Seems like we've heard/seen/read of approximately umpteen-thousand-and-one proposals/patents/product announcements for these "will replace dead trees" thingys. Hey, how about a thin, wall-mountable widescreen TV/monitor/touchscreen-like-Star-Trek thingy? That is, one that I can afford?
1) The people who should be advocates for library users (library boards and staff) lack spines;
2) The poor, who depend on libraries for their web access, don't contribute to political campaigns.
Case in point: Memphis/Shelby County Public Library resisted installing filters for years(well, at least a couple), until a local archconservative anti-pr0n crusader, your stereotypical suburban soccer mom basically, was elected to the county commission. Somehow, she ended up on a budget committee, and threatened to cut the county's contribution to the library system by 25%--some $4M--if they didn't install filters, which they wasted no time whatsoever doing. Never mind that the library has otherwise successfully resisted responsibility(or, more to the point, liability) for babysitting children, including allowing the little varmints access to Playboy and The Joy of Sex. Never mind Peacefire. Never mind that this latter-day Comstock represents a district where most households have their own computers(and do you think that Dick and Jane are even slowed down by the filter that Mommy put on the family PC? Doubt it!), whereas most of the people actually affected by this decision live in the inner city. Point is, libraries are a big, slow-moving target for social conservative politicians looking for an easy score, which is to say, all of them.
The thing that gets me is that so many of these people, who are otherwise more than enthusiastic about homeschooling and free exercise of their religion and so on, are so insistent on the public library being responsible for enforcing morality. They just don't get it that the only filter that works is what they teach their kids regarding right and wrong--no, not what they tell their kids, but what they can make their kids believe.
Consider the possibility that you'd end up creating an electromagnet so powerful, it could attract the iron in your hemoglobin and suck all of the blood out of your body.
You could write software that detects different notes and converts em into characters, and you could use an midi card.. wonder what it would be like to type with a guitar?:)
Well, a million monkeys with a million typewriters typing for a million years would eventually produce... Eddie Van Halen solos.
The banner ad that popped up when I accessed the site:
WantViagra?.com Viagra $4.50 per dose
Insert(ahem) your own one-handed typing joke here...
Re:No. Life does not end when you have kids
on
Skiing Down Everest
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· Score: 1
Jon Krakauer's book Into Thin Air says, at one point, that ten percent of the people who leave base camp don't come back. Yeah, I'd say offhand that cars are a little safer.
Of course, that doesn't address the question of whether or not it's necessary to drive your 1-2+ ton chunks of steel around, at least to the extent that people do. The increased risk comes from the number of vehicles on the road, their size, and possibly the increased sense of personal invulnerability on the part of their drivers (not to mention the decreased attention to driving due to yakking on the phone). How necessary is it for a perfectly healthy adult with a perfectly decent bike to drive an SUV to the store on a perfectly decent day for two sacks of groceries? Granted, there's still a huge difference of degree between that and paying $36,000 to have some Sherpas all but drag you up the side of a mountain, but still.
Should'a tried your local library; even if they don't own it themselves, interlibrary loan could have got a copy for you. Unless, that is, you were dead set on owning a copy. Funny, though--it was out in paperback not too long ago(or was it? I bought it--hmm, must have been early 90's); wonder if they've all been pulped by now.
It still remains a good read, though. Wonder if that guy who camped out in MITS' parking lot still has his Altair?
The palm 3e was offerred for a limited time with a clear case to palm developers.
It was also offered for a while as a sort of "back-to-school" special. I would imagine that you could probably dredge up one for pretty cheap on an auction site; they went for only $150 or so new, IIRC.
...call it "Nickelodeon Slime Green." Helps peg their target market.
Missing the point by umpteen skadillion lightyears
on
The Ultimate Bike
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· Score: 1
AA quote from the article:
Among TINI's more important duties is to make sure the
rider has enough electrons to make it home for their spouse's birthday
party by constantly monitoring all battery parameters to accurately
determine state-of-charge.
For cryin' out loud.
Aside from the inherent inanity of the above statement--as if you need Java or any other bit of code at all to determine the charge remaining on a battery--why the hell would the tardy spouse in question need external "electrons" at all? Why not just put your freeqin' feet on the freeqin' pedals and pedal your sorry ass home? Or are we admitting that Iacocca's "brainchild" is really an electric scooter--the moped for the new millenium--and has about as much to do with real cycling as lightning bugs have to do with lightning?
But maybe I'm the one who just doesn't get it; after all, I don't see why someone can't just shift into a lower gear to get up those dreadful hills instead of getting a "power boost." Never mind; I'll just go put on my stilts and try out for an NBA team.
This made me think about human power in general and how expensive it is. An average person can sustain
about 1/4 horsepower. Let's call that 250 watts. If we could convert all that to electricity for one hour,
we'd have made 0.25 kilowatt hours. At minimum wage of five bucks an hour, we'd have a killowatt hour
that costs $20, which is one thousand times more expensive than normal production and hundreds of times
more expensive than retail electicity.
How about a direct comparison? A good rider can keep up about 20mph, so he will cover a mile in 3
minutes. At minimum wage, that will cost you 25 cents. A car that gets 30 mpg will will cost you 4.7 cents
to drive you that mile at $1.41 per gallon. Let's call that 5 cents/mile to make things easy and conservative.
The difference of 20 cents per mile, when multiplied by the 100,000 mile life of the car adds up to twenty
thousand dollars.
An interesting analysis, but you're overlooking some of the biggest advantages of human power: renewable fuel (peanut butter, bananas, etc) and, especially, the benefit of exercise. Something like a million Americans die every year of heart disease, obesity-related diabetes is on the rise, and what is our solution? Ummm... driving our SUVs to the gym to ride a stationary bike. This isn't quite logical. Why not a laptop hooked to a recumbent bike via a generator charging a car battery? Who says you can't pedal and write code at the same time? How much more healthy, alert, and , yes dammit, buff would we all be if we got eight count 'em eight hours of aerobic exercise each and every day? Mere mortals would cringe before us! Geeks would RUUUUUUUUUUUULE..... oh, sorry. Yes, doctor, I'll take my meds now.
Sure, if you want to break into system X, given enough time and effort, you'll be able to. But if system X is even reasonably secured, the attacker would more likely look for a system that's easier to crack.
Right--it's like the old joke about the two guys who get attacked by the bear. One guy starts running and the other yells, "You'll never outrun the bear!" The other guy yells back, "I don't need to--I just need to outrun you!"
The point, of course, is knowing when enough is enough. Trying to make a computer absolutely secure is like trying to make a bicycle theft-proof. Bike thieves have been able to break most locks, even Kryptonite locks, for years. There's a "New York" line of allegedly unbreakable locks, but they're expensive and heavy. Of course, someone can always "bikejack" you, especially on isolated paths or trails. You could carry a gun, they could set up a sniper post, you could armor-plate your bike... eventually you've got a 300-pound bike that needs a power-assist, and then you've got what's essentially a two-wheeled car, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of cycling instead of driving a cage. The real-world solution is to secure your bike in a manner that makes your bike one of the faster antelopes in the herd being pursued by lions, if you catch my drift.
Of course, that would deprive sysadmins of the sublime pleasures of pouring boiling oil on the heads of the invaders. Maybe no one wants to admit it, but catching script kiddies in the act is part of the fun.
I'm also starting an open source project called "Absolutly" that will attempt to do a clean room implementation of Relativity.
Unless you add the missing "e" to "Absolutly", a certain vodka company will end up owning you, anyway. I say, ditch relativity altogether; it's affecting my warp drive project badly.
First post-Revolutionary governor of New York and vice-president of US from 1805-1812. Information Please Almanac doesn't say when he boarded the mothership, exactly, or whether his discovery that America eats its young had anything to do with that.
Isn't progress great, its spammers like this that kill off things like Usenet and now Gnuetella. Mark my words, this program will do more damage to Gnutella than the RIAA could ever hope to.
Reminds me of the factoid--I think that William Poundstone wrote about it in one of his "Big Secrets" books--about how there are detectable traces of cocaine in virtually all circulated US currency, because it spreads from coke dealers' cash to other currency through bill-counting machines. This apparently was a factor in some drug dealer's trial; his cash was confiscated and tested positive for coke, and his attorney provided the evidence to the effect that this was not uncommon.
The idea that this new tech could be used to "sniff out" traces of bomb-making chemicals at airports is inherently bogus, because all your terrorist would have to do is distribute traces of explosives around the public (i.e. pre-"sniffer") areas of the airport; a few hundred pissed-off false positive-tested commuters later, the system gets shut down.
I support free speech in that we must have the freedom to say what we want without fear of opression. But to
demand that the government facilitate the distribution of information is ridiculous. We're not guaranteed
unrestricted internet access in our contract with our government, so there's no reason to fight these restrictions.
Go ahead and ban porn in the libraries. That's their right.
Wow.. where do I start? Well, for one thing, thanks to laws like the Freedom of Information Act, damn straight the government has an obligation to provide at least some information on demand. Libraries are the creation of specific acts of legislation that obligate governments at different levels to provide information to the public. Are we "guaranteed" Net access by any specific legislative act or clause thereof? Well, not in any jurisdiction that I'm a member of, but there's no real reason why they couldn't. Providing services for the general public is the ostensible reason for their existence, after all.
And that last line--"That's their right"--man, that just sends chills up my spine. Governments don't have rights of any sort, Mark; they have powers specifically granted for the purpose of carrying out their duties. (Yeah, I know that the libertarians out there are in stitches by now. We're talking about theory, not reality.)
Think of it this way- we're constitutionally guaranteed the right to bear arms. But the government is in now way
bound to provide us with guns so that we may exercise our rights. It's as simple as that.
Not really. Sure, Uncle Sam won't actually buy you your very own Uzi so that you can run off and have a shoot-em-up with your personal "well--regulated militia", but it will give you guns and ammo if you join the armed forces, learn to march in a straight line, polish your buttons, etc. Same deal with libraries. We're not talking about buying each man, woman, child & replicant an iMac, a DSL service, the electricity to run it, the farging manuals, and so on. If you can afford your own Internet access, you really don't want to hang out at the local library; trying to sign up for one of the extremely limited spaces is like trying to check out the latest Harry Potter book. The basic public good that libraries serve, all other flowery philosophical bromides aside, is to give regular folk less of an excuse for being ignoramuses. Public internet access supports that mission, as do I.
You should realize that libraries do choose their books. Try going to a public library and look for porn or fascist propaganda. You are unlikely to find any.
Eye of the beholder, chum. My local public library has several editions of The Joy of Sex, as well as Mein Kampf and A republic, not an empire. Yeah, you can argue that JoS is strictly for educational value, no matter how lovingly it illustrates tab A going into slot B, and that the library neither acknowledges nor encourages any pee-Q-liar feelins' such works might inspire in its patrons, for what it's worth. Of course, then there's the stuff that's just plain labeled "erotica", the liberal arts majors' prOn.
That having been said, you're absolutely right on your main point: librarians have practiced de facto censorship for decades, if not centuries, simply because no library (with the exception of the Library of Congress, in its role as copyright depository) can have a copy of everything. If you gotta make those collection development decisions, you just might go for the Anais Nin collection, rather than a subscription to Milk Maid Mania.
Oh, so the employer needs to come to you. What a novel approach. Let me try that! Hey, all you San Francisco types--pick it up and move it on over to Memphis, where the summers are hotter than your mama in a red silk dress! Anyone? Anyone? Ferris?
Mmmmnope, didn't think so. Look, son, if you're not willing to move, give it up. I can tell you that college towns are some of the worst places to find work, because slackers with degrees out the nether parts take all the jobs. Are you one of them?
In college, Star Trek was my baby. The nights that I didn't have to work on something and couldn't sleep because my circadian rhythm was still set to the graveyard shift, I'd go to the nearest convenience store and blow away K'tinga-class cruisers until my eyelids got heavy. I may still have the high-scorer T-shirt that I won at the student union, which also had a copy.
Gauntlet was also great, but for a different reason: if you knew about the three-minute trick(stay put for three minutes on any level past the introductory levels, and all the walls turned into exits), you could play for hours--and I did. Hell, the electricity that it took to run the machine for that long probably cost more than a quarter.
Slashdot Mirror
No, really.
1) The people who should be advocates for library users (library boards and staff) lack spines;
2) The poor, who depend on libraries for their web access, don't contribute to political campaigns.
Case in point: Memphis/Shelby County Public Library resisted installing filters for years(well, at least a couple), until a local archconservative anti-pr0n crusader, your stereotypical suburban soccer mom basically, was elected to the county commission. Somehow, she ended up on a budget committee, and threatened to cut the county's contribution to the library system by 25%--some $4M--if they didn't install filters, which they wasted no time whatsoever doing. Never mind that the library has otherwise successfully resisted responsibility(or, more to the point, liability) for babysitting children, including allowing the little varmints access to Playboy and The Joy of Sex. Never mind Peacefire. Never mind that this latter-day Comstock represents a district where most households have their own computers(and do you think that Dick and Jane are even slowed down by the filter that Mommy put on the family PC? Doubt it!), whereas most of the people actually affected by this decision live in the inner city. Point is, libraries are a big, slow-moving target for social conservative politicians looking for an easy score, which is to say, all of them.
The thing that gets me is that so many of these people, who are otherwise more than enthusiastic about homeschooling and free exercise of their religion and so on, are so insistent on the public library being responsible for enforcing morality. They just don't get it that the only filter that works is what they teach their kids regarding right and wrong--no, not what they tell their kids, but what they can make their kids believe.
So it's been around for the last ten years or so... big deal.
Oh, that Homer. D'oh!
Cool! Make sure to post JPEGs if it happens!
Well, a million monkeys with a million typewriters typing for a million years would eventually produce... Eddie Van Halen solos.
WantViagra?.com Viagra $4.50 per dose
Insert(ahem) your own one-handed typing joke here...
Of course, that doesn't address the question of whether or not it's necessary to drive your 1-2+ ton chunks of steel around, at least to the extent that people do. The increased risk comes from the number of vehicles on the road, their size, and possibly the increased sense of personal invulnerability on the part of their drivers (not to mention the decreased attention to driving due to yakking on the phone). How necessary is it for a perfectly healthy adult with a perfectly decent bike to drive an SUV to the store on a perfectly decent day for two sacks of groceries? Granted, there's still a huge difference of degree between that and paying $36,000 to have some Sherpas all but drag you up the side of a mountain, but still.
It still remains a good read, though. Wonder if that guy who camped out in MITS' parking lot still has his Altair?
It was also offered for a while as a sort of "back-to-school" special. I would imagine that you could probably dredge up one for pretty cheap on an auction site; they went for only $150 or so new, IIRC.
Among TINI's more important duties is to make sure the rider has enough electrons to make it home for their spouse's birthday party by constantly monitoring all battery parameters to accurately determine state-of-charge.
For cryin' out loud.
Aside from the inherent inanity of the above statement--as if you need Java or any other bit of code at all to determine the charge remaining on a battery--why the hell would the tardy spouse in question need external "electrons" at all? Why not just put your freeqin' feet on the freeqin' pedals and pedal your sorry ass home? Or are we admitting that Iacocca's "brainchild" is really an electric scooter--the moped for the new millenium--and has about as much to do with real cycling as lightning bugs have to do with lightning?
But maybe I'm the one who just doesn't get it; after all, I don't see why someone can't just shift into a lower gear to get up those dreadful hills instead of getting a "power boost." Never mind; I'll just go put on my stilts and try out for an NBA team.
An interesting analysis, but you're overlooking some of the biggest advantages of human power: renewable fuel (peanut butter, bananas, etc) and, especially, the benefit of exercise. Something like a million Americans die every year of heart disease, obesity-related diabetes is on the rise, and what is our solution? Ummm... driving our SUVs to the gym to ride a stationary bike. This isn't quite logical. Why not a laptop hooked to a recumbent bike via a generator charging a car battery? Who says you can't pedal and write code at the same time? How much more healthy, alert, and , yes dammit, buff would we all be if we got eight count 'em eight hours of aerobic exercise each and every day? Mere mortals would cringe before us! Geeks would RUUUUUUUUUUUULE..... oh, sorry. Yes, doctor, I'll take my meds now.
Right--it's like the old joke about the two guys who get attacked by the bear. One guy starts running and the other yells, "You'll never outrun the bear!" The other guy yells back, "I don't need to--I just need to outrun you!"
The point, of course, is knowing when enough is enough. Trying to make a computer absolutely secure is like trying to make a bicycle theft-proof. Bike thieves have been able to break most locks, even Kryptonite locks, for years. There's a "New York" line of allegedly unbreakable locks, but they're expensive and heavy. Of course, someone can always "bikejack" you, especially on isolated paths or trails. You could carry a gun, they could set up a sniper post, you could armor-plate your bike... eventually you've got a 300-pound bike that needs a power-assist, and then you've got what's essentially a two-wheeled car, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of cycling instead of driving a cage. The real-world solution is to secure your bike in a manner that makes your bike one of the faster antelopes in the herd being pursued by lions, if you catch my drift.
Of course, that would deprive sysadmins of the sublime pleasures of pouring boiling oil on the heads of the invaders. Maybe no one wants to admit it, but catching script kiddies in the act is part of the fun.
Unless you add the missing "e" to "Absolutly", a certain vodka company will end up owning you, anyway. I say, ditch relativity altogether; it's affecting my warp drive project badly.
And do we know who owns flatplanet?
The idea that this new tech could be used to "sniff out" traces of bomb-making chemicals at airports is inherently bogus, because all your terrorist would have to do is distribute traces of explosives around the public (i.e. pre-"sniffer") areas of the airport; a few hundred pissed-off false positive-tested commuters later, the system gets shut down.
Wow.. where do I start? Well, for one thing, thanks to laws like the Freedom of Information Act, damn straight the government has an obligation to provide at least some information on demand. Libraries are the creation of specific acts of legislation that obligate governments at different levels to provide information to the public. Are we "guaranteed" Net access by any specific legislative act or clause thereof? Well, not in any jurisdiction that I'm a member of, but there's no real reason why they couldn't. Providing services for the general public is the ostensible reason for their existence, after all.
And that last line--"That's their right"--man, that just sends chills up my spine. Governments don't have rights of any sort, Mark; they have powers specifically granted for the purpose of carrying out their duties. (Yeah, I know that the libertarians out there are in stitches by now. We're talking about theory, not reality.)
Think of it this way- we're constitutionally guaranteed the right to bear arms. But the government is in now way bound to provide us with guns so that we may exercise our rights. It's as simple as that.
Not really. Sure, Uncle Sam won't actually buy you your very own Uzi so that you can run off and have a shoot-em-up with your personal "well--regulated militia", but it will give you guns and ammo if you join the armed forces, learn to march in a straight line, polish your buttons, etc. Same deal with libraries. We're not talking about buying each man, woman, child & replicant an iMac, a DSL service, the electricity to run it, the farging manuals, and so on. If you can afford your own Internet access, you really don't want to hang out at the local library; trying to sign up for one of the extremely limited spaces is like trying to check out the latest Harry Potter book. The basic public good that libraries serve, all other flowery philosophical bromides aside, is to give regular folk less of an excuse for being ignoramuses. Public internet access supports that mission, as do I.
Eye of the beholder, chum. My local public library has several editions of The Joy of Sex, as well as Mein Kampf and A republic, not an empire. Yeah, you can argue that JoS is strictly for educational value, no matter how lovingly it illustrates tab A going into slot B, and that the library neither acknowledges nor encourages any pee-Q-liar feelins' such works might inspire in its patrons, for what it's worth. Of course, then there's the stuff that's just plain labeled "erotica", the liberal arts majors' prOn.
That having been said, you're absolutely right on your main point: librarians have practiced de facto censorship for decades, if not centuries, simply because no library (with the exception of the Library of Congress, in its role as copyright depository) can have a copy of everything. If you gotta make those collection development decisions, you just might go for the Anais Nin collection, rather than a subscription to Milk Maid Mania.
Mmmmnope, didn't think so. Look, son, if you're not willing to move, give it up. I can tell you that college towns are some of the worst places to find work, because slackers with degrees out the nether parts take all the jobs. Are you one of them?
Gauntlet was also great, but for a different reason: if you knew about the three-minute trick(stay put for three minutes on any level past the introductory levels, and all the walls turned into exits), you could play for hours--and I did. Hell, the electricity that it took to run the machine for that long probably cost more than a quarter.
2)Superluminal Speed
3)Im pulse Engines