Accommodating the blind, like every service for disabled people, serves everyone. Not just because it gives "abled" people more easy access to disabled people without hassles in the transactions. But because we're all blind sometimes. Like when we want to handle cash without waving it around in front of our faces, like when paying in a dangerous area. Or when covertly getting a tip to someone. Or just in a dark room, where several cash-only transactions are popular.
And remember that machines are practically blind, too - machine vision doesn't accommodate all the conditions cash comes in when its handed to the machine, as anyone feeding wrinkled singles to a vending machine will tell you. These recognition systems can help machines to recognize bills more quickly and accurately.
Helping the blind helps everyone. It's long overdue, especially on something so universal and essential as handling cash.
Bush violated the FISA. The FISA is an exception to basic Constitutional guarantees of protection from government privacy invasion and arbitrary searches, within an extended compromise with rare, extreme cases where the government claims extraordinary necessity for speed and secrecy that the normal due process cannot accommodate.
Bush violated the FISA exception that requires him to get a warrant. Therefore he violated the Constitution. Many times, over many years. As a matter of policy, with a large staff behind him. Bush is a criminal of the highest order. That means impeachment. You or I would go to Federal prison for years and be bankrupted. Bush will clear brush at his ranch.
"The whole surface of your desk could become your keyboard and mouse-pad."
The video and descriptions show only a flat surface of a 3D object. All real objects are 3D, but few have empty flat surfaces across their entire working area.
Will this thing work with the 3D surface of my cluttered desk? I doubt it will track the position of my fingertips on a piece of paper after I've picked it up from the desk, without sensors attached to the paper.
When these sonar sensors can actually track objects inside a 3D volume, not just across a surface in 3D space, they'll have made a major leap in UI. Until then, I don't see how these sensors are different from the touchscreen bezels mounted on monitors for years, except they've figured out how to discard the frame, and supposedly do without calibration.
gwb has been doing my whole country for 6 years. It took about 8 months to reformat. And about 2 more years to install operating systems in each partition. Now that it's been replaced by an odd-numbered development release, it's working to boot the world. Damn thing headcrashes every time it gets power.
Yikes - I just saw some talking head on TV tonight referring to Iraq's security absurdity as "the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly", referring to a partition into Kurdistan, Sunnistan and Shiastan.
Not Kidding. Weird.
The 21st Century is wild at heart and weird on top.
I wish there were a bot like Majordomo which would take a remote email address, generate a hash from it, create a new mailbox alias with the hash as its name, and send a message to the remote address notifying it of the new mailbox. With a note attached, either a default or one I specify when I trigger the process.
Then I could generate addresses for each remote party with whom I correspond, and delete them. I could control whether an address bounces or just consumes mail later. I could expire the mailboxes after a time period, or a message count, or both.
And I could track how the remote parties disclose my address to one another, by watching which addresses receive messages from new remote parties, without the new remote sender even seeing that the addres they used contained the ID of the party to which I originally sent it.
That app would be very useful since I manage my own mailboxes. But it would work just as well for anyone using mailboxes I manage, as long as they trust me to keep the hash lookups. They're trusting me to handle their mail, so that seems OK. So webmail providers could use it, too.
I used to do this manually, editing my/etc/aliases file. I'm disappointed it's not fully automated by now. Maybe a Slashdotter will surprise me, and tell me where the installer package can be grabbed.
Too bad Novell didn't prioritize the development of the MS Exchange network APIs first. By now the protocol implementation should have been done. So Outlook and the rest of MS Office, as well as other Exchange servers in clusters, and Active Directory, all could have connected to a Hula shell as if connecting to a real Exchange server. That's the key competitive feature best done by an org like Novell. Which, as OSS, the rest of the community could use for our own apps.
Which we could still use now, even though Hula itself is dead.
It really looks now like Novell doesn't get "open source", and never did. Its management understood that it was the new buzzword, the only way to compete with Microsoft, somehow. So they bought a Linux distro (SuSE), and a desktop (Ximian), and announced a groupware (Hula). But they never really opened their projects, and left the source open mainly as a way to keep developers interested in developing for the "Novell" brand, long after there was any other reason left.
Meanwhile, SCO's lawsuits showed the power of open source, both threatening markets and defending from patent suits, as part of an organized effort by the global developer public. Even a way to work with a competitor like IBM without directly coordinating, just keeping the open content out in the public.
But they learned nothing about open source, its community, its culture, it's true value. They learned only that Microsoft so fears Linux that it will pay huge money for cross-licensing a single Linux run by a clueless, decrepit old competitor MS has already beaten every time, for 20 years. So MS can just crush it last, after MS has used Novell to attack Linux.
I really don't care about Novell. Their Directory Server will be a loss, but the LDAP servers will improve when they have to serve its demanding market. SuSE's SW and ecosystem will convert to other Linux distros, probably mostly Ubuntu. Ximian will be replaced by other GNOME developers, or just a different brand on the same team members.
And Hula will sink into the sunset, an empty promise by a senile old sellout. I just wish we could pick its bones clean for the next competitor to Exchange, without the Novell execs of limited vision getting in the way.
They're flimsy because the mass production scales cut costs by automating out repairs by humans in favor of manufacture and replacement by machines.
Replacement for wearing out offers the chance to get a new one with some incremental features, and the newer styles that have so much social value.
The hidden cost remaining in these gadgets is discarding them. Either labor-intensive recycling, or environmental pollution plus increased scarcity of materials. The original seller doesn't pay most of that cost, so it doesn't show up in the sale price. But it costs the consumers in increased aftermarket costs and labor.
We should take the flimsiness that economics encourages to the next step: biodegradeablility. Make them flimsy not just to human mechanical use, but to our ecosystem, including bacteria. Or even feedable to our pets. That will cut the costs of discard way down. Which will leave us more money to buy new ones.
Until we can get those little buggers to reproduce themselves. Eventually, they'll be recycling us.
"Science" is completely "apolitical". It's a-everything, because it's an abstract systematic behavior, not a person.
Scientists, on the other hand, can't be apolitical. They're humans, so they're going to be political to some degree, even if negligibly. More than two people in any society means politics. But apathy and disenfranchisement are political conditions, especially useful to those with power who make arbitrary decisions for their own reasons.
American politics does vast amounts of work according to decisions derived from facts about the way the world works. Especially the way that it works physically, as we know from physics, chemistry, biology, even astronomy. Those facts are supposed to determine the decisions we make, and the facts about those facts, to whatever degree of confidence we know we have.
Scientists are obligated to participate in politics. Not just like any other people in a democracy. But because they don't have the excuse that they don't know what will happen when the politicians do what they say.
Certainly scientists are much more appropriate to our Constitutional democratic republic than are, say, religious ministers. The Constitution specifically directs the government to "promote science", and specifically prohibits the government for "respecting an establishment of religion". Our government is crawling with religious establishment professionals. While its scientists increasingly get edited, silenced, ignored, fired, scapegoated. Scientists need to organize better to protect their interests in science. And we need them to do so, to protect our interests in science, and in them.
That's why I recommend people join SEA: Scientists and Engineers for America, even if you're not a scientist (it's free and open). Or join any more specific technical association in your discipline, then vigorously work to make policy hear your science. If you're a scientist, your work is already surely contributing to some corporate political action / lobbying industry. You should make sure that the facts you produce are being represented at least as much as the money you make for them.
Think of it as an experiment, in a lab made of people. Think of a political hypothesis to describe the way your country works best, then test it with the equipment. Share the results with the rest of us.
Thanks for proving the other factors are negligible. The problem is clearly Canadians failure to sit too close, where they could see that non-HD looks crappy on those giant TVs.
American TV is doing its best up there for you, with shows all set in sunny towns where people are more interesting (ie violent and treacherous) than out your windows. Canadian TV has to do something about your mothers, who are interfering with the grand scheme.
Maybe just much bigger TVs. It's always been the solution to "nothing's on" before.
It's not the HD programs that make the bizcase. What makes the bizcase are ever more giant TVs. Which need HD so they don't look crappy when you sit right in front of them. Which therefore need HD programs. Which advertisers will advertise on, because anyone living by the rule "do whatever your mother warned you never to do" is the ideal target market for any product.
Damn socialist Canadians, with their sanity. Their country needs bigger TVs, just to make it look full and warm it up. Where else are the black squirrels supposed to hide when American tourists and Japanese hunters come looking for them as the ice melts?
Such a skinny nail poking through your hand, even if you couldn't use the thumbpress I mentioned, wouldn't do much, if any, damage. Just pull it through, or use the EM to draw down the barbs and put it out.
Until i hear a reason why a fiber a dozen nm across with an atomic tip would split a mesoscopic plank, I'm not going to go back into the nanolab. It's hot in there.
I'd rather use an ATM by touching my mobile "phone" to it to pair it with my Bluetooth (and exchange keys), then use the phone to control my session. I'd prefer my phone client to generate onetime passwords consumed by the ATM to giving anyone my PIN.
With that protocol, I'd feel safe even using those random ATMs at delis and various "impulse purchases", where today they get my PIN and can launch a replay attack any time they want.
I hope the lawmakers eventually realize how much that fair use contributes to the value of the content. How content's value after a generation, when pop can pass into folk (or disappear), is created at least as much by the people sharing it as by the people creating it.
And I hope they then consider the American founders who created an artificial monopoly "to promote progress in science and the useful arts" as temporary, a concession of some freedom to the reality of capitalism. The reality of 1700s capitalism, which took a lot longer for inventors to recoup their risky investment than in the Internet Age.
Then, I hope, they recognize that the past couple of centuries of promoting progress in science and the useful arts have created a world where copyrights can last even less than the original 17 years, a human generation. And even carve out exceptions to copyright that not only accommodate freedom and less risky investments in invention, but serve to promote, rather than retard, that progress.
Useful innovation in copyright law. That would promote progress.
And Italian fascist Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi collapsed at a podium while his trial for fraud and money laundering is grinding away. Could the fascist tide be receding under the sheer weight of its own evil?
It would have to be more like wardriving than like ring & run, because the nanonails would react to only a coded EM pulse, password style. Qubits of encoded passwords, like the ones that next instruct the nailed materials to roll themselves up into a vehicle.
Who says it's for nailing houses, or even wood? With the EM retraction, I could staple together big nuggets of GM game I bag in the field outside my cloud dome:).
What about a nail that slips right into its target, opening barbs to prevent it sliding out, holding everything together with only tensile strength?
A nanofiber nail that's a single atom at the point, and maybe only a few hundred atoms across, braided to keep it straight as it's pushed from behind. Micrometer-long whips pointing back along the shaft for barbs, a flat back for pressing that twists off exactly flush with the surface into which the nail is driven. Bonus points for an electromagnetic effect that withdraws the barbs and forces the nail out of the target material.
Slashdot Mirror
Accommodating the blind, like every service for disabled people, serves everyone. Not just because it gives "abled" people more easy access to disabled people without hassles in the transactions. But because we're all blind sometimes. Like when we want to handle cash without waving it around in front of our faces, like when paying in a dangerous area. Or when covertly getting a tip to someone. Or just in a dark room, where several cash-only transactions are popular.
And remember that machines are practically blind, too - machine vision doesn't accommodate all the conditions cash comes in when its handed to the machine, as anyone feeding wrinkled singles to a vending machine will tell you. These recognition systems can help machines to recognize bills more quickly and accurately.
Helping the blind helps everyone. It's long overdue, especially on something so universal and essential as handling cash.
The NSA warrantless wiretapping is already officially illegal.
Bush violated the FISA. The FISA is an exception to basic Constitutional guarantees of protection from government privacy invasion and arbitrary searches, within an extended compromise with rare, extreme cases where the government claims extraordinary necessity for speed and secrecy that the normal due process cannot accommodate.
Bush violated the FISA exception that requires him to get a warrant. Therefore he violated the Constitution. Many times, over many years. As a matter of policy, with a large staff behind him. Bush is a criminal of the highest order. That means impeachment. You or I would go to Federal prison for years and be bankrupted. Bush will clear brush at his ranch.
"The whole surface of your desk could become your keyboard and mouse-pad."
The video and descriptions show only a flat surface of a 3D object. All real objects are 3D, but few have empty flat surfaces across their entire working area.
Will this thing work with the 3D surface of my cluttered desk? I doubt it will track the position of my fingertips on a piece of paper after I've picked it up from the desk, without sensors attached to the paper.
When these sonar sensors can actually track objects inside a 3D volume, not just across a surface in 3D space, they'll have made a major leap in UI. Until then, I don't see how these sensors are different from the touchscreen bezels mounted on monitors for years, except they've figured out how to discard the frame, and supposedly do without calibration.
gwb has been doing my whole country for 6 years. It took about 8 months to reformat. And about 2 more years to install operating systems in each partition. Now that it's been replaced by an odd-numbered development release, it's working to boot the world. Damn thing headcrashes every time it gets power.
PostPath is not GPL. So it's about as useful to the open source community as is MS Exchange.
Yikes - I just saw some talking head on TV tonight referring to Iraq's security absurdity as "the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly", referring to a partition into Kurdistan, Sunnistan and Shiastan.
Not Kidding. Weird.
The 21st Century is wild at heart and weird on top.
Perl: still the best :). Slashdot: sometimes still the best ;).
I wish there were a bot like Majordomo which would take a remote email address, generate a hash from it, create a new mailbox alias with the hash as its name, and send a message to the remote address notifying it of the new mailbox. With a note attached, either a default or one I specify when I trigger the process.
/etc/aliases file. I'm disappointed it's not fully automated by now. Maybe a Slashdotter will surprise me, and tell me where the installer package can be grabbed.
Then I could generate addresses for each remote party with whom I correspond, and delete them. I could control whether an address bounces or just consumes mail later. I could expire the mailboxes after a time period, or a message count, or both.
And I could track how the remote parties disclose my address to one another, by watching which addresses receive messages from new remote parties, without the new remote sender even seeing that the addres they used contained the ID of the party to which I originally sent it.
That app would be very useful since I manage my own mailboxes. But it would work just as well for anyone using mailboxes I manage, as long as they trust me to keep the hash lookups. They're trusting me to handle their mail, so that seems OK. So webmail providers could use it, too.
I used to do this manually, editing my
Too bad Novell didn't prioritize the development of the MS Exchange network APIs first. By now the protocol implementation should have been done. So Outlook and the rest of MS Office, as well as other Exchange servers in clusters, and Active Directory, all could have connected to a Hula shell as if connecting to a real Exchange server. That's the key competitive feature best done by an org like Novell. Which, as OSS, the rest of the community could use for our own apps.
Which we could still use now, even though Hula itself is dead.
It really looks now like Novell doesn't get "open source", and never did. Its management understood that it was the new buzzword, the only way to compete with Microsoft, somehow. So they bought a Linux distro (SuSE), and a desktop (Ximian), and announced a groupware (Hula). But they never really opened their projects, and left the source open mainly as a way to keep developers interested in developing for the "Novell" brand, long after there was any other reason left.
Meanwhile, SCO's lawsuits showed the power of open source, both threatening markets and defending from patent suits, as part of an organized effort by the global developer public. Even a way to work with a competitor like IBM without directly coordinating, just keeping the open content out in the public.
But they learned nothing about open source, its community, its culture, it's true value. They learned only that Microsoft so fears Linux that it will pay huge money for cross-licensing a single Linux run by a clueless, decrepit old competitor MS has already beaten every time, for 20 years. So MS can just crush it last, after MS has used Novell to attack Linux.
I really don't care about Novell. Their Directory Server will be a loss, but the LDAP servers will improve when they have to serve its demanding market. SuSE's SW and ecosystem will convert to other Linux distros, probably mostly Ubuntu. Ximian will be replaced by other GNOME developers, or just a different brand on the same team members.
And Hula will sink into the sunset, an empty promise by a senile old sellout. I just wish we could pick its bones clean for the next competitor to Exchange, without the Novell execs of limited vision getting in the way.
Your dog is already way ahead of you. It's too late to stop him. Why not spare him the trip to the vet?
No, it's a sign that a horde of TrollMods are about to descend and anonmyously mod me down.
:).
It's always end times here at the leading edge of all the "nows" that have ever been. Some of us like it here
They're flimsy because the mass production scales cut costs by automating out repairs by humans in favor of manufacture and replacement by machines.
Replacement for wearing out offers the chance to get a new one with some incremental features, and the newer styles that have so much social value.
The hidden cost remaining in these gadgets is discarding them. Either labor-intensive recycling, or environmental pollution plus increased scarcity of materials. The original seller doesn't pay most of that cost, so it doesn't show up in the sale price. But it costs the consumers in increased aftermarket costs and labor.
We should take the flimsiness that economics encourages to the next step: biodegradeablility. Make them flimsy not just to human mechanical use, but to our ecosystem, including bacteria. Or even feedable to our pets. That will cut the costs of discard way down. Which will leave us more money to buy new ones.
Until we can get those little buggers to reproduce themselves. Eventually, they'll be recycling us.
"Science" is completely "apolitical". It's a-everything, because it's an abstract systematic behavior, not a person.
Scientists, on the other hand, can't be apolitical. They're humans, so they're going to be political to some degree, even if negligibly. More than two people in any society means politics. But apathy and disenfranchisement are political conditions, especially useful to those with power who make arbitrary decisions for their own reasons.
American politics does vast amounts of work according to decisions derived from facts about the way the world works. Especially the way that it works physically, as we know from physics, chemistry, biology, even astronomy. Those facts are supposed to determine the decisions we make, and the facts about those facts, to whatever degree of confidence we know we have.
Scientists are obligated to participate in politics. Not just like any other people in a democracy. But because they don't have the excuse that they don't know what will happen when the politicians do what they say.
Certainly scientists are much more appropriate to our Constitutional democratic republic than are, say, religious ministers. The Constitution specifically directs the government to "promote science", and specifically prohibits the government for "respecting an establishment of religion". Our government is crawling with religious establishment professionals. While its scientists increasingly get edited, silenced, ignored, fired, scapegoated. Scientists need to organize better to protect their interests in science. And we need them to do so, to protect our interests in science, and in them.
That's why I recommend people join SEA: Scientists and Engineers for America, even if you're not a scientist (it's free and open). Or join any more specific technical association in your discipline, then vigorously work to make policy hear your science. If you're a scientist, your work is already surely contributing to some corporate political action / lobbying industry. You should make sure that the facts you produce are being represented at least as much as the money you make for them.
Think of it as an experiment, in a lab made of people. Think of a political hypothesis to describe the way your country works best, then test it with the equipment. Share the results with the rest of us.
Thanks for proving the other factors are negligible. The problem is clearly Canadians failure to sit too close, where they could see that non-HD looks crappy on those giant TVs.
American TV is doing its best up there for you, with shows all set in sunny towns where people are more interesting (ie violent and treacherous) than out your windows. Canadian TV has to do something about your mothers, who are interfering with the grand scheme.
Maybe just much bigger TVs. It's always been the solution to "nothing's on" before.
It's not the HD programs that make the bizcase. What makes the bizcase are ever more giant TVs. Which need HD so they don't look crappy when you sit right in front of them. Which therefore need HD programs. Which advertisers will advertise on, because anyone living by the rule "do whatever your mother warned you never to do" is the ideal target market for any product.
Damn socialist Canadians, with their sanity. Their country needs bigger TVs, just to make it look full and warm it up. Where else are the black squirrels supposed to hide when American tourists and Japanese hunters come looking for them as the ice melts?
What is the mechanics of the material that holds two surfaces together? I've got more room in my toolbox for these tiny gadgets.
Such a skinny nail poking through your hand, even if you couldn't use the thumbpress I mentioned, wouldn't do much, if any, damage. Just pull it through, or use the EM to draw down the barbs and put it out.
Or wear the forcefield all the pros have.
Until i hear a reason why a fiber a dozen nm across with an atomic tip would split a mesoscopic plank, I'm not going to go back into the nanolab. It's hot in there.
Moderation -1
100% Troll
Slashdot, where an intelligent discussion of copyrights draws the ire of Anonymous TrollMods. They should patent their clever invention.
I'd rather use an ATM by touching my mobile "phone" to it to pair it with my Bluetooth (and exchange keys), then use the phone to control my session. I'd prefer my phone client to generate onetime passwords consumed by the ATM to giving anyone my PIN.
With that protocol, I'd feel safe even using those random ATMs at delis and various "impulse purchases", where today they get my PIN and can launch a replay attack any time they want.
I hope the lawmakers eventually realize how much that fair use contributes to the value of the content. How content's value after a generation, when pop can pass into folk (or disappear), is created at least as much by the people sharing it as by the people creating it.
And I hope they then consider the American founders who created an artificial monopoly "to promote progress in science and the useful arts" as temporary, a concession of some freedom to the reality of capitalism. The reality of 1700s capitalism, which took a lot longer for inventors to recoup their risky investment than in the Internet Age.
Then, I hope, they recognize that the past couple of centuries of promoting progress in science and the useful arts have created a world where copyrights can last even less than the original 17 years, a human generation. And even carve out exceptions to copyright that not only accommodate freedom and less risky investments in invention, but serve to promote, rather than retard, that progress.
Useful innovation in copyright law. That would promote progress.
And Italian fascist Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi collapsed at a podium while his trial for fraud and money laundering is grinding away. Could the fascist tide be receding under the sheer weight of its own evil?
It would have to be more like wardriving than like ring & run, because the nanonails would react to only a coded EM pulse, password style. Qubits of encoded passwords, like the ones that next instruct the nailed materials to roll themselves up into a vehicle.
Who says it's for nailing houses, or even wood? With the EM retraction, I could staple together big nuggets of GM game I bag in the field outside my cloud dome :).
What about a nail that slips right into its target, opening barbs to prevent it sliding out, holding everything together with only tensile strength?
A nanofiber nail that's a single atom at the point, and maybe only a few hundred atoms across, braided to keep it straight as it's pushed from behind. Micrometer-long whips pointing back along the shaft for barbs, a flat back for pressing that twists off exactly flush with the surface into which the nail is driven. Bonus points for an electromagnetic effect that withdraws the barbs and forces the nail out of the target material.