Any success that BP may or may not have in this endeavor does not change the fact that they should have had methods to cap a blowout ready before they started drilling.
Those of us who will see these billboards everywhere in 30 years and start dressing lie ninjas in public.
BILLBOARD: New Sword(TM) from BladeTek(R). 40% sharper then other swords using BladeTek's(R) patented double blade system. A 7% greater curve allows for faster slicing then previous models resulting in a three second decrease per decapitation. Buy new Sword(TM) from BladeTek(R) today!
Hmmm. You have a point, wise one. To keep my ultimate technique from failing so utterly in 30 years, my clan is mandating ritual seppukku. I'll fall on my sword with pride today... and pity for the rest of you tomorrow;)
I'm feeling smug-er about having decided to hold off on smartphones and tablets for this whole year, if for nothing more than the forced data plan contracts and crazy unlocked prices.
I wonder what other bombs and yewels we (um, meaning the collective "imperial YOU" here ) public beta testers will find.
IT only needs the hardware to be ubiquitous for plans to change.
Case in point: Without USB being on every modern PC several years, stores would not sell you USB webcameras, USB dolls, USB lights and USB beer coolers. For kicks, nobody would have dared market a serial-port version of this
Few of those applications of the hardware were planned at the 1996 release of the USB standard.
IT only needs the hardware to be ubiquitous for plans to change. It's a fine line between scanning my face with this prototype, and actually storing the data, ID'ing me and reporting to the government my GPS location.
Won't somebody please think of the...UK? A special team can then be dispatched for marked individuals, good or bad.
So this tech will not work against two types of foes: Muslim women with only their eyes exposed Those of us who will see these billboards everywhere in 30 years and start dressing lie ninjas in public.
So can a desktop with a $100 card, your point being?
That the day the [Russian?] GP has to leave his desktop Command Center behind and go on the run from justice, there'll be no performance penalty for roaming while playing Call Of Duty against you:-)
Wireless disk readers and HDD's, though, are an interesting application. Inter-device networking at 500 MB/s might be fast enough for Avatar-style fast swapping of files between base stations and laptops.
I am surprised that the tech for wireless expansion is here. I would appreciate the missing link: a docking station using eSATA or something new (USB3 or 4?) for laptops and PC's alike to sit more RAM, new CPUs and graphic cards that my laptop / PC is too crowded to place inside. I think wireless anything is too lossy/gimmicky for prime time (my old Lexmark can take 5 minutes to spool 1 page on a 30 second wired print job --I disabled the feature the day I bought it.) But disk readers are probably not a bad idea, though we're doing well with USB.
What I'd really wish for is a PC to PC USB connection bus, instead of relying on crossover setups, router-dependent or temp master-slave backups.
You know, the way the old Powerbooks used to behave like SCSI drives if you plugged them into other computers ( I really miss that feature ).
Not sure if you mean "plugging into potentially Windows computers as a browsable SCSI drive" (this would be new to me,) or only Macs. Anyway, it's neat that beyond the OS 9 era, macs have a "Target Disk" boot mode (Apple + T) to show the internal drive on another desktop without having to physically extract anything. I wish PC's had this because iMacs, small-form-factor PC's, eePC's and laptops are hard to disassemble and reassemble to salvage files on a non-booting OS.
I'm saddened that AGP, PCI-express, home-PC RAID, [whatever the name for our Windows-less BIOS web-ready OS boot] and the eSATA-era have invaded motherboards and Operating Systems, without bringing Target disk mode to Windows XP, Vista and Seven while the hardware-functionality upgrades were shoved down our throats.
Have you tried pressing F11 in your web browser? Just because it's different from YouTube's control doesn't necessarily make it worse.
I am a heavy user of F11 for text pages. Minor gripe: Safari 4.0.5 for Windows doesn't seem have fullscreen options, just like free Quicktime vids.
Anyway, Flash is different from plain text. Most Windows XP / Vista web browsers and gnome distros on my PC and laptop let Flash supercede their text and F11 input routines: once I've interacted with the object, and sometimes without anything else, F11 is ignored. Opera seems to do it right.
Some of my early-day mistakes were to sign up on innocent-sounding sites for joke e-mails, IQ tests, and free-greeting-card sites... and my e-mail during warranty registration to legit companies that later sold my address to shady partners. I even signed up for email "news" at an anime site even though they promised all content was pending as they were "still awaiting delivery of our giant robots." I realized I'd been had, but they did put up a legit page 5 years later, and I'm sure they sold my email addy many times over in those five years, even if their promise for news was never fulfilled.
A quick web search for my email address surprised me with a single site cloning my [defunct Geocities] page where I naively used it a decade ago. It's good to see from your post that I don't get as much SPAM as I deserve for my paranoia-free Windows 98 days:)
An electrical engineering professor at SIU studied this a few months ago, and his findings were that the ECU did not, in fact, record correctly. He was able to recreate the problem, and recorded it with a laptop connected to the car's electronics, and while the laptop collected the data, the ECU did not.
Toyota proceeded to drag the man's work and reputation through the mud. I haven't heard any more about it, and can't remember the fellow's name. Anybody with a better memory than me here today, and perhaps a link?
I'm not familiar with this. Googling gave me a name --David W. Gilbert, and a 5 page PDF article.. A summary starts on the last paragraph of page 4.
if it is better than today's aweful touchscreen typing support. So far the mouse is the only lag-less input system that lets you precisely select things layed out, and we expect precision. From seeing different smartphones handling touch support, where a fat finger has lots of possible locations on a screen, there is little hope that we will come up with something with the fine grained resolution provided by laser-pointer guided mice.
I will be sold if this new system is better than our text-to-speech reliability, so that I can play fast-paced games on my PC where lots of hovering, selecting, dragging, clicking and even gestures must be precisely read by my input device.
We are seeing a tendency in the US: carriers are refusing to even SELL you new smartphones unless you enslave yourself in a USD$30 data plan. That's nearly 50% more on your standard $60 cellphone bill.
Your choice is to pay $90 to $200 + 2 year contract + data plan, or to pay $500 for an unlocked phone that you rarely can reuse with different carriers.
Bravo. The single problem with google's invasion is that they go beyond *my product spec* and extend the 50meter range of your wireless to worldwide distances, even if it's just a few useful bits. All without permission. People get sued for ignoring re-broadcasting "laws" here in the states.
I don't know if you've noticed this, but the capabilities of technology tend to filter done the price scale rather quickly. 2010's $500 device is 2012's $100 device is 2014's "get two free when you switch to our network" device. It won't be long before just about every phone for sale is a smart phone.
Pricewise, I beg to differ. The first android phone is barely 2 years old. Apparently it's impossible to find after its price was slashed in half last year to $99 (with a contract). Very few models get to become venerable AND remain in circulation like the Motorolla Rzr. Meaning, we rarely see tried models for cheap prices on the streets. Even when the inevitable good phone arrives, companies realize that phasing them out is good to maintain high profit margins. Exhibit A: the yearly iPhone rehash.
Companies like Microsoft hogging the patent means there's little chance the someone will slip up and fail to renew or take people to court over "small" offenses. A small company would hardly have the resources to find AND sue me for having a 10-year-old transition animation on a personal webpage, for instance.
It bothers me that smaller companies almost never pull this kind of anti-prior-art stunts, dealing a blow to the bigger, noisier fish who would be suing us in their sleep for stuff like the above. Maybe it's the difference in headcount-to-lawyer# ratios.
I was appalled to find that Facebook nags for a phone number to complete each "new friend" request (they stress it's for your ID verification, which smells like a strong-arm tactic to me.)
Must be extremely annoying to click on their alternative option to achieve the intended request process (an ugly 2 word captcha.) It's not like FB is verifying RealID thru your phone records prior to letting you finish the process.
Being barely PC-literate and privacy-conscious means that users get the impulse to succumb over a long-term period and fork over their phone number. I'm not surprised that FB is already snooping your phone on their own. We have moved from an age of malware that snooped on you illegally to companies that you willingly let in through the front door to clean out your personal information in exchange for convenience.
I can picture a boom in 30 years from today's teenagers seeing middle-age repercussions and wanting a more luddite-like existance. It will be too late by then, though. Think of usenet archives.
Because they write the OS and do not dictate what you can run on your box?
Har, har, har.
Microsoft has 3 separate technologies for "security" that do to us exactly what you claim they do not. See their TrustedPlatformModules (TPM), DRM and HDCP divisions and reconsider our imaginary "freedom to run what we want" a double standard.
From Vista on a clause in every Windows EULA gives MS the right to delete executables and files from YOUR computer should they choose to do so (does XP also have this?) I smell a wedge for more proactive witch hunts in the future where OSS code and "unemcumbered" media/data is the target.
Read once in a web usability design book that there are two types of users [...] Search oriented users use a search engine instead of the browsers navigation bar and the browsers back and forward buttons [...] Navigation oriented users use the browsers navigation bar and the web sites navigation links.
Shame that browsers get bloated with features that users and web designers ignore or misuse. People being oblivious to the tools in their browser toolbar are a big problem. The nineties gave us sites with "back" and "home" links on every single static page. Eventually this evolved into javascript linkbacks, frames and css / flash menus, because sites babysit their products by reinforcing unecessary behavior as if early web adopters were clueless back then.
Our early barometer for web progress is pr0n sites, which have the belief that people STILL need to be told how to "get out of a page they mistakenly landed on... pointing back to google or disney and rising click rates and pageranks in the process. Thinking back to my parents' lack of interest on learning the most basic GUI navigation instead of being mechanical, this sounds about right. My mother closes the browser every time she wants to read a new site; the address bar looks "full" to just edit it. This whole madness is exacerbated by how browser toolbars no longer just have 3 buttons, and no two browser toolbars look the same. Lowest common denominator says whoever encourages the most braindead behavior will gain the most converts quickly. Ergo, popular GUI's like Chrome and iPhone's Safari version.
I use alt + left for back. my most clicked button = stumble upon;)
I do too. But keyboards can be more dangerous than mice in your browser:
I have lost many a/. comment when mistakenly <BACKSPACE> gets hit intead of "=" (most browsers proccess that as "Back".)
Pre-Firefox 3.5, swapping the letters W and Q by mistake would exit your browser while trying to close a window. Years of Mac use should have trained me to perfectly avoid that, but it seems that browsing the web puts us in a different / less controlled mindset. That, or these "fullsize" keycaps don't matter in a sub 17" laptop keyboard form factor.
Slashdot Mirror
Any success that BP may or may not have in this endeavor does not change the fact that they should have had methods to cap a blowout ready before they started drilling.
Oh, give'em a break! Everyone knows BP lacks capping methods for anything worse than a coffee spill. ;-)
Your wish was my command, master! Here is for June 17th 2010. Click on the pic for the flickr.com link or just go to the accompanying blog
BILLBOARD: New Sword(TM) from BladeTek(R). 40% sharper then other swords using BladeTek's(R) patented double blade system. A 7% greater curve allows for faster slicing then previous models resulting in a three second decrease per decapitation. Buy new Sword(TM) from BladeTek(R) today!
Hmmm. You have a point, wise one. To keep my ultimate technique from failing so utterly in 30 years, my clan is mandating ritual seppukku. I'll fall on my sword with pride today... and pity for the rest of you tomorrow ;)
This is the first time BitTorrent indicated it would take more than a year to download.
Just in time for my torrent of OpenSuSe 11.4!
*ducks*
Correct.
I'm feeling smug-er about having decided to hold off on smartphones and tablets for this whole year, if for nothing more than the forced data plan contracts and crazy unlocked prices.
I wonder what other bombs and yewels we (um, meaning the collective "imperial YOU" here ) public beta testers will find.
IT only needs the hardware to be ubiquitous for plans to change.
Case in point: Without USB being on every modern PC several years, stores would not sell you USB webcameras, USB dolls, USB lights and USB beer coolers. For kicks, nobody would have dared market a serial-port version of this
Few of those applications of the hardware were planned at the 1996 release of the USB standard.
IT only needs the hardware to be ubiquitous for plans to change. It's a fine line between scanning my face with this prototype, and actually storing the data, ID'ing me and reporting to the government my GPS location.
Won't somebody please think of the ...UK? A special team can then be dispatched for marked individuals, good or bad.
So this tech will not work against two types of foes:
Muslim women with only their eyes exposed
Those of us who will see these billboards everywhere in 30 years and start dressing lie ninjas in public.
So can a desktop with a $100 card, your point being?
That the day the [Russian?] GP has to leave his desktop Command Center behind and go on the run from justice, there'll be no performance penalty for roaming while playing Call Of Duty against you :-)
Just change a few physical constants to open up some more bandwidth.. emacs has a command for that right?
Yes. Ye olde
;)
M-x pipe-to-level-3-backbone-core-switch
At 60GHz those homes better be very close together and very small. Is your house wider than 10m?
640k... er, :)
60Ghz should be enough for the Smurf village I share my parents' basement with
Wireless disk readers and HDD's, though, are an interesting application. Inter-device networking at 500 MB/s might be fast enough for Avatar-style fast swapping of files between base stations and laptops.
I am surprised that the tech for wireless expansion is here. I would appreciate the missing link: a docking station using eSATA or something new (USB3 or 4?) for laptops and PC's alike to sit more RAM, new CPUs and graphic cards that my laptop / PC is too crowded to place inside. I think wireless anything is too lossy/gimmicky for prime time (my old Lexmark can take 5 minutes to spool 1 page on a 30 second wired print job --I disabled the feature the day I bought it.) But disk readers are probably not a bad idea, though we're doing well with USB.
What I'd really wish for is a PC to PC USB connection bus, instead of relying on crossover setups, router-dependent or temp master-slave backups.
You know, the way the old Powerbooks used to behave like SCSI drives if you plugged them into other computers ( I really miss that feature ).
Not sure if you mean "plugging into potentially Windows computers as a browsable SCSI drive" (this would be new to me,) or only Macs. Anyway, it's neat that beyond the OS 9 era, macs have a "Target Disk" boot mode (Apple + T) to show the internal drive on another desktop without having to physically extract anything. I wish PC's had this because iMacs, small-form-factor PC's, eePC's and laptops are hard to disassemble and reassemble to salvage files on a non-booting OS.
I'm saddened that AGP, PCI-express, home-PC RAID, [whatever the name for our Windows-less BIOS web-ready OS boot] and the eSATA-era have invaded motherboards and Operating Systems, without bringing Target disk mode to Windows XP, Vista and Seven while the hardware-functionality upgrades were shoved down our throats.
Have you tried pressing F11 in your web browser? Just because it's different from YouTube's control doesn't necessarily make it worse.
I am a heavy user of F11 for text pages. Minor gripe: Safari 4.0.5 for Windows doesn't seem have fullscreen options, just like free Quicktime vids.
Anyway, Flash is different from plain text. Most Windows XP / Vista web browsers and gnome distros on my PC and laptop let Flash supercede their text and F11 input routines: once I've interacted with the object, and sometimes without anything else, F11 is ignored. Opera seems to do it right.
Some of my early-day mistakes were to sign up on innocent-sounding sites for joke e-mails, IQ tests, and free-greeting-card sites ... and my e-mail during warranty registration to legit companies that later sold my address to shady partners. I even signed up for email "news" at an anime site even though they promised all content was pending as they were "still awaiting delivery of our giant robots." I realized I'd been had, but they did put up a legit page 5 years later, and I'm sure they sold my email addy many times over in those five years, even if their promise for news was never fulfilled.
A quick web search for my email address surprised me with a single site cloning my [defunct Geocities] page where I naively used it a decade ago. It's good to see from your post that I don't get as much SPAM as I deserve for my paranoia-free Windows 98 days :)
it is just screaming for a pewpewpew tag!
An electrical engineering professor at SIU studied this a few months ago, and his findings were that the ECU did not, in fact, record correctly. He was able to recreate the problem, and recorded it with a laptop connected to the car's electronics, and while the laptop collected the data, the ECU did not.
Toyota proceeded to drag the man's work and reputation through the mud. I haven't heard any more about it, and can't remember the fellow's name. Anybody with a better memory than me here today, and perhaps a link?
I'm not familiar with this. Googling gave me a name --David W. Gilbert, and a 5 page PDF article.. A summary starts on the last paragraph of page 4.
More results are here indicating that Toyota did harass him.
if it is better than today's aweful touchscreen typing support. So far the mouse is the only lag-less input system that lets you precisely select things layed out, and we expect precision. From seeing different smartphones handling touch support, where a fat finger has lots of possible locations on a screen, there is little hope that we will come up with something with the fine grained resolution provided by laser-pointer guided mice.
I will be sold if this new system is better than our text-to-speech reliability, so that I can play fast-paced games on my PC where lots of hovering, selecting, dragging, clicking and even gestures must be precisely read by my input device.
We are seeing a tendency in the US: carriers are refusing to even SELL you new smartphones unless you enslave yourself in a USD$30 data plan. That's nearly 50% more on your standard $60 cellphone bill.
Your choice is to pay $90 to $200 + 2 year contract + data plan, or to pay $500 for an unlocked phone that you rarely can reuse with different carriers.
Bravo.
The single problem with google's invasion is that they go beyond *my product spec* and extend the 50meter range of your wireless to worldwide distances, even if it's just a few useful bits. All without permission. People get sued for ignoring re-broadcasting "laws" here in the states.
I don't know if you've noticed this, but the capabilities of technology tend to filter done the price scale rather quickly. 2010's $500 device is 2012's $100 device is 2014's "get two free when you switch to our network" device. It won't be long before just about every phone for sale is a smart phone.
Pricewise, I beg to differ. The first android phone is barely 2 years old. Apparently it's impossible to find after its price was slashed in half last year to $99 (with a contract). Very few models get to become venerable AND remain in circulation like the Motorolla Rzr. Meaning, we rarely see tried models for cheap prices on the streets. Even when the inevitable good phone arrives, companies realize that phasing them out is good to maintain high profit margins. Exhibit A: the yearly iPhone rehash.
Companies like Microsoft hogging the patent means there's little chance the someone will slip up and fail to renew or take people to court over "small" offenses. A small company would hardly have the resources to find AND sue me for having a 10-year-old transition animation on a personal webpage, for instance.
It bothers me that smaller companies almost never pull this kind of anti-prior-art stunts, dealing a blow to the bigger, noisier fish who would be suing us in their sleep for stuff like the above. Maybe it's the difference in headcount-to-lawyer# ratios.
I was appalled to find that Facebook nags for a phone number to complete each "new friend" request (they stress it's for your ID verification, which smells like a strong-arm tactic to me.)
Must be extremely annoying to click on their alternative option to achieve the intended request process (an ugly 2 word captcha.) It's not like FB is verifying RealID thru your phone records prior to letting you finish the process.
Being barely PC-literate and privacy-conscious means that users get the impulse to succumb over a long-term period and fork over their phone number. I'm not surprised that FB is already snooping your phone on their own. We have moved from an age of malware that snooped on you illegally to companies that you willingly let in through the front door to clean out your personal information in exchange for convenience.
I can picture a boom in 30 years from today's teenagers seeing middle-age repercussions and wanting a more luddite-like existance. It will be too late by then, though. Think of usenet archives.
Why doesn't Windows enforce it's security?
Because they write the OS and do not dictate what you can run on your box?
Har, har, har.
Microsoft has 3 separate technologies for "security" that do to us exactly what you claim they do not. See their Trusted Platform Modules (TPM), DRM and HDCP divisions and reconsider our imaginary "freedom to run what we want" a double standard.
From Vista on a clause in every Windows EULA gives MS the right to delete executables and files from YOUR computer should they choose to do so (does XP also have this?) I smell a wedge for more proactive witch hunts in the future where OSS code and "unemcumbered" media/data is the target.
Read once in a web usability design book that there are two types of users [...] Search oriented users use a search engine instead of the browsers navigation bar and the browsers back and forward buttons [...] Navigation oriented users use the browsers navigation bar and the web sites navigation links.
Shame that browsers get bloated with features that users and web designers ignore or misuse. People being oblivious to the tools in their browser toolbar are a big problem. The nineties gave us sites with "back" and "home" links on every single static page. Eventually this evolved into javascript linkbacks, frames and css / flash menus, because sites babysit their products by reinforcing unecessary behavior as if early web adopters were clueless back then.
Our early barometer for web progress is pr0n sites, which have the belief that people STILL need to be told how to "get out of a page they mistakenly landed on... pointing back to google or disney and rising click rates and pageranks in the process. Thinking back to my parents' lack of interest on learning the most basic GUI navigation instead of being mechanical, this sounds about right. My mother closes the browser every time she wants to read a new site; the address bar looks "full" to just edit it. This whole madness is exacerbated by how browser toolbars no longer just have 3 buttons, and no two browser toolbars look the same. Lowest common denominator says whoever encourages the most braindead behavior will gain the most converts quickly. Ergo, popular GUI's like Chrome and iPhone's Safari version.
I use alt + left for back. my most clicked button = stumble upon ;)
I do too. But keyboards can be more dangerous than mice in your browser:
I have lost many a /. comment when mistakenly <BACKSPACE> gets hit intead of "=" (most browsers proccess that as "Back".)
Pre-Firefox 3.5, swapping the letters W and Q by mistake would exit your browser while trying to close a window. Years of Mac use should have trained me to perfectly avoid that, but it seems that browsing the web puts us in a different / less controlled mindset. That, or these "fullsize" keycaps don't matter in a sub 17" laptop keyboard form factor.