforce you to make that awful move again in the future. If you play this game enough and are competitive at it I'm sure you'd eventually improve though.
I'd buy this game if it came out for the Gamecube.
Sony makes the best Palm-based PDA's. The only downside to the NR-series, in my opinion, is the size (which isn't as big as Pocket PC's or even some PalmOS units, but is bigger than, say, Sony's T-series).
This is worse than the fiasco when they started demanding signatures and addresses and real names on identification cards!
Yeah totally dude!!! The supermarket mafia is tracking you through your fingerprints!!! They can tell wherever you and whatever you buy and who you sleep with and what you read!!! (They sell this info to the evil shadow government!!!)
:-(
Ignore the fact that all the fingerprint is for is to link to your CREDIT CARD: a number that DOES NOT CHANGE and is linked to your NAME and your ADDRESS and your SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER and all kinds of other PERSONAL INFORMATION and which millions of people use every day anyway WITHOUT using fingerprints!
PS I was being sarcastic
They DON'T NEED a disclaimer. Imagine if I'm setting up a web site for a car dealership and I accidently put down "$147.50" instead of "$14,750.00" for a brand new car. Do I have to sell everyone a brand new car for $147.50? Of course not. That's ridiculous. I don't need a disclaimer. Many companies would have gone out of business due to simple typographic errors if that were the case.
The only reason Best Buy could POSSIBLY be at fault if it's true that they intentionally mislead customers, WHICH I DOUBT. It's pretty clear that they gain nothing by publishing incorrect prices, and since they have thousands of items for sale on their web store, a 0.1% error rate or so isn't too bad.
Hint to everyone: stop trying to rip off companies.
Everyone who runs kazaa is doing so to pirate software/music/movies, so I don't think they care much about license agreements or terms of service. =(
I don't believe the Nokia plays MP3's. Besides that, Sony Ericsson's new phone (the P800) has all of these features and runs the same OS as that Nokia phone. Plus, it has some nice little features like a jog dial (which is so useful if you've used a PDA).
Flash movies in the middle of a site (or as a "splash page") suck ass, but the link they give for a site made with the beta of the new flash is kind of nice. It's much faster and easier on the eyes than similarly-formatted sites like orbitz or travelocity.
Of course I haven't seen everything that these flash-sites can do, or will do, but I approve so far.
Just like Ebay, Paypal is successful (and I mean by # of users and money exchanged, not profit-wise, which only ebay has attained) because they were first. Both charge higher rates than their competitors without any better service or features.
Ebay has a bunch of users because their business model requires that many people come together in one place; Yahoo Auctions, for example, are horrible in comparison if only 1/2 the people use them (and the #'s aren't even that high).
PayPal just basically rode off Ebay's success and Ebay's lack of making any decent alternatives (BillPoint started off way too expensive and full of hassles).
Does anyone remember the LONG period where PayPal gave $5 to each user and $5 for each referral, even if you never used their service? I had a slightly popular website and made nearly $200 off of referrals. I've used PayPal, but only as a sender, so I've never given PayPal a dime back.
I think PayPal is near the peak of its popularity; once ebay's BillPoint starts getting more users (as Ebay is pushing it more on users and the fees are more reasonable for the market) and better alternatives arise (like citibank's c2it for a bad example), PayPal will decline in popularity. They haven't reached anything near a profit yet and I doubt they ever will.
Jeremyf's rating: Sell
Uh, you make no sense. The $3 rental has the same benefit as the $20 purchase, and a lot less cost.
Are you high. =(
>> If I were ever to buy hardware from a country other than my own I'd go through every single mm of it with a fine tooth comb
Umm, you mean every piece of hardware you own? Did you go through every mm of your car with a fine tooth comb? The alternator probably has a Mexican "overheat now" button and the air bag probably has a Danish "don't deploy now" switch.
Don't forget to put your non-hardware items under the microscope. Your boxers are probably made of Taiwanese "constrict now" microfibers.
I bought a used 386 on Ebay, and I couldn't even figure out where to put my austin powers DVD. Windows sucks, buy mac!