Yea, that's the real issue... what was out there before MS filed for their patent, not what's out there before MS was awarded the patent. Prior art is art prior to the filing, not prior to it being awarded. For the sake of discussion, let's call art inbetween filing and awarding "intervening art".
I would hope that the preponderance of "intervening art" would help prove how obvious the idea is and invalidate the patent that way. But as other posters have said... given the way the current patent/legal system works... that would require a court challenge to the patent.
if I had insight as to what causes a panic then perhaps I'd learn how not to INCITE one.
But one mistake makes me think the original poster is an idiot. Two mistakes like this makes me think the original poster was trying to be funny. Who knows?
"Powerful" is an odd term in this case. Being an amatuer astronomer the main thing a large mirror gets you is light gathering ability. A 30 meter lens, has 9x the surface area of a 10 meter lens (the current largest optical telescope), so it can gather 9x more light.
A ground based scope will have problems with the atmospheric turbulance. If you're not an amatuer astronomer you'll be hard pressed to believe how bad this can be, but in principle, it's like looking up at the sky through the bottom of a swimming pool... sure the water is "clear" but those ripples on the surface sure do mess with your ability to see clearly.
This is not a problem when viewing large objects (did you know the Andromeda galaxy is 4x the size of the full moon?) but for smaller objects like planets... it's pretty bad.
Fortunately there's a technique called "adaptive optics" which can help.
But this is getting long winded as it is... my guess is that this scope will be used for looking at VERY dim and moderately large objects.
Whether the original poster was trolling or not... the correlation vs causation issue is irrelavent, isn't it?
Consider: The planet is warming and warming faster than it has in recent history. Even the troll doesn't appear to deny this. The warming rate will have disasterous consequences for life on this planet, maybe not fatal, but melting Arctic ice cap, the thawing tundra, etc are all pretty severe and damaging. No one seems to be denying this.
Even if we assume this is a natural cycle, does anyone deny that our CO2 usage is making it worse? Even if it is a natural cycle, wouldn't cutting back on our greenhouse emmissions help reduce the negative effects of warming?
I refuse to waste any more energy on trying to convince the deniers of the root cause of the warming... I would hope that even w/o 100% consensus on this we can all agree on what needs to happen to mitigate the effects of something that we all agree is occurring.
Beginning in my 2nd year as a Math grad student at NCSU (many years ago) the school administrators switched their grad student teaching policy across the school. From then on they would no longer allow 1st year grad students to teach freshmen any subject. All 1st year grad students needed to do things like grading and running study sessions. The stated goal was to only have "knowledgable" people teaching students.
While a noble goal, in practice, especially in math, it had the opposite effect of what was intended. The math dept already had a policy of only allowing 1st year grad students to teach College Algebra. If you're a math grad student you have the knowledge base to teach college algebra when you were a freshman. What you need to be better at is explaining things and knowing how to teach. There the Math dept was already doing this by handing out pre-made lesson plans to each of the 1st year grad student teachers... It wasn't until the 2nd year that they let us teach on our own allowing us to make our own lesson plans. But with this (then) new rule, no other changes were made, but foreign non-native English speakers were suddenly teaching kids College Algebra.
We all thought it was crazy at the time, but the policy stuck for at least that year. In hindsight it may not have had a horrible effect on the engineering majors, bad, yes, but horrible??? maybe not. But for liberal arts folks who would probably be the main students in a college algebra course, the tiny increase in subject matter knowledge that a 2nd year grad would have was completely obliterated by their lack of ability to speak clear english.
It was my first up-close brush with beaucratic stupidity.
It's too bad the article doesn't discuss the possible need to do both. It's pretty depressing to consider that such a "solution" may encourage people to emit more CO2. Which will what? Require a larger halo to help out with that? No, it's impossible to consider this a LONG term solution.
It's also easy to get depressed about this because other research indicates that by the time we start acting on reducing CO2 emissions the planetary temperature may continue to rise for a few more years.
But I prefer the more optimistic interpretation that if we do both, a halo for the short term and CO2 emission reduction for the long term we may be able to safely come through this upcoming crisis.
I agree completely. For myself, it isn't just limited to computer games. Many years ago when the Othello brand of Reversi came out my siblings and I played so many games back to back that both my brother and I suffered from the symptoms described.
We both were in high school then, he was working at a grocery store... stacking fruit, when he saw apples next to oranges he thought he could put an orange on the other side and flip the apple over and it should become an orange. When I took naps on a couch with a pillow at my head, I felt, if someone put a pillow at my feet I should flip over and become a pillow.
I agree, if the patent and the enforcement of the patent surrounds the particular implementation that Microsoft uses then it could be valid and I wouldn't care.
However, if this patent is extended to prevent anyone from creating and patenting any other method of using the human body as a bus then it's gone too far.
When I first heard about this I thought it clearly was a good deal. But then I remembered that a lot of companies subsidize the price of a cell phone against the long term contract. So... it occurs to me that one sure fire way to make the cell phone companies go out of business is to sign up for service in California with the most subsidized phone one can find, then return it within the 30 day period, and get as many Californians to do the same.
Two questions emerge: 1) How can this "bill" be modified to both give consumers the obvious rights they should have while allowing the cell phone companies to offer subsidized phone deals? 2) Why isn't the cell phone industry trotting out *this* example in their war against this bill?
I have no easy answers to #1... ideas include offering the 30 day trial only for low end phones or on plans where the consumer buys the phone outright. Charge a "restocking fee" (gasp). others?
As for #2... maybe the carriers are more afraid of giving consumers choice rather than losing their shirts on returns of heavily subsidized phones.
At this point I'm reminded of that Monty Python skit "Dennis Moore" (Robin Hood parody). "This redistribution of wealth business is trickier than I thought."
I'm a nerd (I'm here aren't I), but I grew out of it. What's the use of knowing the right answer if you can't convince others you know the right answer? Fortunately there's a high school class that teaches kids just that skill, it's called Speech and Debate.
My 15 year old son is in it and it's great. I was pleasantly surprised how much he likes it, way more than I thought. I asked him, and his answer was that it's competitive too (Debate that is, speech isn't). Seems my son likes to win way more than I thought and there's a winner in Debate... it keeps him going.
So you say the right stuff, but you're wearing white socks, sporting unkempt hair, have an untucked shirt, and broken glasses. You won't convince the judges you're right. In the real world, looks matter, presentation matters, self confidence matters. It may not be pretty, it may offend your sense of justice and mathematical fair play, but it's the way the world is. If you need to live in that world, stay behind the computer and type all your messages. But if you want to live away from the computer, learn that lesson while you're in high school and have your life ahead of you so you can take advantage of it!
Exclusion for Independently Generated Info
on
Who Owns The Facts?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I read most of the bill and Phyllis Schlafly's article. I'm scared by her example of Veeck vs SBCCI, but then again I was heartened to read this passage from the bill.
(a) INDEPENDENTLY GENERATED OR GATHERED INFORMATION- This Act shall not restrict any person from independently generating or gathering information obtained by means other than extracting it from a database generated, gathered, or maintained by another person and making that information available in commerce.
By way of example suppose... CASE 1 The phone company in my town prints its DB of customers and phone numbers and sells that book. I buy a copy of that book and take it to kinkos and give it away for free. Should I be punished?
CASE 2 Same town and phone company, but this time I go to every person in my small town and ask what their phone number is, collect that info into my own book and give that book away... "INDEPENDENTLY GATHERED INFORMATION" Seems like I'm in the clear.
On the surface I'm OK with this, but at least one problem is that the book from case 1 may be indistinguishable from the book in case 2. Will burden of proof lie with me or them?
Well, you don't have to use it. Default behavior could be "never expire" and that would mimic existing OSs.
Additionally, we're of completely opposite opinions here. I would love to have a spray bottle of "time delay paper dissolve" available in 3-month, 6-month, 9-month and 1-year time settings. Not only do I want an automatic delete capability to my virtual Archaeological filing system. I want it for my real paper-based filing system too!
I too use the archaelogical filing system for email, but would like a more structured approach for everything else.
Additionally I would LOVE OS level support for a "delete old stuff" feature. I would like to be able to tag each file with an expiration date. If I don't touch it before that expiration date the file would automatically be deleted. I would be able to tag things as "never expire" and also, should I touch something within the expire interval, the OS would reset the auto-expire date to be NOW+delta, where delta was calculated/remembered from when I first set the expiration (expire - creation = delta).
Looks like I saw this in GMA earlier in the week.../. is slipping. Also I say "looks like" because I can't pull up the sites due to the/. effect, (so maybe/. isn't slipping).
Anyway, on GMA, I was absolutely amazed that the owner said it had a 20KiloWatt generator on board. Even more amazed when the interviewer (Tony Perkins-GMA weather guy) didn't blink an eye at that statistic. Most 3000 sqft houses pull less than that at peak load! Assuming they guy didn't misspeak, the only thing I can figure is the outboard engine is electric, in addition to a rather large hot water tank... even then I'm not sure.
Looking Energetic vs Being Energetic
on
Ageism in IT?
·
· Score: 1
Now that I'm getting on in years I think I understand the deal with "ageism", and IMHO a lot of it is tied up in how energetic one is or appears to be.
I think hiring managers ASSUME rightly or wrongly that a young person is an energetic one. A qualitative thought experiment may be in order here. Take two folks, each with exactly the same "energy level" but one is 25 and the other is 45 and have them interview for a position where age doesn't really matter (hard, I know) I imagine the interviewer would assume that the 25 year old had more energy. Just because he/she is younger.
I have seen plenty of young and non-energetic people in my time and plenty of older and very energetic people in my time. If you want a highly motivated work force one should focus on how energetic the people ARE rather than how energetic they appear to be.
Programmers, I believe are in an especially difficult trap here. I have met many programmers who's mind can do the programming job extremely well, but all other external signs of their energy levels are much harder to detect.
It's a good question, but is complexity the reason? Surely someone could benchmark increasing complexity vs "time to failure" of a bunch of systems, some mentioned already. Seems cars are much more complex today than the original Model-T. Do they fail more often or less? Ditto for airplanes. I would imagine that a plot of increasing complexity of these sort of systems vs "time to failure" would be relatively flat, or at least no where near as sharp as a similar curve for software systems.
I would conjecture that it's the "virtual" nature of software that makes the interactions difficult to predict and what allows systems to fail. My favorite example of a non-software failure is the situation that lead to someone becomming the President of the United States with out ever being involved in an election. This president was Gerald Ford. For those too young, Nixon's elected VP resigned, Nixon appointed Ford, then Nixon resigned. Frankly I consider this a failure of the US Constitution, and the sequence of events that led up to this an "unforseen interaction". Surprisingly this "bug" in the US Constitution still remains unfixed.
My belief is that hardware carries baggage with it. People build things with hammers, nails, wood, brick, steel, and etc. These things place design restrictions on the designers and that these restrictions help with stability. In software, or anything virtual, the analogous "building blocks" are all in our minds and the features of these virtual components are less well understood that physical ones.
Another possibility is mere familiarity. People have been building stuff with real components for a lot longer than they have been building things with virtual components. Perhaps it's merely that length of time that is the difference. Once we've had a sort algorithm in our tool kit for as long as we've had a nail or a lever things will start to improve on the virtual front.
I'm surprised the in-flight signage hasn't changed to accommodate electronic devices. Now that all domestic US flights have been smokeless for several years, why is there still a 'no smoking' sign next to the 'fasten seatbelts' and 'flight attendant call' signs?
When some of the restricted devices are those that people usually use with headphones, it seems really strange that the only 2 ways the airlines use to announce this "black out" period are PA and flight attendant check.
Why not add a 3rd, replace the 'no smoking' sign with a 'no electronic devices' sign?
Most of the cities I've lived in have followed the rule that a long distance call (as determined by the increased charge on my phone bill) must be dialed with the 1 prefix while local calls must not have the one.
Most of the gripes I've heard from folks is that if the phone system were smart enough to know you needed to dial a 1 then why doesn't it dial that for us?
I like the idea of knowing when I'm being charged more and when I'm not and think there is a place for both 10 and 11 digit dialing. However I share the frustration of having to re-dial 11 digits because I forgot. Perhaps there could be an audible announcement... "We're sorry you must first dial a one to make this call. In 5 seconds we'll re-dial the call for you." giving you a chance to hang up if you do not wish to pay the extra charge of this "long distance" call.
This is a pet peeve of mine. Although I'm currently content to have universal computer roaming profiles and feel no immediate need for better cellphone/pda connections.
That said, my solution to the computer side is to use Netscape 4.75's roaming access feature. I have it set up in my house now and all my computers use it. It is damn handy for bookmarks and address books on my home computer network. It's so handy that I'm reluctant to upgrade past 4.75 because I've heard that roaming access HAS BEEN REMOVED from all the later releases of Netscape!
This is a disturbing trend. While MS and Apple and all are talking.net and.mac, netscape/AOL are dropping support for erstwhile 'home brew' solutions to this problem. What the hell are they thinking? True When the feature was introduced it probably was only used in corporate settings, but now that many homes have more than one computer in them it makes sense to have a feature like this for home users. IMHO netscape is dropping the ball on this by removing this feature.
Re:Freecell Solitaire...
on
Awari Solved
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It's basically normally sorted, but with aces, twos and eights on the first two rows. Nines and sixes are at the bottom and you can't climb up high enough to get to the aces.
Hey one of my favorite, and one I thought would surely make this list is Bresenham's (integer) line drawing algorithm.
If you don't know, this algorithm powered most of not all of the old computer line drawing displays (possibly including ones like Apple II's, C-64's and maybe even some of the early Evans and Sutherland machines). The algorithm is that old at least, and quite clever. For a given line (y=mx+b) it figures out which pixels on the screen are the closest to lying on this line, and it does it all in integer arithmetic!
Bresenham(sp?) has a similar circle drawing algorithm.
I'll confess my ignorance of modern day graphics hardware. I do not know if this algorithm is still at the heart of graphics machines, heart being just where the number hits the phosphor. But I wouldn't be surprised it if were still in use.
While others have serious doubts about surfwatch, it needs to be said that Google is quite fantastic. As I recall, Google rates sites based (somehow) on the quantity of references to said site. This may turn out to be a very effective approach to detecting pornography.
To make an example, imagine searching for "female breasts", either for pornographic reasons or for breast cancer reasons. I can almost imagine the citations for pornography and medical as being completely non-overlapping. If Google can detect this (maybe by relying on surfwatch's database) and take appropriate action, this could have quite a high success rate.
But as in all things, I would certainly like to be able to CHOOSE whether this is active or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Yea, that's the real issue... what was out there before MS filed for their patent, not what's out there before MS was awarded the patent. Prior art is art prior to the filing, not prior to it being awarded. For the sake of discussion, let's call art inbetween filing and awarding "intervening art".
I would hope that the preponderance of "intervening art" would help prove how obvious the idea is and invalidate the patent that way. But as other posters have said... given the way the current patent/legal system works... that would require a court challenge to the patent.
Not to mention "insight a panic"...
if I had insight as to what causes a panic then perhaps I'd learn how not to INCITE one.
But one mistake makes me think the original poster is an idiot. Two mistakes like this makes me think the original poster was trying to be funny. Who knows?
"Powerful" is an odd term in this case. Being an amatuer astronomer the main thing a large mirror gets you is light gathering ability. A 30 meter lens, has 9x the surface area of a 10 meter lens (the current largest optical telescope), so it can gather 9x more light.
A ground based scope will have problems with the atmospheric turbulance. If you're not an amatuer astronomer you'll be hard pressed to believe how bad this can be, but in principle, it's like looking up at the sky through the bottom of a swimming pool... sure the water is "clear" but those ripples on the surface sure do mess with your ability to see clearly.
This is not a problem when viewing large objects (did you know the Andromeda galaxy is 4x the size of the full moon?) but for smaller objects like planets... it's pretty bad.
Fortunately there's a technique called "adaptive optics" which can help.
But this is getting long winded as it is... my guess is that this scope will be used for looking at VERY dim and moderately large objects.
Whether the original poster was trolling or not... the correlation vs causation issue is irrelavent, isn't it?
Consider: The planet is warming and warming faster than it has in recent history. Even the troll doesn't appear to deny this. The warming rate will have disasterous consequences for life on this planet, maybe not fatal, but melting Arctic ice cap, the thawing tundra, etc are all pretty severe and damaging. No one seems to be denying this.
Even if we assume this is a natural cycle, does anyone deny that our CO2 usage is making it worse? Even if it is a natural cycle, wouldn't cutting back on our greenhouse emmissions help reduce the negative effects of warming?
I refuse to waste any more energy on trying to convince the deniers of the root cause of the warming... I would hope that even w/o 100% consensus on this we can all agree on what needs to happen to mitigate the effects of something that we all agree is occurring.
Beginning in my 2nd year as a Math grad student at NCSU (many years ago) the school administrators switched their grad student teaching policy across the school. From then on they would no longer allow 1st year grad students to teach freshmen any subject. All 1st year grad students needed to do things like grading and running study sessions. The stated goal was to only have "knowledgable" people teaching students.
While a noble goal, in practice, especially in math, it had the opposite effect of what was intended. The math dept already had a policy of only allowing 1st year grad students to teach College Algebra. If you're a math grad student you have the knowledge base to teach college algebra when you were a freshman. What you need to be better at is explaining things and knowing how to teach. There the Math dept was already doing this by handing out pre-made lesson plans to each of the 1st year grad student teachers... It wasn't until the 2nd year that they let us teach on our own allowing us to make our own lesson plans. But with this (then) new rule, no other changes were made, but foreign non-native English speakers were suddenly teaching kids College Algebra.
We all thought it was crazy at the time, but the policy stuck for at least that year. In hindsight it may not have had a horrible effect on the engineering majors, bad, yes, but horrible??? maybe not. But for liberal arts folks who would probably be the main students in a college algebra course, the tiny increase in subject matter knowledge that a 2nd year grad would have was completely obliterated by their lack of ability to speak clear english.
It was my first up-close brush with beaucratic stupidity.
It's too bad the article doesn't discuss the possible need to do both. It's pretty depressing to consider that such a "solution" may encourage people to emit more CO2. Which will what? Require a larger halo to help out with that? No, it's impossible to consider this a LONG term solution.
It's also easy to get depressed about this because other research indicates that by the time we start acting on reducing CO2 emissions the planetary temperature may continue to rise for a few more years.
But I prefer the more optimistic interpretation that if we do both, a halo for the short term and CO2 emission reduction for the long term we may be able to safely come through this upcoming crisis.
I agree completely. For myself, it isn't just limited to computer games. Many years ago when the Othello brand of Reversi came out my siblings and I played so many games back to back that both my brother and I suffered from the symptoms described.
We both were in high school then, he was working at a grocery store... stacking fruit, when he saw apples next to oranges he thought he could put an orange on the other side and flip the apple over and it should become an orange. When I took naps on a couch with a pillow at my head, I felt, if someone put a pillow at my feet I should flip over and become a pillow.
I agree, if the patent and the enforcement of the patent surrounds the particular implementation that Microsoft uses then it could be valid and I wouldn't care.
However, if this patent is extended to prevent anyone from creating and patenting any other method of using the human body as a bus then it's gone too far.
When I first heard about this I thought it clearly was a good deal. But then I remembered that a lot of companies subsidize the price of a cell phone against the long term contract. So... it occurs to me that one sure fire way to make the cell phone companies go out of business is to sign up for service in California with the most subsidized phone one can find, then return it within the 30 day period, and get as many Californians to do the same.
Two questions emerge:
1) How can this "bill" be modified to both give consumers the obvious rights they should have while allowing the cell phone companies to offer subsidized phone deals?
2) Why isn't the cell phone industry trotting out *this* example in their war against this bill?
I have no easy answers to #1... ideas include offering the 30 day trial only for low end phones or on plans where the consumer buys the phone outright. Charge a "restocking fee" (gasp). others?
As for #2... maybe the carriers are more afraid of giving consumers choice rather than losing their shirts on returns of heavily subsidized phones.
At this point I'm reminded of that Monty Python skit "Dennis Moore" (Robin Hood parody). "This redistribution of wealth business is trickier than I thought."
Thanks, I will.
I'm a nerd (I'm here aren't I), but I grew out of it. What's the use of knowing the right answer if you can't convince others you know the right answer? Fortunately there's a high school class that teaches kids just that skill, it's called Speech and Debate.
My 15 year old son is in it and it's great. I was pleasantly surprised how much he likes it, way more than I thought. I asked him, and his answer was that it's competitive too (Debate that is, speech isn't). Seems my son likes to win way more than I thought and there's a winner in Debate... it keeps him going.
So you say the right stuff, but you're wearing white socks, sporting unkempt hair, have an untucked shirt, and broken glasses. You won't convince the judges you're right. In the real world, looks matter, presentation matters, self confidence matters. It may not be pretty, it may offend your sense of justice and mathematical fair play, but it's the way the world is. If you need to live in that world, stay behind the computer and type all your messages. But if you want to live away from the computer, learn that lesson while you're in high school and have your life ahead of you so you can take advantage of it!
I read most of the bill and Phyllis Schlafly's article. I'm scared by her example of Veeck vs SBCCI, but then again I was heartened to read this passage from the bill.
(a) INDEPENDENTLY GENERATED OR GATHERED INFORMATION- This Act shall not restrict any person from independently generating or gathering information obtained by means other than extracting it from a database generated, gathered, or maintained by another person and making that information available in commerce.
By way of example suppose...
CASE 1
The phone company in my town prints its DB of customers and phone numbers and sells that book. I buy a copy of that book and take it to kinkos and give it away for free. Should I be punished?
CASE 2
Same town and phone company, but this time I go to every person in my small town and ask what their phone number is, collect that info into my own book and give that book away... "INDEPENDENTLY GATHERED INFORMATION" Seems like I'm in the clear.
On the surface I'm OK with this, but at least one problem is that the book from case 1 may be indistinguishable from the book in case 2. Will burden of proof lie with me or them?
Sounds more like an explanation for Ball Lightning than how life started.
Well, you don't have to use it. Default behavior could be "never expire" and that would mimic existing OSs.
Additionally, we're of completely opposite opinions here. I would love to have a spray bottle of "time delay paper dissolve" available in 3-month, 6-month, 9-month and 1-year time settings. Not only do I want an automatic delete capability to my virtual Archaeological filing system. I want it for my real paper-based filing system too!
I too use the archaelogical filing system for email, but would like a more structured approach for everything else.
Additionally I would LOVE OS level support for a "delete old stuff" feature. I would like to be able to tag each file with an expiration date. If I don't touch it before that expiration date the file would automatically be deleted. I would be able to tag things as "never expire" and also, should I touch something within the expire interval, the OS would reset the auto-expire date to be NOW+delta, where delta was calculated/remembered from when I first set the expiration (expire - creation = delta).
Is this so haarrrd?
Looks like I saw this in GMA earlier in the week... /. is slipping. Also I say "looks like" because I can't pull up the sites due to the /. effect, (so maybe /. isn't slipping).
Anyway, on GMA, I was absolutely amazed that the owner said it had a 20KiloWatt generator on board. Even more amazed when the interviewer (Tony Perkins-GMA weather guy) didn't blink an eye at that statistic. Most 3000 sqft houses pull less than that at peak load! Assuming they guy didn't misspeak, the only thing I can figure is the outboard engine is electric, in addition to a rather large hot water tank... even then I'm not sure.
Now that I'm getting on in years I think I understand the deal with "ageism", and IMHO a lot of it is tied up in how energetic one is or appears to be.
I think hiring managers ASSUME rightly or wrongly that a young person is an energetic one. A qualitative thought experiment may be in order here. Take two folks, each with exactly the same "energy level" but one is 25 and the other is 45 and have them interview for a position where age doesn't really matter (hard, I know) I imagine the interviewer would assume that the 25 year old had more energy. Just because he/she is younger.
I have seen plenty of young and non-energetic people in my time and plenty of older and very energetic people in my time. If you want a highly motivated work force one should focus on how energetic the people ARE rather than how energetic they appear to be.
Programmers, I believe are in an especially difficult trap here. I have met many programmers who's mind can do the programming job extremely well, but all other external signs of their energy levels are much harder to detect.
It's a good question, but is complexity the reason? Surely someone could benchmark increasing complexity vs "time to failure" of a bunch of systems, some mentioned already. Seems cars are much more complex today than the original Model-T. Do they fail more often or less? Ditto for airplanes. I would imagine that a plot of increasing complexity of these sort of systems vs "time to failure" would be relatively flat, or at least no where near as sharp as a similar curve for software systems.
I would conjecture that it's the "virtual" nature of software that makes the interactions difficult to predict and what allows systems to fail. My favorite example of a non-software failure is the situation that lead to someone becomming the President of the United States with out ever being involved in an election. This president was Gerald Ford. For those too young, Nixon's elected VP resigned, Nixon appointed Ford, then Nixon resigned. Frankly I consider this a failure of the US Constitution, and the sequence of events that led up to this an "unforseen interaction". Surprisingly this "bug" in the US Constitution still remains unfixed.
My belief is that hardware carries baggage with it. People build things with hammers, nails, wood, brick, steel, and etc. These things place design restrictions on the designers and that these restrictions help with stability. In software, or anything virtual, the analogous "building blocks" are all in our minds and the features of these virtual components are less well understood that physical ones.
Another possibility is mere familiarity. People have been building stuff with real components for a lot longer than they have been building things with virtual components. Perhaps it's merely that length of time that is the difference. Once we've had a sort algorithm in our tool kit for as long as we've had a nail or a lever things will start to improve on the virtual front.
I'm surprised the in-flight signage hasn't changed to accommodate electronic devices. Now that all domestic US flights have been smokeless for several years, why is there still a 'no smoking' sign next to the 'fasten seatbelts' and 'flight attendant call' signs?
When some of the restricted devices are those that people usually use with headphones, it seems really strange that the only 2 ways the airlines use to announce this "black out" period are PA and flight attendant check.
Why not add a 3rd, replace the 'no smoking' sign with a 'no electronic devices' sign?
Most of the cities I've lived in have followed the rule that a long distance call (as determined by the increased charge on my phone bill) must be dialed with the 1 prefix while local calls must not have the one.
Most of the gripes I've heard from folks is that if the phone system were smart enough to know you needed to dial a 1 then why doesn't it dial that for us?
I like the idea of knowing when I'm being charged more and when I'm not and think there is a place for both 10 and 11 digit dialing. However I share the frustration of having to re-dial 11 digits because I forgot. Perhaps there could be an audible announcement... "We're sorry you must first dial a one to make this call. In 5 seconds we'll re-dial the call for you." giving you a chance to hang up if you do not wish to pay the extra charge of this "long distance" call.
This is a pet peeve of mine. Although I'm currently content to have universal computer roaming profiles and feel no immediate need for better cellphone/pda connections.
.net and .mac, netscape/AOL are dropping support for erstwhile 'home brew' solutions to this problem. What the hell are they thinking? True When the feature was introduced it probably was only used in corporate settings, but now that many homes have more than one computer in them it makes sense to have a feature like this for home users. IMHO netscape is dropping the ball on this by removing this feature.
That said, my solution to the computer side is to use Netscape 4.75's roaming access feature. I have it set up in my house now and all my computers use it. It is damn handy for bookmarks and address books on my home computer network. It's so handy that I'm reluctant to upgrade past 4.75 because I've heard that roaming access HAS BEEN REMOVED from all the later releases of Netscape!
This is a disturbing trend. While MS and Apple and all are talking
Here's an unsolvable instance
It's basically normally sorted, but with aces, twos and eights on the first two rows. Nines and sixes are at the bottom and you can't climb up high enough to get to the aces.
If you don't know, this algorithm powered most of not all of the old computer line drawing displays (possibly including ones like Apple II's, C-64's and maybe even some of the early Evans and Sutherland machines). The algorithm is that old at least, and quite clever. For a given line (y=mx+b) it figures out which pixels on the screen are the closest to lying on this line, and it does it all in integer arithmetic!
Bresenham(sp?) has a similar circle drawing algorithm.
I'll confess my ignorance of modern day graphics hardware. I do not know if this algorithm is still at the heart of graphics machines, heart being just where the number hits the phosphor. But I wouldn't be surprised it if were still in use.
To make an example, imagine searching for "female breasts", either for pornographic reasons or for breast cancer reasons. I can almost imagine the citations for pornography and medical as being completely non-overlapping. If Google can detect this (maybe by relying on surfwatch's database) and take appropriate action, this could have quite a high success rate.
But as in all things, I would certainly like to be able to CHOOSE whether this is active or not.