Yes, but they're old and no longer useful. The overall impact is purely aesthetic....it's not really a huge emergency when lots and lots of old people die in the middle of a snowstorm..
I, on the other hand, think the world would be better off without
those who are congenitally devoid of empathy (please look up the word,
although it may be hard for someone without it to grasp its meaning).
Check out The Golden Book of
Chemistry Experiments
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Book_of_Chemistry_Experiments,
an amazing book now considered dangerous. The book was apparently
removed from most public libraries. I think you can find a pdf via the
wiki p links though - it is an amazing book.
.
While unfortunately I didn't have this book as a kid, I had some others that were
similarly "dangerous", along with a chemistry set with most of the necessary chemicals. I made gunpowder once to prove to myself I could
do it. I filled balloons with hydrogen with a simple
reaction of aluminum strips and lye in a coke bottle, floated them, and
of course applied a match on a long stick to watch them explode with a blue flash. I did a lot of experiments with electrolysis (in the cheapest way possible,
directly from 110VAC,
through a rectifier and light bulb to limit current; by experience I quickly learned to avoid
shocks and do this safely). Eventually I got interested in
electronics and left the chemistry behind.
Typical solution from someone in the target demographic: Go to local
shops (possibly paying bus / or tube fare), look in a few shops,
buy one, take it home.
Typical solution from someone in the target demographic using a computer:
Press the button with the picture of a shopping cart, type in what you want. Buy at whatever price is offered.
Seriously, I had an old Windows PC (forget the brand) with a
Shopping Cart button above the function keys, next to the Web button and
the Email button. Actually, I have no idea what it did; I never pressed
it, even out of curiousity. Probably I was subconsciously afraid it
would install some horrendous advertising software deeply ingrained in
the OS and impossible to get rid of, that would pop up with every app or
something like that. Plus it would notify the vendor, "Here is a
clueless luser who pressed the shopping cart button. Price
accordingly."
Until it is fixed, perhaps the
workaround is to include the URL as the hyperlink text
in submissions referencing the NY Times.
Like this: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/17/us/17gaming.html (non-subscribers should text-copy/paste the link).
I'd never be able to use an OLPC for anything I do.
Actually, I still use my original XO-1 for one thing that no apparently other netbook or
laptop can do:
it is the only netbook I know of that can be read in full sunlight. When I go to the
beach, I can sit 5 hours in the sun while working - in my case, using the bash
shell, which is perfect for my particular project. To my knowledge, no other
netbook or laptop can do that. If there is one, let me know so I can prepare
for next summer... I still hate the OLPC keyboard.
(Actually I don't like the beach that much but go to keep the GF happy. I've given
up on arguments about dangers of too much sun. I sit under an umbrella with SPF 30 sunblock
while she perfects her tan.)
Indeed, many years ago I built an experimental bidirectional fiber-optic
link simply by gluing LEDs to each end of a short (3m) plastic optical fiber.
(I ground down each LED close to its chip, then polished it and glued
it with clear epoxy.)
When not powered, the LED would act as a photodiode.
It wasn't very fast - the slow response of the circuit I used to amplify
the weak current limited it to perhaps 100KHz. But it worked.
Actually, it seems to me the removal of these titles would open up a
great business opportunity for some young entrepreneur, using a
website with a name like booksbannedbyamazon.com (or maybe
booksbannedbymajorretailer.com if the use of "amazon" is legally
contentious).
The schools should go along with it. Make the parents send money with
their kid every time they're going to sing in class.... Maybe if it gets ridiculous enough people will notice.
However, this might have the opposite effect of
indoctrinating the children (and their parents) into mindlessly
accepting such draconian enforcement as the status quo.
It seems to me Google is being slightly hypocritical.
How is it that they can walk into libraries and copy
millions of books without paying for them, then use their contents
for profit-making content search purposes to boot?
(I vaguely recall they reached some kind of settlement with publishers,
but only after their piracy was complete.
And certainly not $1000s per work like individuals would be hit with.)
My town library has a big sign over the copier that you are allowed to copy
no more than one chapter in a book, it can only be used for
personal use, etc. And the librarian will not hesitate to remind you if she
thinks you're pushing the rules.
OK, I know that in principle I could check the book out and scan it at home,
and no one would be the wiser.
The point is that Google was allowed to do this in plain
sight inside the library, whereas you and I would quickly be
called to task for such a blatant copyright violation. Why were they
not kicked out on the spot? I guess the rules are different if you're
a big, rich company. Making it easy to get even bigger and richer for free.
I foresee copyright claims going the way of (intestate) land claims... inherited by the family or spouse, unless debts are owed, until the end of time.
Then they should pay property taxes on it until the end of time, just like the real estate
taxes they pay on
their land.
Assigning an appraisal value is more problematic than
for real estate, but cheating to reduce taxes could be prevented by making the owner's declaration of
value an automatic offer to sell at that price. If the owner wishes to avoid the taxes,
he or she could assign a value of zero, in which case the "property" would revert to
public domain.
Government lawmakers: take note of this fantastic opportunity to raise new
tax revenue to reduce budget deficits!
I used Pimsleur to help me learn Croatian (lessons 1 through 10). While it was essential to
for learning pronunciation and some basics, the vocabulary wasn't extensive.
In order to
learn thousands of words, I used Mnemosyne flash
cards, which for that language someone put up several thousand cards (and I added my own).
While Mnemosyne might not appeal to kids because of its bare-bones appearance, its
minimalism is exactly what I want. With it I've already learned most of the words, but I still
use it daily so they get committed to long-term memory.
Using hot keys I added (from one of the site's plugins, which I customized to use the ASDF keys instead
of the mouse for scores 1234),
I can review literally several hundred words in a daily 15 or 20 minute session with my first cup of
morning coffee. Kind of addictive, actually - I look forward to it each morning.
if it is true, and flying is already safer than road travel, then why do we need all the security?...
2) Do you have any idea how much freaking money that "security theater" costs? Lots of campaign contributions later, it turns out we have a need.
Follow the money.
http://www.politicolnews.com/chertoff-lobbyists-and-airport-scanners/:
"The former Head of Homeland Security had an ulterior motive in promoting the Airport security scanning machines that people are objecting to so strongly. The company that makes the machine is now one of Chertoff's clients but in the past under the Bush administration Chernoff [sic] was selling these machines to the government and to the Obama administration and they bought it hook, line and sinker."
Ah, yes, I remember those. Back in the 80s I bought a wide-band
scanning receiver that happened to cover the band used
by car phones. It came
with a separate sheet of paper in the box loudly warning me that I should
never tune to that band because it was illegal (citing the
appropriate legal codes). Of course you can guess which
band I tuned into first.
I was astounded.
Most car phone users acted as if
they had no clue their calls
could be eavesdropped (only once or twice did I hear someone say, "you better
be careful with what you say"), and you could even decode the phone
numbers from the tone sequences setting up the call.
Many of the calls were routine business calls, some of them were
like a young guy trying to impress a girl that he was calling from
his fancy new
Porche (it would work - she'd say, "Really? Oh wow!", and they'd schedule a date),
others were things like a guy telling his mistress they couldn't
meet that night because something came up with his wife (right after
talking to his wife).
Since most of the users back then were wealthy or at least well-off,
the blackmail opportunities would have been endless for someone so inclined,
and I'm surprised it wasn't something that occurred more often.
Later, when early cell phones started using the band, something changed
where you could hear only one side of the conversation, so it
wasn't nearly as interesting.
As someone studying certain specialized math books from the 1800's and
early 1900's, I had great expectations for Google books, since they
offer downloadable PDFs for public domain works. However, the focus
quality of many (most?) of them is so incredibly poor that things like
tiny subscripts are illegible blobs, making them essentially useless.
While plain text solves this problem for novels, it is useless for
math books, because OCR renders the equations (which are the essence of
the book) as garbage characters. And it's not clear how one would
communicate them as plain text anyway, unless the OCR was extremely
sophisticated and generated say LaTeX output.
Thankfully, some of the ones I need are in the University of Michigan
Historical Mathematics Collection, with a much higher quality. But
for the ones that are not there, I've used the Google pdf as a last
resort - at least I can get an overview, if somewhat unpleasant to read.
But for books I actually want to study, I've ended up making my own scan
from a library copy (which, if done with care, is better quality than
even the U Mich. version) when Google's is the only one
I can find on-line.
However, scanning physically stresses these old books. I think it is
sad that I have to repeat what Google has done, when they (presumably)
could have scanned them with high quality with a little more
effort or better equipment with automatic focusing.
In some cases, the books have been in the rare book section of
the university library, which can't be checked out, and making copies of
the whole book locally is frowned upon because of possible damage and sometimes,
depending on the book's condition, not allowed.
When Facebook announces new privacy-preserving settings for its users,
what they mean is "we have implemented a new zero-day exploit that will
allow hackers to steal all your info with a simple script and sell it
all off on the internet with very little effort."
Windows 7 kept
nagging me off and on for weeks saying "jucheck.exe" was from an
"Unknown Publisher" and asking whether I wanted to let it modify my
system. I kept saying "no" because I'd never heard of this program (I
don't use Java very often) and didn't have time to research it.
When I finally had some time (and was fed up with the nagging),
I typed "jucheck.exe unknown publisher" in
Google. I waded my way through the hits warning me that it was probably a
virus and that I should do a "free scan" with their anti-virus software
(any.exe seems to bring up these scams). After reading some forums,
I began to feel that it was probably OK, although I didn't
find a crystal clear answer that made me totally confident.
I was a little nervous when I finally allowed it to run, but it
seemed to install the Java update OK.
I don't know how the "cautious" average user is supposed to deal with
this. (Of course, an ordinary average user would just let it run, which
is why they get viruses.) Why do they give it such a cryptic name?
What's the deal with the "Unknown publisher"?
Defying the notion that
mathematicians are over the hill at age 30, Mandelbrot made his fractal
breakthroughs when he was in his 50s.
It gives the rest of us some hope.:)
Also, in order to communicate with the distant tower, the actual cell
phone (the thing that delivers the most radiation to your head) must boost its power.
This is one of the reasons I probably wouldn't buy such
a computer. A removable, transparent silicone-rubber mat,
with holes corresponding to the touch screen keys, while not perfect, might
make a difference to a touch-typist like me, since you could at least
find the keys by feel. But I've never seen or
heard of such a thing, even for the iPad. Does anyone know if something like this exists?
My prediction is that the lack of copyright will help CD sales rather than
hurt them, because removing restrictions adds value.
I, for one, will be happy to pay for a high-quality CD that, for the first
time in my life, I actually own in every sense of the word, with which
I am free to do whatever I please, whether it is to use excerpts in
for a home video, use as part of the background music in a school play,
or anything else with no cares or concerns about legal issues. In fact I'll probably buy their entire
collection.
The propagation of electrons in copper is about 2/3 that of light speed in a vacuum, which on the time and length scales we're using in computers, is quite significant.
This is wrong on two counts.
(1) It has little to do with copper. The reduced propagation speed in a copper cable is due to the
dielectric constant of the insulating material. If the copper cable were made of conductors in
a vacuum, the propagation speed would be essentially the speed of light (although not quite, due
to secondary factors such as skin effect attenuation of the higher frequency components of a waveform, which would slow down e.g. the arrival time of the midpoint of a square wave).
(2) What propagates is an electromagnetic wave (field),
not the electrons. The electrons themselves propagate very slowly in a wire with current, perhaps
a few cm/s, and in a cable with zero net current their average propagation velocity is zero.
Slashdot Mirror
I, on the other hand, think the world would be better off without those who are congenitally devoid of empathy (please look up the word, although it may be hard for someone without it to grasp its meaning).
.
While unfortunately I didn't have this book as a kid, I had some others that were similarly "dangerous", along with a chemistry set with most of the necessary chemicals. I made gunpowder once to prove to myself I could do it. I filled balloons with hydrogen with a simple reaction of aluminum strips and lye in a coke bottle, floated them, and of course applied a match on a long stick to watch them explode with a blue flash. I did a lot of experiments with electrolysis (in the cheapest way possible, directly from 110VAC, through a rectifier and light bulb to limit current; by experience I quickly learned to avoid shocks and do this safely). Eventually I got interested in electronics and left the chemistry behind.
Typical solution from someone in the target demographic using a computer: Press the button with the picture of a shopping cart, type in what you want. Buy at whatever price is offered.
Seriously, I had an old Windows PC (forget the brand) with a Shopping Cart button above the function keys, next to the Web button and the Email button. Actually, I have no idea what it did; I never pressed it, even out of curiousity. Probably I was subconsciously afraid it would install some horrendous advertising software deeply ingrained in the OS and impossible to get rid of, that would pop up with every app or something like that. Plus it would notify the vendor, "Here is a clueless luser who pressed the shopping cart button. Price accordingly."
Until it is fixed, perhaps the workaround is to include the URL as the hyperlink text in submissions referencing the NY Times. Like this: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/17/us/17gaming.html (non-subscribers should text-copy/paste the link).
Actually, I still use my original XO-1 for one thing that no apparently other netbook or laptop can do: it is the only netbook I know of that can be read in full sunlight. When I go to the beach, I can sit 5 hours in the sun while working - in my case, using the bash shell, which is perfect for my particular project. To my knowledge, no other netbook or laptop can do that. If there is one, let me know so I can prepare for next summer... I still hate the OLPC keyboard.
(Actually I don't like the beach that much but go to keep the GF happy. I've given up on arguments about dangers of too much sun. I sit under an umbrella with SPF 30 sunblock while she perfects her tan.)
Indeed, many years ago I built an experimental bidirectional fiber-optic link simply by gluing LEDs to each end of a short (3m) plastic optical fiber. (I ground down each LED close to its chip, then polished it and glued it with clear epoxy.) When not powered, the LED would act as a photodiode. It wasn't very fast - the slow response of the circuit I used to amplify the weak current limited it to perhaps 100KHz. But it worked.
Actually, it seems to me the removal of these titles would open up a great business opportunity for some young entrepreneur, using a website with a name like booksbannedbyamazon.com (or maybe booksbannedbymajorretailer.com if the use of "amazon" is legally contentious).
However, this might have the opposite effect of indoctrinating the children (and their parents) into mindlessly accepting such draconian enforcement as the status quo.
How is it that they can walk into libraries and copy millions of books without paying for them, then use their contents for profit-making content search purposes to boot? (I vaguely recall they reached some kind of settlement with publishers, but only after their piracy was complete. And certainly not $1000s per work like individuals would be hit with.)
My town library has a big sign over the copier that you are allowed to copy no more than one chapter in a book, it can only be used for personal use, etc. And the librarian will not hesitate to remind you if she thinks you're pushing the rules.
OK, I know that in principle I could check the book out and scan it at home, and no one would be the wiser. The point is that Google was allowed to do this in plain sight inside the library, whereas you and I would quickly be called to task for such a blatant copyright violation. Why were they not kicked out on the spot? I guess the rules are different if you're a big, rich company. Making it easy to get even bigger and richer for free.
Then they should pay property taxes on it until the end of time, just like the real estate taxes they pay on their land.
Assigning an appraisal value is more problematic than for real estate, but cheating to reduce taxes could be prevented by making the owner's declaration of value an automatic offer to sell at that price. If the owner wishes to avoid the taxes, he or she could assign a value of zero, in which case the "property" would revert to public domain.
Government lawmakers: take note of this fantastic opportunity to raise new tax revenue to reduce budget deficits!
In order to learn thousands of words, I used Mnemosyne flash cards, which for that language someone put up several thousand cards (and I added my own).
While Mnemosyne might not appeal to kids because of its bare-bones appearance, its minimalism is exactly what I want. With it I've already learned most of the words, but I still use it daily so they get committed to long-term memory. Using hot keys I added (from one of the site's plugins, which I customized to use the ASDF keys instead of the mouse for scores 1234), I can review literally several hundred words in a daily 15 or 20 minute session with my first cup of morning coffee. Kind of addictive, actually - I look forward to it each morning.
2) Do you have any idea how much freaking money that "security theater" costs? Lots of campaign contributions later, it turns out we have a need.
Follow the money. http://www.politicolnews.com/chertoff-lobbyists-and-airport-scanners/: "The former Head of Homeland Security had an ulterior motive in promoting the Airport security scanning machines that people are objecting to so strongly. The company that makes the machine is now one of Chertoff's clients but in the past under the Bush administration Chernoff [sic] was selling these machines to the government and to the Obama administration and they bought it hook, line and sinker."
I was astounded. Most car phone users acted as if they had no clue their calls could be eavesdropped (only once or twice did I hear someone say, "you better be careful with what you say"), and you could even decode the phone numbers from the tone sequences setting up the call. Many of the calls were routine business calls, some of them were like a young guy trying to impress a girl that he was calling from his fancy new Porche (it would work - she'd say, "Really? Oh wow!", and they'd schedule a date), others were things like a guy telling his mistress they couldn't meet that night because something came up with his wife (right after talking to his wife). Since most of the users back then were wealthy or at least well-off, the blackmail opportunities would have been endless for someone so inclined, and I'm surprised it wasn't something that occurred more often.
Later, when early cell phones started using the band, something changed where you could hear only one side of the conversation, so it wasn't nearly as interesting.
Yes, the perfect way to power our flying cars and cities under the ocean.
While plain text solves this problem for novels, it is useless for math books, because OCR renders the equations (which are the essence of the book) as garbage characters. And it's not clear how one would communicate them as plain text anyway, unless the OCR was extremely sophisticated and generated say LaTeX output.
Thankfully, some of the ones I need are in the University of Michigan Historical Mathematics Collection, with a much higher quality. But for the ones that are not there, I've used the Google pdf as a last resort - at least I can get an overview, if somewhat unpleasant to read. But for books I actually want to study, I've ended up making my own scan from a library copy (which, if done with care, is better quality than even the U Mich. version) when Google's is the only one I can find on-line.
However, scanning physically stresses these old books. I think it is sad that I have to repeat what Google has done, when they (presumably) could have scanned them with high quality with a little more effort or better equipment with automatic focusing. In some cases, the books have been in the rare book section of the university library, which can't be checked out, and making copies of the whole book locally is frowned upon because of possible damage and sometimes, depending on the book's condition, not allowed.
s/zero-day exploit/API/; s/hackers/business partners/
True, hackers will also occasionally discover how to do it, but that of course isn't intentional, since there's no profit for Facebook.
When I finally had some time (and was fed up with the nagging), I typed "jucheck.exe unknown publisher" in Google. I waded my way through the hits warning me that it was probably a virus and that I should do a "free scan" with their anti-virus software (any .exe seems to bring up these scams). After reading some forums,
I began to feel that it was probably OK, although I didn't
find a crystal clear answer that made me totally confident.
I was a little nervous when I finally allowed it to run, but it
seemed to install the Java update OK.
I don't know how the "cautious" average user is supposed to deal with this. (Of course, an ordinary average user would just let it run, which is why they get viruses.) Why do they give it such a cryptic name? What's the deal with the "Unknown publisher"?
Defying the notion that mathematicians are over the hill at age 30, Mandelbrot made his fractal breakthroughs when he was in his 50s. It gives the rest of us some hope. :)
Also, in order to communicate with the distant tower, the actual cell phone (the thing that delivers the most radiation to your head) must boost its power.
So how does this make them money, with today's absurdly low interest rates?
Or, maybe they're thinking ahead to the day when an insider leaks some "creative accounting" ledgers. :)
This is one of the reasons I probably wouldn't buy such a computer. A removable, transparent silicone-rubber mat, with holes corresponding to the touch screen keys, while not perfect, might make a difference to a touch-typist like me, since you could at least find the keys by feel. But I've never seen or heard of such a thing, even for the iPad. Does anyone know if something like this exists?
My prediction is that the lack of copyright will help CD sales rather than hurt them, because removing restrictions adds value. I, for one, will be happy to pay for a high-quality CD that, for the first time in my life, I actually own in every sense of the word, with which I am free to do whatever I please, whether it is to use excerpts in for a home video, use as part of the background music in a school play, or anything else with no cares or concerns about legal issues. In fact I'll probably buy their entire collection.
is here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1005.4915.
This is wrong on two counts.
(1) It has little to do with copper. The reduced propagation speed in a copper cable is due to the dielectric constant of the insulating material. If the copper cable were made of conductors in a vacuum, the propagation speed would be essentially the speed of light (although not quite, due to secondary factors such as skin effect attenuation of the higher frequency components of a waveform, which would slow down e.g. the arrival time of the midpoint of a square wave).
(2) What propagates is an electromagnetic wave (field), not the electrons. The electrons themselves propagate very slowly in a wire with current, perhaps a few cm/s, and in a cable with zero net current their average propagation velocity is zero.