I don't expect the house to have millions of monitors. I've also never been to a LAN party where anyone's used even one TV, so I only need one for me, not everyone.
It's funny how the bar for 'serious gaming' keeps going up, even when the software doesn't. Used to be you had to have a ping below 200ms and 30fps to be a 'serious gamer'. Now you need at least 60fps (though 130 is better, even though your monitor refresh is at 72 Hz), a ping less than 40ms, and the biggest honking graphics card you can get, so you can run the game in 1024x768x24bit instead of 640x480.
Serious gamers rely on strategy and technique, not the latest in texture rendering technology. Those are serious geeks. Both are respectable, but respect the difference...
Get a laptop with a nice big screen (or better yet, S-VHS out), a wireless lan card, and a good USB controller. Total weight? about 6 or 7 lbs. Completely portable.
The Apple Titaniums are perfect for this, as long as you're playing cross-platform games (Diablo II, Quake Arena, Starcraft, Myth II, etc.)
Back in 1997, we made fan sites and protest sites, for and against "Cyberdiversion" for Heat.net. The fact that we were doing it got morepress than the sites themselves ever did...
The funny thing is that one of the sites, "Mothers Against Cyberdiversion" has since been quoted and incorporated into culture several years later by people who had no idea that it was nothing more than a reverse-psychology guerilla marketing effort.
A few years later I was the webmaster for levi.com and its associated domains. While at that time we didn't do any direct misdirection, we would create one-off rough-cut promo sites, including one for redline, designed by the folks at superbad. I left before the age of Mahir, and so didn't have anything to do with those...
You're right. It is all about comparative risks, and I wasn't making the point that Hydrogen is a a bad fuel, just that it's not a SAFE fuel. In response to your assertion that you have to have a fuel, and therefore an unsafe fuel, for locomotion, be it spacecraft or car, I'd point out that lead-acid bateries don't tend to be as explosive as gasolene or hydrogen.
Also, in response to those who point out that leaking hydrogen floats upwards out of harms way, this is a good poiont. Leaking hydrogen isn't half so dangerous as an explosive release of pressuraized gas (flammable or not) that a hydrogen-powered car carries around.
So if a drunk driver's breaks fail, then it's okay to drive drunk, because driving drunk didn't cause the accident?
Hydrogen is still dangerous, Hindenberg anecdote or not. If Challenger wasn't sitting on a tank of liquid Hydrogen and another tank of liquid Oxygen, the challenger disaster would have looked very different, and might not have even happened, despite the fact that Hydrogen wasn't responsible for the failed o-ring.
Hydrogen isn't safe. Not that gasolene is particularly safe, but the logic in the parent post is pretty contrived and false.
People often fail to realize that each time a service patch is released, it means your system was vulnerable every single day from installation to the day you install it. Each service patch (well, each security-related service pack or hotfix) is in response to a discovered flaw.
With such a wide-sweeping operation as the one detailed in this article, who's to say that the security hole to be addressed by next months' hotfix isn't being exploited right now?
Trained hotfix monkey or 6-digit sysadmin, your IIS system is still vulnerable today to the bugs that go public tomorrow.
Which isn't to say that IIS is alone in this vulnerability, but it's silly to assume that keeping up to date with security patches and revs, be it Windows, Linux, Irix, or whatever, is a panacea to security break-ins. Your e-commerce architecture should be such that the credit cards are never on the same machine as your public server, and that the public server only has the ability to send CC info to the CC database, and never the other way.
What if the doctor receives the page, but is doing heart surgery at the moment?
Wow, an obstitrician that also does heart surgery? Quite a jack of all trades.
Yes, the signal does travel forever, but at a certain point it will no longer interfere with cell phones.
Actually that's not true. there is no 'certain point' where the the signal stops interfereing. Rather, there is a very uncertain gradient, and if your house is next to someone elses, you would either have only spotty blocking on your own property if you tried to ensure no blocking on your neighbors, or spotty blocking on your neighbors property if you wanted to ensure blocking on yours, or more likely, both.
(ie: If you take your pants off in public, expect to be talking to the police).
Great, then make it illegal to talk on a cellphone in a theater (or to have one set to 'ring'). If they do it, they can talk to the police. that makes more sense than padlocking peoples pants on, and only giving keys to bathroom attendants, parents, and spouses.
Yeah, I'm sure all those annoying people that talk on their cellphones in the theater are going to be just peachy about buying a new phone so they can't hear it ring.
It's just a convenient way to adhere to a potential 'quiet zone' law. It's a convenience, not a shackle. I've had my phone go off in class more than I'd like (twice) and I'd welcome the tech.
>You don't want a speed governor on your car
Too late, you may already have one.
Yes, but it doesn't keep you from going faster than 65.
>and we can go beyond '50s technology.
Today's cellphones are infact '90s technology.
You missed the point. Jamming is '50s technology. We can go beyond '50s technology in finding a solution to the problem.
God I wish this thread would die. People talking about th holy grail of watching a movie in peace regardless of others needs and finding middle ground is like people fighting tooth and nail about their right to drive in Texas with an open beer in their hand.
Not sure I follow. Who exactly lost $5K when someone gets up to go to the bathroom? You the moviegoer may have lost a delicately built atmosphere if the person had to step over you. Is that tatamount to making it not worth having gone, thus losing $8?
Even so, the theater didn't lose a dime. Not trying to make a counterpoint, I'm just wondering...
Your doctor is your doctor, and when your wife goes into labor at 4am, your doctor is going to deliver the baby, not the one who happens to be on call.
Hm, I don't think this holds much ground. The jammer only makes "turning the volume down" mandatory, since the phone basically stops working -- but you were already supposed to turn the volume down, anyway, when going to a movie. I agree that for a doctor at a restaurant this would be a borderline case, and jamming probably inappropriate, but for a movie, the doctor isn't supposed to be there with a live phone in the first place, so jam away. In other words, anybody who needs to be reachable and has a bit of courtesy shouldn't show up at movies (or funerals or whatever) with a live phone in the first place.
Umm:
The jammer doesn't turn down the volume on a phone, it stops a call from getting through at all.
A 'live phone' can be set to vibrate so the person can quietly get up, leave the theater, and answer the phone. This would enable someone with a 'live phone' to coexist with others in peace. Millions do it every day.
In regards to your comment that "anyone who needs to be reachable and has a bit of courtesy shouldn't show up at movies (or funerals or whatever) with a live phone in the first place." there are many people who, because of their job, need to be reachable at all times, and not simply for selfish reasons (doctors being the most salient example). They therefore can never go to movies?
Did you misunderstand the 'set to vibrate' concept, or am I missing your point?
God, how do you think people have survived the last 3 million years before cell phones? Your level of self-absorbtion reaches signal 11 proportions.
And you don't think society's changed in the last 3 million years, or even just the last 10? The way people work has changed because of the freedom afforded by telephones, pages, and cellphones. To ignore that in justifying blocking them is to necessitate returning to work habits and limitations in effect in the days before telecommuting, email, wired transfer of information, and even the written word.
Get your head out of your ass, Coward. You're missing your wake-up call.
Considering Starbucks is installing complimentary 802.11 wireless data networks for their patrons, I'm guessing cellphone jamming isn't on their to-do list...
Sure it sounds nice to guarentee no interruptions in a movie theater, and while it seems like everyone has a cellphone, some people do, in fact, need them.
Your wife (or you) go(es) into labor, and the hospital pages your doctor, only they're at a movie because labor is two weeks early and they have a baby expected during any 4 week span. They don't find out because their cellphone and pager are jammed.
Also, unless you can build a farriday cage around your house, your jamming will affect people on adjacent properties. And if you could build a farriday cage around your house, then you wouldn't need a jammer to begin with.
The deal here is the need for social rules. they're already here, and getting stronger. Now that most phones come with vibrate settings, and it's getting easier to switch between 'profiles', the problem will get better.
Add bluetooth to the mix and soon you'll have devices that know when they're entering 'quiet areas' and they'll switch to silent operation automatically while they're in the theater.
You don't want a speed governor on your car, and I don't want someone jamming cellphones. Sure it's annoying to be interrupted during a movie, and yes, I'm completely supportive of ways to prevent that, but it's obnoxious to assume that nobody has duties so important that they need to be interrupted during a meal, movie, or play, and it's closed-minded to think that there aren't more ingeneous ways to solve the problem than aggressive wholesale jamming of signals.
We're smarter than that, and we can go beyond '50s technology.
..if the optical components of the eye (lens, cornea, the fluid inside the eyeball) are actually transparent to infrared?
I assumed anyone replacing the retina and lens of an eye would also be replacing the ocular fluid and pretty much the rest of the eye, so they could construct it to suit whatever needs. I know it passes UV, because UV can currently damage retinas, indicating it gets through.
Related question: I know there are animals (notably bees) that can see in the ultraviolet -- and also some that can sense polarity, which I think is really cool too! -- but are there animals that have IR-capable vision? (I seem to recall snakes being able to sense IR, but I can't remember if it was via their eyes or some other organ.)
Snakes sense temperature via two pits on either side of their head. I don't believe the pits actually sense IR though, they sense ambient temperature (convective heat, as opposed to radiative heat). Apparently pirhhana and goldfish can also see in infrared...
With all the talk of increased resolution, what would also be sueful, and far less difficult from a visual pathways standpoint, would be building eyes that could respond to different frequency ranges, or be able to increase contrast and control brightness better than our existing eyes. Look at sunspots one secong, then step into a pitch black room and play hunter with your cat in the dark.
Imagine, just for a second, what life would be like if we didn't have to have streetlights, reading lights, big, bright monitors, or even daylight most of the time. You could hike through the woods at night without even noticing a difference, and driving through fog would be no difficulty for your infrared eyes.
All without having to deal with the problems posed by increased resolution in the visual pathway.
Unfortunately, a bionic retina wouldn't help either. Like the resolution problem going from lens to retina, the lateral geniculate nucleus, and the V1 visual cortex are also only built for specific levels of resolution. The hypercolumns in the V2 area map to the same density, so having higher resolution data from the retina would, at best, be downsampled before traveling to higher visual functions.
What might work is if you had an artificial retina that could zoom in, either by muscular control (squinting wil increase the zoom factor from 1x to 5x) but then you'd still have a lot of disorientation because small saccades to look a little to the left while zoomed in, would result in a much greater axial shift (like theshaking when you're looking through binocluars for example).
Most of the biogenetic advancements theorized today would work a lot better on humans built with them from the get-go, instead of tacking on upgrades later. Now if we could only implant our consciousness into younger bioengineered clones of ourselves...
I was pleased that the paper addressed the issue of neuronal density, and that even if the optics were perfect, the receptors aren't up to the task.
Really, this is the way it evolved: each part's complexity and accuracy is limited by the others. We wouldn't evolve the optics of eagles unless we also had the neural capability to do something with it.
It doesan't stop at the rods and cones though. The ganglion cells behind them agregate localized cells for transmission to the LGN and then the visual cortex. These too would have to be completely rewired, not to mention the rewiring of the visual cortex, for the increased clarity to do much good at all. The plasticity of the visual track just isn't high enough in adults.
This sort of surgery would have to be done while the brain is still forming its visual pathways, pretty much from 0-8 months. Then, even if we didn't have a higher fovial neural count (and who knows, we might get a higher count if the optic acuity is there early enough), the visual pathways from the retina on back would form based on the higher acuity, helping us make better use of the enhancement, especially, as the paper mentioned, in the area of feature detection, because the bipolar ganglion cells would likely link to smaller clusters of rods and cones, taking advantage of the greater clarity.
Heck, when I was working on the Levi's Online Store, we were the first site I'm aware of to implement a wishlist or 'wish basket' in addition to a shopping cart.
If you can't beat 'em... Okay, well if I don't go for a patent, at least I'll have prior art.
But you don't mind me using the word "kaflooey" in the same sentence?
Funny thing is, you don't get to decide what is and is not a word. If I use it and you understand it, it's ia word whether you like it being one or not.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't expect the house to have millions of monitors. I've also never been to a LAN party where anyone's used even one TV, so I only need one for me, not everyone.
Kevin Fox
--
It's funny how the bar for 'serious gaming' keeps going up, even when the software doesn't. Used to be you had to have a ping below 200ms and 30fps to be a 'serious gamer'. Now you need at least 60fps (though 130 is better, even though your monitor refresh is at 72 Hz), a ping less than 40ms, and the biggest honking graphics card you can get, so you can run the game in 1024x768x24bit instead of 640x480.
Serious gamers rely on strategy and technique, not the latest in texture rendering technology. Those are serious geeks. Both are respectable, but respect the difference...
Kevin Fox
--
Get a laptop with a nice big screen (or better yet, S-VHS out), a wireless lan card, and a good USB controller. Total weight? about 6 or 7 lbs. Completely portable.
The Apple Titaniums are perfect for this, as long as you're playing cross-platform games (Diablo II, Quake Arena, Starcraft, Myth II, etc.)
Kevin Fox
--
Back in 1997, we made fan sites and protest sites, for and against "Cyberdiversion" for Heat.net. The fact that we were doing it got more press than the sites themselves ever did...
The funny thing is that one of the sites, "Mothers Against Cyberdiversion" has since been quoted and incorporated into culture several years later by people who had no idea that it was nothing more than a reverse-psychology guerilla marketing effort.
A few years later I was the webmaster for levi.com and its associated domains. While at that time we didn't do any direct misdirection, we would create one-off rough-cut promo sites, including one for redline, designed by the folks at superbad. I left before the age of Mahir, and so didn't have anything to do with those...
Kevin Fox
--
You're right. It is all about comparative risks, and I wasn't making the point that Hydrogen is a a bad fuel, just that it's not a SAFE fuel. In response to your assertion that you have to have a fuel, and therefore an unsafe fuel, for locomotion, be it spacecraft or car, I'd point out that lead-acid bateries don't tend to be as explosive as gasolene or hydrogen.
Also, in response to those who point out that leaking hydrogen floats upwards out of harms way, this is a good poiont. Leaking hydrogen isn't half so dangerous as an explosive release of pressuraized gas (flammable or not) that a hydrogen-powered car carries around.
Kevin Fox
--
So if a drunk driver's breaks fail, then it's okay to drive drunk, because driving drunk didn't cause the accident?
Hydrogen is still dangerous, Hindenberg anecdote or not. If Challenger wasn't sitting on a tank of liquid Hydrogen and another tank of liquid Oxygen, the challenger disaster would have looked very different, and might not have even happened, despite the fact that Hydrogen wasn't responsible for the failed o-ring.
Hydrogen isn't safe. Not that gasolene is particularly safe, but the logic in the parent post is pretty contrived and false.
Kevin Fox
--
People often fail to realize that each time a service patch is released, it means your system was vulnerable every single day from installation to the day you install it. Each service patch (well, each security-related service pack or hotfix) is in response to a discovered flaw.
With such a wide-sweeping operation as the one detailed in this article, who's to say that the security hole to be addressed by next months' hotfix isn't being exploited right now?
Trained hotfix monkey or 6-digit sysadmin, your IIS system is still vulnerable today to the bugs that go public tomorrow.
Which isn't to say that IIS is alone in this vulnerability, but it's silly to assume that keeping up to date with security patches and revs, be it Windows, Linux, Irix, or whatever, is a panacea to security break-ins. Your e-commerce architecture should be such that the credit cards are never on the same machine as your public server, and that the public server only has the ability to send CC info to the CC database, and never the other way.
Kevin Fox
--
My first thought on reading the headline was:
... ?
What? They're reverting to crudely cut out and meticulously airbrushed Monty Python animation?
Um, cool!
And there was much rejoicing... "yay..."
Kevin Fox
--
What if the doctor receives the page, but is doing heart surgery at the moment?
Wow, an obstitrician that also does heart surgery? Quite a jack of all trades.
Yes, the signal does travel forever, but at a certain point it will no longer interfere with cell phones.
Actually that's not true. there is no 'certain point' where the the signal stops interfereing. Rather, there is a very uncertain gradient, and if your house is next to someone elses, you would either have only spotty blocking on your own property if you tried to ensure no blocking on your neighbors, or spotty blocking on your neighbors property if you wanted to ensure blocking on yours, or more likely, both.
(ie: If you take your pants off in public, expect to be talking to the police).
Great, then make it illegal to talk on a cellphone in a theater (or to have one set to 'ring'). If they do it, they can talk to the police. that makes more sense than padlocking peoples pants on, and only giving keys to bathroom attendants, parents, and spouses.
Yeah, I'm sure all those annoying people that talk on their cellphones in the theater are going to be just peachy about buying a new phone so they can't hear it ring.
It's just a convenient way to adhere to a potential 'quiet zone' law. It's a convenience, not a shackle. I've had my phone go off in class more than I'd like (twice) and I'd welcome the tech.
>You don't want a speed governor on your car
Too late, you may already have one.
Yes, but it doesn't keep you from going faster than 65.
>and we can go beyond '50s technology.
Today's cellphones are infact '90s technology.
You missed the point. Jamming is '50s technology. We can go beyond '50s technology in finding a solution to the problem.
God I wish this thread would die. People talking about th holy grail of watching a movie in peace regardless of others needs and finding middle ground is like people fighting tooth and nail about their right to drive in Texas with an open beer in their hand.
Kevin Fox
--
Not sure I follow. Who exactly lost $5K when someone gets up to go to the bathroom? You the moviegoer may have lost a delicately built atmosphere if the person had to step over you. Is that tatamount to making it not worth having gone, thus losing $8?
Even so, the theater didn't lose a dime. Not trying to make a counterpoint, I'm just wondering...
Kevin Fox
--
Dude, you've obviously never had a child.
Your doctor is your doctor, and when your wife goes into labor at 4am, your doctor is going to deliver the baby, not the one who happens to be on call.
Kevin Fox
--
General, I didn't think I needed to be so obvious as to say "pun intended" but whatever...
Kevin Fox
--
Dear god, let's take out the bathrooms too. Damn peeers. Don't they know they're wrecking it for all of us!
Kevin Fox
--
Umm:
- The jammer doesn't turn down the volume on a phone, it stops a call from getting through at all.
- A 'live phone' can be set to vibrate so the person can quietly get up, leave the theater, and answer the phone. This would enable someone with a 'live phone' to coexist with others in peace. Millions do it every day.
- In regards to your comment that "anyone who needs to be reachable and has a bit of courtesy shouldn't show up at movies (or funerals or whatever) with a live phone in the first place." there are many people who, because of their job, need to be reachable at all times, and not simply for selfish reasons (doctors being the most salient example). They therefore can never go to movies?
- Did you misunderstand the 'set to vibrate' concept, or am I missing your point?
Thanks,Kevin Fox
--
God, how do you think people have survived the last 3 million years before cell phones? Your level of self-absorbtion reaches signal 11 proportions.
And you don't think society's changed in the last 3 million years, or even just the last 10? The way people work has changed because of the freedom afforded by telephones, pages, and cellphones. To ignore that in justifying blocking them is to necessitate returning to work habits and limitations in effect in the days before telecommuting, email, wired transfer of information, and even the written word.
Get your head out of your ass, Coward. You're missing your wake-up call.
Kevin Fox
--
-Starbucks
Considering Starbucks is installing complimentary 802.11 wireless data networks for their patrons, I'm guessing cellphone jamming isn't on their to-do list...
Kevin Fox
--
Sure it sounds nice to guarentee no interruptions in a movie theater, and while it seems like everyone has a cellphone, some people do, in fact, need them.
Your wife (or you) go(es) into labor, and the hospital pages your doctor, only they're at a movie because labor is two weeks early and they have a baby expected during any 4 week span. They don't find out because their cellphone and pager are jammed.
Also, unless you can build a farriday cage around your house, your jamming will affect people on adjacent properties. And if you could build a farriday cage around your house, then you wouldn't need a jammer to begin with.
The deal here is the need for social rules. they're already here, and getting stronger. Now that most phones come with vibrate settings, and it's getting easier to switch between 'profiles', the problem will get better.
Add bluetooth to the mix and soon you'll have devices that know when they're entering 'quiet areas' and they'll switch to silent operation automatically while they're in the theater.
You don't want a speed governor on your car, and I don't want someone jamming cellphones. Sure it's annoying to be interrupted during a movie, and yes, I'm completely supportive of ways to prevent that, but it's obnoxious to assume that nobody has duties so important that they need to be interrupted during a meal, movie, or play, and it's closed-minded to think that there aren't more ingeneous ways to solve the problem than aggressive wholesale jamming of signals.
We're smarter than that, and we can go beyond '50s technology.
Kevin Fox
--
I hope they can handle recursion of the site won't be complete.
Kevin Fox
--
..if the optical components of the eye (lens, cornea, the fluid inside the eyeball) are actually transparent to infrared?
I assumed anyone replacing the retina and lens of an eye would also be replacing the ocular fluid and pretty much the rest of the eye, so they could construct it to suit whatever needs. I know it passes UV, because UV can currently damage retinas, indicating it gets through.
Related question: I know there are animals (notably bees) that can see in the ultraviolet -- and also some that can sense polarity, which I think is really cool too! -- but are there animals that have IR-capable vision? (I seem to recall snakes being able to sense IR, but I can't remember if it was via their eyes or some other organ.)
Snakes sense temperature via two pits on either side of their head. I don't believe the pits actually sense IR though, they sense ambient temperature (convective heat, as opposed to radiative heat). Apparently pirhhana and goldfish can also see in infrared...
Kevin Fox
--
With all the talk of increased resolution, what would also be sueful, and far less difficult from a visual pathways standpoint, would be building eyes that could respond to different frequency ranges, or be able to increase contrast and control brightness better than our existing eyes. Look at sunspots one secong, then step into a pitch black room and play hunter with your cat in the dark.
Imagine, just for a second, what life would be like if we didn't have to have streetlights, reading lights, big, bright monitors, or even daylight most of the time. You could hike through the woods at night without even noticing a difference, and driving through fog would be no difficulty for your infrared eyes.
All without having to deal with the problems posed by increased resolution in the visual pathway.
Kevin Fox
--
Unfortunately, a bionic retina wouldn't help either. Like the resolution problem going from lens to retina, the lateral geniculate nucleus, and the V1 visual cortex are also only built for specific levels of resolution. The hypercolumns in the V2 area map to the same density, so having higher resolution data from the retina would, at best, be downsampled before traveling to higher visual functions.
What might work is if you had an artificial retina that could zoom in, either by muscular control (squinting wil increase the zoom factor from 1x to 5x) but then you'd still have a lot of disorientation because small saccades to look a little to the left while zoomed in, would result in a much greater axial shift (like theshaking when you're looking through binocluars for example).
Most of the biogenetic advancements theorized today would work a lot better on humans built with them from the get-go, instead of tacking on upgrades later. Now if we could only implant our consciousness into younger bioengineered clones of ourselves...
Kevin Fox
--
I was pleased that the paper addressed the issue of neuronal density, and that even if the optics were perfect, the receptors aren't up to the task.
Really, this is the way it evolved: each part's complexity and accuracy is limited by the others. We wouldn't evolve the optics of eagles unless we also had the neural capability to do something with it.
It doesan't stop at the rods and cones though. The ganglion cells behind them agregate localized cells for transmission to the LGN and then the visual cortex. These too would have to be completely rewired, not to mention the rewiring of the visual cortex, for the increased clarity to do much good at all. The plasticity of the visual track just isn't high enough in adults.
This sort of surgery would have to be done while the brain is still forming its visual pathways, pretty much from 0-8 months. Then, even if we didn't have a higher fovial neural count (and who knows, we might get a higher count if the optic acuity is there early enough), the visual pathways from the retina on back would form based on the higher acuity, helping us make better use of the enhancement, especially, as the paper mentioned, in the area of feature detection, because the bipolar ganglion cells would likely link to smaller clusters of rods and cones, taking advantage of the greater clarity.
Kevin Fox
--
Heck, when I was working on the Levi's Online Store, we were the first site I'm aware of to implement a wishlist or 'wish basket' in addition to a shopping cart.
If you can't beat 'em... Okay, well if I don't go for a patent, at least I'll have prior art.
Kevin Fox
--
But you don't mind me using the word "kaflooey" in the same sentence?
Funny thing is, you don't get to decide what is and is not a word. If I use it and you understand it, it's ia word whether you like it being one or not.
Kevin Fox
--
"Woomera is right in the middle of nowhere so it's a bit hard to hit anything."
...
"Now it's used as holding area for illegal immigrants..."
Sooo... it's a bit hard to hit anything but illegal immigrants? Check.
Kevin Fox
--