The most disruptive is someone walking into my office - you can't get away from that, although you can tell the person you're busy.
There's also an ex-colleague's tactic of not bathing. Visitors really fall off when you reek. Unfortunately he took it too far and let the miasma stray outside the boundaries of his cubicle. We had a mini-revolt and got our manager to transfer him elsewhere.
One thing I haven't succumbed to ...
on
Meet The Life Hackers
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
is using Instant Messaging when I'm working. All the other distractions are bad enough without a bunch of little windows popping up all the time. I don't know how people who use it stand it.
Hmmm. I suddenly have this mental image of me yelling, "Get off my lawn, you kids!" while waving my cane.
One of Google's arguments isn't quite valid
on
Google Terror Threat
·
· Score: 1
Debbie Frost, spokewoman for Mountain View, California-based Google, noted that the software uses information already available from public sources and the images displayed are about one to two years old, not shown in real time."
Using Google's KML languague, you can overlay more recent photos on a particular area. Of course, if you have those photos, then that's the problem, not Google Earth.
I notice that one of the recommendations is scholarships for certain degrees, after which the receiver would be obligated to teach for a time to pay it off. I have a better idea: pay the teachers who have those degrees more than others. I know the teacher's unions will have a stroke at this unegalitarian approach, but screw them. The capitalist approach is, when something is scarce you pay more for it or do without. Why should math teachers who actually have degrees in math be any different?
Feng shui in public buildings and banning GMail? Yeah I know this is off topic but I'd really like to see some sources cited for those two bits mentioned. Or were you being facetious?
Long contracts are how cell companies manage to offer you "free" or low-cost phones, "free" minutes, etc. If contracts are limited to one year, you'll see those sorts of offers disappear or go up in cost. Maybe that's an acceptable result, but no one should expect that this regulation will somehow usher in a utopia for the consumer in which all sorts of new rights adhere at no cost.
I notice that nobody is bitching about the busybodies in the California legislature who actually wrote this bill. This is just the latest in their endless campaign to make us all Better People. No soft drinks or junk food in schools, no "ethnic" team mascots or names, feng shui in the building code, requiring vending machines to sell health food, banning GMail ("we think it's an absolute invasion of privacy. It's like having a massive billboard in the middle of your home"). These are all recent bills they've considered. These people, mostly Democrats, have an absolute mania to micromanage our lives in this state, and we somehow keep electing these radical loons.
Please note that this isn't interesting unless you work in, as, the FA says, a severely memory constrained system.
Which is exactly why I ended up using protothreads for a PIC microcontroller based system that needed some concurrency but didn't have the resources to support a more full-featured OS. With protothreads, I was able to input serial data from a couple of devices, drive an LCD display, take user input, etc. For all but the simplest implementations of microcontroller-based systems, protothreads are a terrific help.
It's all about trust, and yes, a war matters here: Waged against international law, and against the wishes of an international community. The US lost much credibility here. In the end, everyone only trusts in bodies he has had a hand in setting up. This is nothing new, but the war in Iraq surly sped things up.
Without getting into an argument about the legitimacy of international law created and interpreted by an intrinsically corrupt body, let me just say that, of all the institutions in existence, I trust the U.S. more than any other to do the right thing most of the time. We have our flaws and more than a little hubris, but people risk their lives to get here for a reason: there's no better place in safeguarding personal freedoms. When people can be arrested and prosecuted for making statements critical of Islam, when governments seem to have an absolute mania for observing and tracking their citizens, I fear that even Europe is becoming an increasingly hostile environment to liberties we've come to assume as fundamental to our cultures. The internet as administered by the US today is a laisse faire environment. I can only conclude that the motivation for the UN/EU taking control would be to end that.
Radical nutjobs are not going to pay $100,000 for an autonomous car when recruting other nutjobs to blow them selvs up is much cheaper.
The price barrier will be of short duration. I expect that in a surprisingly short period of time, it'll be down to a few thousand dollars for the guidance computer and sensors. The major portion of the cost will be the vehicle itself, and they've shown themselves to be more than willing to front that (or steal them). They don't seem to be short of cash in any case. All the ordnance they've been using doesn't come cheap.
I don't know about these being used as unmanned 'weapons', but certainly the military will use them for transport vehicles. The real reason for this competition was to create technology that would save lives. This is even more appropriate now that a majority of deaths over in Iraq are due to road side bombs.
Trouble is, once this technology becomes widespread, the bombs aren't going to be just roadside, they'll be driving themselves right up to you. Imagine the damage a swarm of autonomous vehicles could do to a convoy, or to a targeted building, and how hard it would be to defend against them. We might then need to develop counter-autonomous vehicles to protect ourselves from enemy autonomous vehicles. Should be a good era for advancement of autonomous vehicles, but it's going to bring its own set of problems.
On another note: No country will give up national control over its domains. And nobody is asking for that. But regarding international matters, nobody is going to tolerate one nations control over international communication any longer.
Who's to say, once the UN is in charge, what will happen? If the UN takes its hostility toward Israel to the next logical step, what's to keep them from simply saying, "Stop fighting the Palestinians, or.IL will cease to exist as far as we're concerned"? How about when the UN decides that www.pigs.com is offensive to Muslims? Will politically correct member nations then excise that domain from their nameservers, while the US and some others keep it? What's to keep a million disagreements like this from obliterating the universality of the internet? Bringing up the US war on Iraq in this matter indicates exactly the danger: issues outside the needs of telecomm are going to be dragged into it almost immediately, and the threat of internet excommunication will be used as a weapon by whoever is in authority, something the US has not done and is extremely unlikely ever to do.
The answer of course is that, once autonomous vehicles are possible and proven, the door is open to any use. The military will use them to deliver supplies, and so will relief organizations. Private companies will use them to transport materials for, for example, the building of remote pipelines or roads. Ranchers will use them to patrol the boundaries of their acreage. Security companies will employ autonomous vehicles to keep an eye on the perimeters of land they're guarding. Universities will use them to explore the arctic, antarctic, and other hostile environments. Radical nutjobs will use them to deliver deadly payloads instead of using human beings. And there will be a host of applications that we haven't even thought of yet.
Has the United States been a bad custodian of the internet in some way? Has it abused its powers of control? Has it bullied anyone or threatened to misuse its authority? Beyond wanting to wrench the steering wheel away, what reason do the EU and UN have for forcing such a change, and what benefits do these organizations think will flow from it?
The utter fecklessness and corruption of the UN in bringing authoritaritan/totalitarian regimes (Iraq, Syria, North Korea, and a depressingly long list of others) to heel, protect the helpless (Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan), or deter nuclear proliferation among rogue states (Iran, North Korea) don't give me a warm feeling that it's going to do any better when it's in charge of the internet.
Does any else get the mental image of turning on this monitor and suddenly having every square inch of one's face pierced by tiny little pixel-sized laser beams?
The point of my post was, I'd like to know BEFORE I RTFA roughly what it's about. I don't have much interest in reading about the Servants of Athena, or Slimeballs of Argentina, or whatever, and I wouldn't have to bother trying to fight through the/. effect to find out that it's about a topic I don't care about.
Would it kill submitters to expand acronyms? Or give a little background on the "frammazazz project" for those of us who have no idea what it is? I read some of these summaries and am even stupider than when I started. And that's saying something.
I think in most cases, property taxes are collected by the local municipality, and it's really their primary form of income.
Sales tax is usually state-wide. So all that added commercial activity in the area is going to California, not the local municipal governments.
Actually, post-prop 13, the state ends up with the property tax revenue. The state doles it back, less its 'cut' to the counties and cities, though some are "more equal than others" in what they get. What the counties and cities get is most of the sales tax. That's why you see cities doing everything humanly possible to get more retail businesses built: they get more sales tax revenue for every one of those.
Paying NASA is just paying NASA.
Paying NASA is paying the federal taxpayer. I don't know about you, but I pay lots of federal tax and anything that reduces federal deficits I'm in favor of.
The city is now going to have to deal with issues such as increased traffic, upgrading public utilities, etc., and they're not going to get the money to handle it. I'm not surprised that they are ticked off at this.
The city is going to get lots of new, very high-paying jobs. Those people will pay sales tax, buy homes and pay property tax, and in general add to the prosperity of the area. The city is getting a good deal, on balance. However, like many governmental entities in California, they've also bloated their payrolls and overpromised on their benefits, so they think it's up to taxpayers to bail them out. Rather than cut payroll or benefits to fit reality, they're looking at any way possible to shake more money out of the pockets of the people. That's why they're ticked that somebody might be able to escape their clutches.
Google is winning big, and at the expense of the local people.
Ask them [members of the younger generation] HOW the things work, and they have no idea. They are really riding on the backs of the 'old folks' like us that built the goodies they enjoy.
We're all getting overwhelmed by increasing complexity in the devices we use. Back in the days before electronic ignitions and the like, I was able to maintain my own car. Tuned it, changed plugs, cleaned out the carb, even changed the water pump on it. Now, I'd no more attempt to work on my car's engine than do my own brain surgery. Come to think of it, brain surgery looks easier.
But they can, as the California initiative makes clear. What they can't get is U.S. Government FEDERAL funding for NEW LINES of EMBRYONIC stem cell research. Unless you subscribe to the notion that funding from the American government is the sine qua non of all medical research, this isn't more than a minor obstacle. There are any number of state, private, and international sources for funding research for EMBRYONIC stem cells. The only reason this has become an issue is because one side of the political spectrum sees it as a weapon it can use to club the other.
I skimmed through the article and didn't see whether the memory can at least be erased and used as a plain SD memory once it's hit its replay limit. Tossing a perfectly good memory chip once it's "used up" seems pretty stupid and wasteful.
I guess it could be worse. Some organization somewhere has to be naming their machines after body parts. Some poor schmuck has his user account hosted on Anus.
Slashdot Mirror
There's also an ex-colleague's tactic of not bathing. Visitors really fall off when you reek. Unfortunately he took it too far and let the miasma stray outside the boundaries of his cubicle. We had a mini-revolt and got our manager to transfer him elsewhere.
is using Instant Messaging when I'm working. All the other distractions are bad enough without a bunch of little windows popping up all the time. I don't know how people who use it stand it.
Hmmm. I suddenly have this mental image of me yelling, "Get off my lawn, you kids!" while waving my cane.
Using Google's KML languague, you can overlay more recent photos on a particular area. Of course, if you have those photos, then that's the problem, not Google Earth.
I was thinking about some sort of thin piezoelectric generator, where you'd give it a few squeezes to generate the needed power.
When I read this, I immediately got the image of the Hogswart paintings in the Harry Potter movies.
Obligatory:
In future, newspapers read you!
I notice that one of the recommendations is scholarships for certain degrees, after which the receiver would be obligated to teach for a time to pay it off. I have a better idea: pay the teachers who have those degrees more than others. I know the teacher's unions will have a stroke at this unegalitarian approach, but screw them. The capitalist approach is, when something is scarce you pay more for it or do without. Why should math teachers who actually have degrees in math be any different?
Banning GMail
Feng Shui
Long contracts are how cell companies manage to offer you "free" or low-cost phones, "free" minutes, etc. If contracts are limited to one year, you'll see those sorts of offers disappear or go up in cost. Maybe that's an acceptable result, but no one should expect that this regulation will somehow usher in a utopia for the consumer in which all sorts of new rights adhere at no cost.
I notice that nobody is bitching about the busybodies in the California legislature who actually wrote this bill. This is just the latest in their endless campaign to make us all Better People. No soft drinks or junk food in schools, no "ethnic" team mascots or names, feng shui in the building code, requiring vending machines to sell health food, banning GMail ("we think it's an absolute invasion of privacy. It's like having a massive billboard in the middle of your home"). These are all recent bills they've considered. These people, mostly Democrats, have an absolute mania to micromanage our lives in this state, and we somehow keep electing these radical loons.
The interface stinks. I much prefer BlogLines.
Which is exactly why I ended up using protothreads for a PIC microcontroller based system that needed some concurrency but didn't have the resources to support a more full-featured OS. With protothreads, I was able to input serial data from a couple of devices, drive an LCD display, take user input, etc. For all but the simplest implementations of microcontroller-based systems, protothreads are a terrific help.
It's all about trust, and yes, a war matters here: Waged against international law, and against the wishes of an international community. The US lost much credibility here. In the end, everyone only trusts in bodies he has had a hand in setting up. This is nothing new, but the war in Iraq surly sped things up.
Without getting into an argument about the legitimacy of international law created and interpreted by an intrinsically corrupt body, let me just say that, of all the institutions in existence, I trust the U.S. more than any other to do the right thing most of the time. We have our flaws and more than a little hubris, but people risk their lives to get here for a reason: there's no better place in safeguarding personal freedoms. When people can be arrested and prosecuted for making statements critical of Islam, when governments seem to have an absolute mania for observing and tracking their citizens, I fear that even Europe is becoming an increasingly hostile environment to liberties we've come to assume as fundamental to our cultures. The internet as administered by the US today is a laisse faire environment. I can only conclude that the motivation for the UN/EU taking control would be to end that.
The price barrier will be of short duration. I expect that in a surprisingly short period of time, it'll be down to a few thousand dollars for the guidance computer and sensors. The major portion of the cost will be the vehicle itself, and they've shown themselves to be more than willing to front that (or steal them). They don't seem to be short of cash in any case. All the ordnance they've been using doesn't come cheap.
Trouble is, once this technology becomes widespread, the bombs aren't going to be just roadside, they'll be driving themselves right up to you. Imagine the damage a swarm of autonomous vehicles could do to a convoy, or to a targeted building, and how hard it would be to defend against them. We might then need to develop counter-autonomous vehicles to protect ourselves from enemy autonomous vehicles. Should be a good era for advancement of autonomous vehicles, but it's going to bring its own set of problems.
Who's to say, once the UN is in charge, what will happen? If the UN takes its hostility toward Israel to the next logical step, what's to keep them from simply saying, "Stop fighting the Palestinians, or .IL will cease to exist as far as we're concerned"? How about when the UN decides that www.pigs.com is offensive to Muslims? Will politically correct member nations then excise that domain from their nameservers, while the US and some others keep it? What's to keep a million disagreements like this from obliterating the universality of the internet? Bringing up the US war on Iraq in this matter indicates exactly the danger: issues outside the needs of telecomm are going to be dragged into it almost immediately, and the threat of internet excommunication will be used as a weapon by whoever is in authority, something the US has not done and is extremely unlikely ever to do.
The answer of course is that, once autonomous vehicles are possible and proven, the door is open to any use. The military will use them to deliver supplies, and so will relief organizations. Private companies will use them to transport materials for, for example, the building of remote pipelines or roads. Ranchers will use them to patrol the boundaries of their acreage. Security companies will employ autonomous vehicles to keep an eye on the perimeters of land they're guarding. Universities will use them to explore the arctic, antarctic, and other hostile environments. Radical nutjobs will use them to deliver deadly payloads instead of using human beings. And there will be a host of applications that we haven't even thought of yet.
Has the United States been a bad custodian of the internet in some way? Has it abused its powers of control? Has it bullied anyone or threatened to misuse its authority? Beyond wanting to wrench the steering wheel away, what reason do the EU and UN have for forcing such a change, and what benefits do these organizations think will flow from it?
The utter fecklessness and corruption of the UN in bringing authoritaritan/totalitarian regimes (Iraq, Syria, North Korea, and a depressingly long list of others) to heel, protect the helpless (Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan), or deter nuclear proliferation among rogue states (Iran, North Korea) don't give me a warm feeling that it's going to do any better when it's in charge of the internet.
Does any else get the mental image of turning on this monitor and suddenly having every square inch of one's face pierced by tiny little pixel-sized laser beams?
The point of my post was, I'd like to know BEFORE I RTFA roughly what it's about. I don't have much interest in reading about the Servants of Athena, or Slimeballs of Argentina, or whatever, and I wouldn't have to bother trying to fight through the /. effect to find out that it's about a topic I don't care about.
Would it kill submitters to expand acronyms? Or give a little background on the "frammazazz project" for those of us who have no idea what it is? I read some of these summaries and am even stupider than when I started. And that's saying something.
Sales tax is usually state-wide. So all that added commercial activity in the area is going to California, not the local municipal governments.
Actually, post-prop 13, the state ends up with the property tax revenue. The state doles it back, less its 'cut' to the counties and cities, though some are "more equal than others" in what they get. What the counties and cities get is most of the sales tax. That's why you see cities doing everything humanly possible to get more retail businesses built: they get more sales tax revenue for every one of those.
Paying NASA is just paying NASA.
Paying NASA is paying the federal taxpayer. I don't know about you, but I pay lots of federal tax and anything that reduces federal deficits I'm in favor of.
The city is now going to have to deal with issues such as increased traffic, upgrading public utilities, etc., and they're not going to get the money to handle it. I'm not surprised that they are ticked off at this.
The city is going to get lots of new, very high-paying jobs. Those people will pay sales tax, buy homes and pay property tax, and in general add to the prosperity of the area. The city is getting a good deal, on balance. However, like many governmental entities in California, they've also bloated their payrolls and overpromised on their benefits, so they think it's up to taxpayers to bail them out. Rather than cut payroll or benefits to fit reality, they're looking at any way possible to shake more money out of the pockets of the people. That's why they're ticked that somebody might be able to escape their clutches.
Google is winning big, and at the expense of the local people.
Exactly the opposite.
We're all getting overwhelmed by increasing complexity in the devices we use. Back in the days before electronic ignitions and the like, I was able to maintain my own car. Tuned it, changed plugs, cleaned out the carb, even changed the water pump on it. Now, I'd no more attempt to work on my car's engine than do my own brain surgery. Come to think of it, brain surgery looks easier.
But they can, as the California initiative makes clear. What they can't get is U.S. Government FEDERAL funding for NEW LINES of EMBRYONIC stem cell research. Unless you subscribe to the notion that funding from the American government is the sine qua non of all medical research, this isn't more than a minor obstacle. There are any number of state, private, and international sources for funding research for EMBRYONIC stem cells. The only reason this has become an issue is because one side of the political spectrum sees it as a weapon it can use to club the other.
I skimmed through the article and didn't see whether the memory can at least be erased and used as a plain SD memory once it's hit its replay limit. Tossing a perfectly good memory chip once it's "used up" seems pretty stupid and wasteful.
I guess it could be worse. Some organization somewhere has to be naming their machines after body parts. Some poor schmuck has his user account hosted on Anus.