I think you'll be surprised by the end result. Gerry has been into pinball for years and has owned many of the best pinball machines, so I'm sure he'll end up making it a fun game. He has been thinking about this platform for 15 years, so I believe it'll surprise a lot of people.
So many people have chimed in saying they don't think NASA does much PR, I thought I should add more.
Have any of you ever seen the numerous "technical" publications (i.e. NASA Tech Briefs) that NASA puts out? They are sheer propoganda for NASA funded projects.
Have you seen their online newsletters and spam mailing lists?
Have you seen their publicity stunts (John Glenn in space)?
Have you seen their media planted stories in major magazines and newspapers? I count 7 stories on NASA in the last week at nytimes.com.
IMO, the biggest problem with NASA is that they have gotten TOO big. They have taken on a life of their own and are afraid of getting smaller and doing ONLY their core mission. Take a look at the wide variety of things NASA does and tell me how many of them really relate to aerospace...fewer than you might imagine.
NASA needs to be trimmed in size so that they don't keep trying to feed their own through bogus projects and other agencies missions.
Well that is not true at all. In fact, the answer may be closer to the opposite. The NASA PR machine is always in high gear, so it is difficult to figure out what really is interesting since they are so breathless about everything.
For proof, watch the morning talk shows. You will see plenty of NASA. See space.com for all the news releases.
If anything, I am dissappointed the NASA spends SO MUCH money on promoting themselves. They are not a commercial organization after all.
Your book would probably do much better if it rendered in Netscape 4.X. I can only view it with IE. On a linux site, you are missing a large part of the audience.
I submit that if you never test the law with these sorts of cases that you will never know what is legal and illegal. Just like the GPL never being tested does add uncertainty to the legal strength it holds.
There are plenty of gray areas in what you term legal searches already.
I doubt there is a law enforcement person alive whose primary motivation is to violate your rights. When you are looking for a piece of information that you need, do you not try different search engines, do you not ask people, perhaps try something new? The idea is the same; they are doing their job in a professional manner; they determine that perhaps an heat sensor would be helpful to catch law breakers. They try it and find a law breaker. There is not intent to violate your rights; there is intent to catch a criminal.
I don't know that your table really helps your cause.
For the heroin and concaine numbers, the number of users is an estimate that probably has an uncertainty on the order of +/- 25% to +/- 50%, while the number of users for alcohol and tobacco are pretty well known. The number of deaths attributed to the various drugs can neglect accidents (i.e. car crashes) that might have caused death through drug use indirectly. Plus the source (cato institute) that found those statistics is dubious because it is clearly biased.
I'm too lazy to look for better, so let's assume that these numbers are reasonable.
Your supposition, that "with legalization the deaths from currently illegal drugs would decrease" is probably false, depending on how you meant it. It is quite possible that quality of the drugs would go up, but with legalization, more people would try the drugs.
That makes the assumption that you are arguing that the total number of deaths will go down. If you are arguing that the percentage of death will go down, I would probably agree. But the size of user base would likely grow significantly. The net loss to society in terms of drug deaths might be significant.
Since we are making a lot of suppositions, it is tough to know what would really happen.
I tend to believe the *right thing* to do with regards to the law is to decriminalize drug use because it should be a personal choice; if a crime is committed during drug use, there are plenty of laws to cover that. But I guess the big concern, held many others (and maybe me, I find it somewhat persuasive), is that the loss to society as a whole could be very large.
Well, remember that this particular fellow was going to plead guily if the search was determined to be legal.
If you are an FBI agent and you have a *really* good idea that someone is guilty of a relatively serious (by law) crime, wouldn't you feel like you should use those means that you can, especially something simple like a heat imager?
The FBI agent has no reason to expect that it will be ruled an illegal search, they are just trying to do their job and catch someone who is committing a crime (which they did do in this instance, although it may get overturned).
I think your final point is perhaps a counter-argument?
If alcohol and tobacco kill more people per year than all other drugs *combined*, and they are the most widely distributed because they are *legal*, then does it not suggest (not necessarily, but possible) that perhaps if the other drugs are legalized that they will kill many people?
When you say victimless, some people will disagree and say that the cost of cleaning up/treating these people causes all of society to pay for their abuses (abuse because those are the ones that cost money, some users inflict no cost).
Personally, I am alright with decriminalization (legalization is a misnomer in my mind) of drug possession and use, but would like to see strict penalties for drug use when involved with other crimes (similar to the idea of felony murder). Unfortunately, I don't think decriminalization will happen for many years, if ever.
I think it is because most of the American public does not pay attention to the actual decisions and read the justifications, they merely look at what the media tells them. And the media (at least by using the words of many liberals) has painted Scalia to be this incredible stereotype that is actually pretty far from the truth.
Could you please cite some of those instances? I would like to understand better some of the criticisms of Scalia.
My opinion of him is not that he shouts tradition frequently, but that he merely is adamant about keeping states power strong and federal power relatively weak. But YMMV.
I just don't get it. You buy the Tivo from Philips, and then you hook it up to a phone line for a free time/update service that Tivo provides.
Now all these people get pissed off that Tivo changed things!! WTF did you think the phone line was for?
Bitch all you want, Tivo may have made a mistake, but they are letting you have a free ride they don't have any obligation to give you.
If I owned a Tivo, I would just have purchase the $200 lifetime subscription upfront and been done with it. Or hacked it and not used their free time server.
You all sound like a bunch of fucking whiny kids that can't handle a couple months without TV.
There are alternatives, you know. A conventional VCR will work just fine. Side note: When reading these stories, I went to Amazon.com to see how much people liked their Tivos and its like freaking testimonials..."It has revolutionized my life..." Have these people never heard of VCRs?
Most good books that I buy on a technical subject are atleast $20, more likely $40 to $60. If the subject is esoteric, the price is frequently $80 to $150. Price a graduate text book sometime and you will see that most of those are easily above $60.
The price is not out of line because of some conspiracy. It is merely not a very popular subject. I would bet is has less than 1% of the audience of say a book on HTML. And books on HTML are not exactly read by the general populace as simple as HTML may be and as useful as it may be.
"There's little published material about steganography, and what has been written costs a fortune. Information Hiding: Techniques for Steganography and Digital Watermarking edited by Stefan Katzenbeisse and Fabien A.P. Petitcolas, published by Artech House, costs nearly $100."
Translation:
"There is little published on steganography, and since I have no budget and am to cheap to buy a $100 book, I couldn't even look at one damn book, but here is the title of one!"
Come on Jon, a $100 is shitted away by most of the people on Slashdot in a week by eating out for lunch, renting movies, buying CDs, buying a new computer game, buying pron, etc. To say that $100 is a lot of money to this crowd is ridiculous.
I hadn't heard of this, it is a good idea. The only question is how well they promote the idea. Cause no good idea ever gets very far without some good promotion. So if you are interested in this getting paid attention to, please promote it.
Does it ever seem like the world will collapse from the weight of standards to you? It does to me.
I like it when the book reviews have a picture of the book cover. Allows me to put a face with a name.;-) Here is the Amazon.com page with the picture on it.
For your short term needs in voice recording, I would recommend dumping the tapes and going with something like the Olympus DS1000. I have a DS150, but wish I would have gotten the DS1000 (it was not quite out when I needed it). It accepts SmartMedia (which I have cause of the digital camera), so essentially the amount of voice you can store is unlimited. USB interface to put on your laptop. I archive the old recordings on CDs. The format is very well compressed so you can fit a lot on, etc.
Please Moderate the Parent Higher. It contains a good answer to the hypothetical brought up by the District Attorney.
Intent is definitely a large portion of the law. In fact, the plantiff is clearly arguing on the basis of intent, but their use is very selective. All software is merely a tool. It may be a tool to create a beautiful piece of art, it may be a tool that will automate some boring job, but a tool cannot be banned if it has a legal use.
It can be illegal to possess the tool if the intent is to perform an illegal act. But if there is substantial doubt about the objects use, it can be legal. There are a number of cases about concealed "weapons" like scissors that have given the benefit of the doubt to the defendents.
In some respects, I could be, but the generally excepted definition of radiation hardening is to build the electronics with another layout and/or foundry.
I just wanted to point out that the other alternative is sometimes the better path. See what issues you have and then use good engineering to make them non-issues. For many years, the process has been: "Well, we are going to put this into space. Okay, well let's have Lockheed Martin (now BAE NA), or Honeywell or Sandia make a radiation hardened version and we will fly that."
It really is not that difficult to build simple circuits that perform EDAC, measure current levels, and reset units.
The other thing is that a number of times, the result of radiation hardening is not that the device is less susceptible to most SEEs, but merely total dose. That was the case with the ADSP21020 and that is pretty useless in my opinion. You can put some simple shielding around the device (like the SEi (now Maxwell)RadPack(tm), but simpler) and decrease the amount of dose that the device will see in space significantly.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you'll be surprised by the end result. Gerry has been into pinball for years and has owned many of the best pinball machines, so I'm sure he'll end up making it a fun game. He has been thinking about this platform for 15 years, so I believe it'll surprise a lot of people.
I get paid for overtime. So now you've heard of one.
So many people have chimed in saying they don't think NASA does much PR, I thought I should add more.
Have any of you ever seen the numerous "technical" publications (i.e. NASA Tech Briefs) that NASA puts out? They are sheer propoganda for NASA funded projects.
Have you seen their online newsletters and spam mailing lists?
Have you seen their publicity stunts (John Glenn in space)?
Have you seen their media planted stories in major magazines and newspapers? I count 7 stories on NASA in the last week at nytimes.com.
IMO, the biggest problem with NASA is that they have gotten TOO big. They have taken on a life of their own and are afraid of getting smaller and doing ONLY their core mission. Take a look at the wide variety of things NASA does and tell me how many of them really relate to aerospace...fewer than you might imagine.
NASA needs to be trimmed in size so that they don't keep trying to feed their own through bogus projects and other agencies missions.
Well that is not true at all. In fact, the answer may be closer to the opposite. The NASA PR machine is always in high gear, so it is difficult to figure out what really is interesting since they are so breathless about everything.
For proof, watch the morning talk shows. You will see plenty of NASA. See space.com for all the news releases.
If anything, I am dissappointed the NASA spends SO MUCH money on promoting themselves. They are not a commercial organization after all.
Your book would probably do much better if it rendered in Netscape 4.X. I can only view it with IE. On a linux site, you are missing a large part of the audience.
Solution to keeping the GPS system from knowing:
Stop it from acquiring position. Encase the antenna in something that will keep it from acquiring. Or pull the antenna plug from the receiver.
I submit that if you never test the law with these sorts of cases that you will never know what is legal and illegal. Just like the GPL never being tested does add uncertainty to the legal strength it holds.
There are plenty of gray areas in what you term legal searches already.
I doubt there is a law enforcement person alive whose primary motivation is to violate your rights. When you are looking for a piece of information that you need, do you not try different search engines, do you not ask people, perhaps try something new? The idea is the same; they are doing their job in a professional manner; they determine that perhaps an heat sensor would be helpful to catch law breakers. They try it and find a law breaker. There is not intent to violate your rights; there is intent to catch a criminal.
I don't know that your table really helps your cause.
For the heroin and concaine numbers, the number of users is an estimate that probably has an uncertainty on the order of +/- 25% to +/- 50%, while the number of users for alcohol and tobacco are pretty well known. The number of deaths attributed to the various drugs can neglect accidents (i.e. car crashes) that might have caused death through drug use indirectly. Plus the source (cato institute) that found those statistics is dubious because it is clearly biased.
I'm too lazy to look for better, so let's assume that these numbers are reasonable.
Your supposition, that "with legalization the deaths from currently illegal drugs would decrease" is probably false, depending on how you meant it. It is quite possible that quality of the drugs would go up, but with legalization, more people would try the drugs.
That makes the assumption that you are arguing that the total number of deaths will go down. If you are arguing that the percentage of death will go down, I would probably agree. But the size of user base would likely grow significantly. The net loss to society in terms of drug deaths might be significant.
Since we are making a lot of suppositions, it is tough to know what would really happen.
I tend to believe the *right thing* to do with regards to the law is to decriminalize drug use because it should be a personal choice; if a crime is committed during drug use, there are plenty of laws to cover that. But I guess the big concern, held many others (and maybe me, I find it somewhat persuasive), is that the loss to society as a whole could be very large.
Well, remember that this particular fellow was going to plead guily if the search was determined to be legal.
If you are an FBI agent and you have a *really* good idea that someone is guilty of a relatively serious (by law) crime, wouldn't you feel like you should use those means that you can, especially something simple like a heat imager?
The FBI agent has no reason to expect that it will be ruled an illegal search, they are just trying to do their job and catch someone who is committing a crime (which they did do in this instance, although it may get overturned).
I think your final point is perhaps a counter-argument?
If alcohol and tobacco kill more people per year than all other drugs *combined*, and they are the most widely distributed because they are *legal*, then does it not suggest (not necessarily, but possible) that perhaps if the other drugs are legalized that they will kill many people?
When you say victimless, some people will disagree and say that the cost of cleaning up/treating these people causes all of society to pay for their abuses (abuse because those are the ones that cost money, some users inflict no cost).
Personally, I am alright with decriminalization (legalization is a misnomer in my mind) of drug possession and use, but would like to see strict penalties for drug use when involved with other crimes (similar to the idea of felony murder). Unfortunately, I don't think decriminalization will happen for many years, if ever.
I think it is because most of the American public does not pay attention to the actual decisions and read the justifications, they merely look at what the media tells them. And the media (at least by using the words of many liberals) has painted Scalia to be this incredible stereotype that is actually pretty far from the truth.
Could you please cite some of those instances? I would like to understand better some of the criticisms of Scalia.
My opinion of him is not that he shouts tradition frequently, but that he merely is adamant about keeping states power strong and federal power relatively weak. But YMMV.
I refer you to this post: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=01/06/08/12322 50&cid=70
I just don't get it. You buy the Tivo from Philips, and then you hook it up to a phone line for a free time/update service that Tivo provides.
Now all these people get pissed off that Tivo changed things!! WTF did you think the phone line was for?
Bitch all you want, Tivo may have made a mistake, but they are letting you have a free ride they don't have any obligation to give you.
If I owned a Tivo, I would just have purchase the $200 lifetime subscription upfront and been done with it. Or hacked it and not used their free time server.
You all sound like a bunch of fucking whiny kids that can't handle a couple months without TV.
There are alternatives, you know. A conventional VCR will work just fine. Side note: When reading these stories, I went to Amazon.com to see how much people liked their Tivos and its like freaking testimonials..."It has revolutionized my life..." Have these people never heard of VCRs?
Hey Rob,
Serious question: Do you believe in this? (or was that some other slashdot editor you were referring to?)
Thanks.
I thought even more funny was that the article was written like they were having a hard time typing:
Hell, it even a whole keyboard. It's half of one! Let's take a look.
In all that time there have been no significat advances in how people type.
One thing I thought I mightion is the fact that you can only buy a Half Keyboard for either your PC or your handheld.
Pretty Funny, eh?
For more information about chernobyl, you can take a look at this resource.
What world are you living in?
Most good books that I buy on a technical subject are atleast $20, more likely $40 to $60. If the subject is esoteric, the price is frequently $80 to $150. Price a graduate text book sometime and you will see that most of those are easily above $60.
The price is not out of line because of some conspiracy. It is merely not a very popular subject. I would bet is has less than 1% of the audience of say a book on HTML. And books on HTML are not exactly read by the general populace as simple as HTML may be and as useful as it may be.
those who don't want to read it.
Engineers are policy wise.
Three big points security, privacy and IP. No rational media coverage, not even here.
Define Steganography
It could upend conventional wisdom. Governments and businesses make us hide stuff.
SDMI presentation canceled.
Microsoft reportedly developed a music control system using watermarks.
Define watermarks.
War over control of information online seems to escalate over time.
History of this war.
Microsoft campaign to counter the open source movement. This is important to information hiding for some reason.
Law is coming to the net.
Quote: Businesses are terrified about the rise in free and shared data.
Quote: Corporate lobbyists have successfully advanced the idea that laws and initiatives are necessary to protect IP from pirates online.
I disagree. Some laws are bad.
Hiding informating...DeCSS
Too cheap to buy a book. Hackers should buy them though.
Cryptography has been important, but maybe not stenography.
Review of book.
Fingerprinting can be used to prevent theft and also prevent fair use.
Right now IP and copyright issues are up in the air. Some people think one thing, some think another.
So Information Hiding becomes politically important
MAY EFFECT EVERYONE and EVERYTHING
Seems to be missing content to me.
Jon Katz said:
"There's little published material about steganography, and what has been written costs a fortune. Information Hiding: Techniques for Steganography and Digital Watermarking edited by Stefan Katzenbeisse and Fabien A.P. Petitcolas, published by Artech House, costs nearly $100."
Translation:
"There is little published on steganography, and since I have no budget and am to cheap to buy a $100 book, I couldn't even look at one damn book, but here is the title of one!"
Come on Jon, a $100 is shitted away by most of the people on Slashdot in a week by eating out for lunch, renting movies, buying CDs, buying a new computer game, buying pron, etc. To say that $100 is a lot of money to this crowd is ridiculous.
I hadn't heard of this, it is a good idea. The only question is how well they promote the idea. Cause no good idea ever gets very far without some good promotion. So if you are interested in this getting paid attention to, please promote it.
Does it ever seem like the world will collapse from the weight of standards to you? It does to me.
I like it when the book reviews have a picture of the book cover. Allows me to put a face with a name. ;-) Here is the Amazon.com page with the picture on it.
For your short term needs in voice recording, I would recommend dumping the tapes and going with something like the Olympus DS1000. I have a DS150, but wish I would have gotten the DS1000 (it was not quite out when I needed it). It accepts SmartMedia (which I have cause of the digital camera), so essentially the amount of voice you can store is unlimited. USB interface to put on your laptop. I archive the old recordings on CDs. The format is very well compressed so you can fit a lot on, etc.
Anyway, it works for me.
Please Moderate the Parent Higher. It contains a good answer to the hypothetical brought up by the District Attorney.
Intent is definitely a large portion of the law. In fact, the plantiff is clearly arguing on the basis of intent, but their use is very selective. All software is merely a tool. It may be a tool to create a beautiful piece of art, it may be a tool that will automate some boring job, but a tool cannot be banned if it has a legal use.
It can be illegal to possess the tool if the intent is to perform an illegal act. But if there is substantial doubt about the objects use, it can be legal. There are a number of cases about concealed "weapons" like scissors that have given the benefit of the doubt to the defendents.
In some respects, I could be, but the generally excepted definition of radiation hardening is to build the electronics with another layout and/or foundry.
I just wanted to point out that the other alternative is sometimes the better path. See what issues you have and then use good engineering to make them non-issues. For many years, the process has been: "Well, we are going to put this into space. Okay, well let's have Lockheed Martin (now BAE NA), or Honeywell or Sandia make a radiation hardened version and we will fly that."
It really is not that difficult to build simple circuits that perform EDAC, measure current levels, and reset units.
The other thing is that a number of times, the result of radiation hardening is not that the device is less susceptible to most SEEs, but merely total dose. That was the case with the ADSP21020 and that is pretty useless in my opinion. You can put some simple shielding around the device (like the SEi (now Maxwell)RadPack(tm), but simpler) and decrease the amount of dose that the device will see in space significantly.