I'm holding out for the brick fileserver (has more battery life than you'll survive, rechargable inductively if you insist; all the storage you'll ever use for non-bulk content; exports the filesystem wirelessly with encryption; watertight, rustproof, silent; has one button, used to tell it when the owner connects the first time). Then you put your graphics card and DVD drive in your flat panel display, run your OS and software on the GPU, and donate your computer to charity. Or maybe you run your OS and software on your smart card.
TV shows and films aren't generally trying to give a good impression of the surroundings of the camera, and they can also compensate for the confusion with clever editing and set design (in particular, putting the camera outside the room). Computer games and architectural models, however, are trying to provide a useable picture of the space that the user navigates and generally put the camera inside the space.
I assume that the limit is just under 180 degrees, and the transform isn't the cylindrical camera; I don't think cylindrical camera is supported by graphics cards, and games generally don't want to lose the acceleration. The edges of a perspective image are much lower quality than the middle, too, which means that a 85 degree angle gives significantly less useful information.
Pov-ray, however, supports it, and I've generated some images if you want to see what it looks like: 90 degrees, 135 degrees. I think the 90-degree one looks perfectly natural (but notice that the top of the far wall bends slightly), and the 135-degree one is odd but comprehensible. Notice that the edges of both are as sharp as any other part of the image.
These are based on a model of my kitchen (the room next to the one my computer is in), and give a good impression of what it's like to stand where the camera is; a non-cylindrical camera image like this one gives the impression of being closer than the camera actually is and feels like staring at a point.
Incidentally, the cylindrical camera idea isn't new; Escher used it in "Up and Down", which gives the effect of looking at a tall building while bending your neck to see it, and he said he got the idea from looking around cathedrals.
The issue with IPv6 isn't so much adoption as that the thing is still partially being specified; it's the second-system effect on a large scale, but with no time constraints, so it will take a really long time to get done, but it will never fail. IPv6 has actually gotten widely adopted at the network infrastructure level. Most of your packets today probably go over IPv4 tunnels over IPv6 routers at some point getting across the internet. User adoption takes longer, but this is also due to there being IPv6 features which aren't yet worked out, and nobody's going to switch the users to something incomplete.
Personally, I think POPn and IMAP are far more in need of replacement, and probably first; if there was a good replacement, people would actually send all of their outgoing mail through their incoming mail host, reducing the number of programs that actually had any reason to use SMTP, and making the problems that SMTP or a replacement faces much easier.
But replacing SMTP with a better alternative would go quickly; if the next sendmail, outlook, and exchange supported it and a couple of other MTAs supported it, people would pick it up with their next set of security fixes (or non-sendmail/outlook/exchange users would pick it up on its merits or for the novelty), and most other programs actually pass the info off to a local MTA or can be set to do so.
There would probably be a year to get critical mass such that you can turn off SMTP and get anyone who wants to email you to upgrade.
On the other hand, the replacement specification is a bit tricky. PKI isn't really an option, since the "trusted" authorities aren't necessarily usefully picky, even when they aren't downright fraudulent. Charging money runs into collection issues, even if there were actually a suitable micropayment infrastructure, and charging processing is hard to make effective against the sorts of budgets spammers get. I think that a mixture of DNSSEC, IPSEC, and actually getting mail only from a host that receives mail to the sender's address would be effective against spam (at least spam that tries to hide its origin), without any change to SMTP and only slight changes to server behavior.
One important thing to realize about storage is that people's storage needs for some types of files grow over time, but storage needs for other things do not grow significantly. For example, if you separate attachments and filter spam, you can now buy an SD card which will store all of the email you will get in the next few years; when that runs out, you'll be able to buy a card which will store the rest of the email you will ever receive. There are similar effects for all of the text you'll ever write.
Furthermore, there are a number of important directories on any system whose total size won't double in the next ten years, because they add one more file of about the same size for each program you install, and they already have ten years of stuff.
In the cases where you do have exponential growth of storage use, the structure of the stored data is extremely simple; you have directories with huge files which are read sequentially and have a flat structure.
I see a real opportunity for a system when you have one gig of solid-state storage for your structured data and HDDs (note that you can now add a new HDD without any trouble, because it's only data storage, not a filesystem) for the bulk data.
The GFDL actually makes separate provisions for author and version information; they have to keep the History section from your version with you name on it (of course, they have to add their name, too, so you don't get blamed for their mistakes).
They're also particularly down on shows that require a lot of special effects and sets every episode. Law & Order, for instance, is probably a lot cheaper, because it only needs an occasional stunt. The real problem is that they keep coming up with new shows to fill the timeslots and viewer segments vacated by shows they cancelled, meaning that sci-fi TV is full of shows you haven't gotten into yet and shows that are being cancelled. If the shows are trying not to be short or interchangable, it's not going to be good storytelling.
On the other hand, if they made a sci-fi reality show, I'd watch that. Perhaps a show like Firefly, except that they killed off a character each week, with the plot point that something really great was going to happen to any crew member who survived the season. Alternatively, "Survivor: B5" would be really amusing; you follow a set of random residents who have to avoid getting themselves killed by the disasters that are always happening on the station, and also have to avoid getting voted out an airlock, shipped back to their home planet, etc.; it would be based on interpersonal skills and dexterity, but with more exciting things they have to do.
I've always wondered why computers tend to render the view that you would see of the model if you were looking through your screen and expect people to have some clue of their surroundings inside a model. I mean, if you block out all of your vision except for an area the size of your screen and try to walk around, you'll find it extremely hard to tell where you are, especially in a new place. Beyond that, if you were actually in a new place, you'd turn your head frequently to get an even larger viewing angle (about 120 degrees of clear vision, with peripheral past 180). Computer rendered pictures are really not a very accurate likeness of the experience of being in a place.
It's actually possible to get significantly better results with a cylindrical camera, which renders as if you turned your head to face each column as it was rendered; it can do a wider angle without getting badly distorted and makes more efficient use of horizontally off-center pixels while not warping any local region of the image. It also means that, as you turn, the image just moves sideways without the scales of columns changing. If you turn your head, you'll notice that your brain corrects for perspective, but it has a harder time doing this with images on a computer screen because you aren't moving your head and the rest of your visual field isn't changing.
So interpreting a standard 3D computer image is actually relatively difficult, especially from within the model. Some people may be able to do it (or maybe the men couldn't do it either, but refused to stop for directions...), but it's less informative than you'd expect and it's takes a significant amount of effort.
Re:Don�t sweat the removable media�
on
Rabid TiVo Fanaticism
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The biggest advantage I've noticed is that the shows are aligned with you, not with the clock. When you sit down to watch an hour of TV while eating, the hour show actually is ending when you've been watching for an hour, even if you start watching at 7:15. This makes it much easier to watch the amount of TV you plan to, rather than watching for an hour and then being 15 minutes into another hour show.
If you make a point of never watching anything live, it also means that there's nothing bad on, there's a limited amount of TV, and it stops if you just sit there. This makes it much easier to stop than if you can always watch the next thing that's on, even if it's no good. You can't just let it run, you can't channel surf. You have to be in control and decide what you're going to do next, and that might involve doing something other than staring at a screen. (Like, for example, posting on slashdot...)
I suspect that print news will die long before other printed things. The benefits of a physical copy aren't worth it with lousy ink and paper and pages that big. Newspapers also have to be delivered or distributed to boxes and stands every day, and they still tend to be at least half a day out of date. It'll be a while before nicely-printed ergonomic publications that stay current for years go away, though; those will probably last until there are electronic versions with their form factor and quality.
Can you call a kernel Linux if it is not the Linux kernel (being, say, a vendor-supplied kernel instead)?
I can't actually find any evidence that the FSF (or anyone) has a trademark on "the GPL" or "General Public License", so MicroSoft could, in fact, legally offer software "under the GPL" where the GPL was, in fact, a standard MicroSoft EULA, so long as it wasn't based on the GNU GPL.
The other issue is people changing the license in the distribution of some software. Someone could modify the file COPYING in a package to give the distributor more rights or less responsibilities. Of course, it isn't the copyright on the GPL that prevents this, either; you could avoid the copyright issue on the GPL itself by replacing the file with an unrelated file. The GPL (being the license you were given to distribute the work), however, specifies that (regardless of what files are included in the derived distribution), you must license it to others under the (official) GPL, regardless of what you've done to the file in which you received the license.
What the copyright on the GPL does do is prevent people from distributing just the actual license from that document without the preamble, instructions on using the GPL for a new package, etc.
Unfortunately for that plan, invariant sections have to be "Secondary Sections", which are not about the subject matter of the document. You could, however, use an invariant section to tell readers where the official version of the primary data can be found (under your control), and to advise the reader to be extremely suspicious of claims that misrepresent the primary data.
Actually, I suspect that it's not useful to require the document to contain the original data; if people change the method due to lab conditions (they have different machines, different supplies in stock, etc), your data becomes irrelevant. They'll want to provide the data that people replicating the procedure with their equipment can be expected to get, not the data which could be replicated with supplies they don't have.
In order to avoid this, invariant sections must not be about the subject matter of the documentation (e.g., in the mathematics text, they could not be about mathematics). As to why the GFDL provides extra protection for content which does not actually belong in the document, I have no idea. Somewhat ironically, the FSF has a diatribe which makes the same point you've made, which is an invariant section in the gdb manual.
The FSF has an unfortunate habit of trying to make a soap box out of any piece of text they touch. In fact, the GPL itself states that programs under the GPL should, in addition to anything else they might do, display sections of the GPL (which, according to the license of the GPL itself, would mean that they would have to show the whole thing, since you can't modify the GPL), and it includes a substantial amount of text which is not actually part of the license and which the author of the software may not agree with.
Debian's distribution mechanism does provide for packages from non-free and even non-debian sources, which should be sufficient for all practical applications. For the packages for which there is a desire and the legal permission to do so, debian maintains their own patches, packaging information, etc. to make the software work smoothly with the rest of debian; they use their guidelines to determine whether they can do this with a particular package or whether they have to use a less hands-on method of dealing with it.
It actually makes a lot of sense for debian to have a policy of distinguishing between packages they are licensed to maintain and packages which can only be maintained effectively by other people.
Right, but localtime(3) assumes that your timezone will always have the same offset from TAI (unless you change timezones), and it can have a table giving the correct offset for each timezone; this isn't true once you factor in leap seconds, because the offset is different today from what it was twenty years ago in the same time zone, and we won't know for twenty years what it will be in twenty years.
"Yes, I'd like you to pick up a package at these GPS coordinates, and ship it to me. I have no idea what it will be."
On the other hand, it would be kind of neat to have UPS deliver something to the location output from your GPS. Driving down the highway, the UPS truck honks at you, you pull over, and the driver gives you the books you bought online...
The point of this software is to let people who aren't twits and know what's actually important information figure out what charts to show to the managers, who will then make the right decision and have something to justify what they did. The point is to make the twits (who are largely chosen for their ability to get people to do what they say) less significant in figuring out what to do, without obviously insulting them.
The real trick is to get someone who really knows what's important to figure out what to show, and not let the users pick random charts (which will tend to look interesting, but not promote the right decisions).
They have a wireless means of charging batteries, sort of. It's called inductive charging, and works much like a transformer (which has no physical contact between the input and output). The idea is that you put a big coil of wire (big meaning lots of twists, not large) in the device, and another big coil of wire nearby, and you run current through the second one and current flows in the first one. Of course, now your device has to be in one particular place, but you don't need a plug or anything, and you don't have bare metal that you could shock yourself with (unless, I guess, you hold a spring up to it...). Given that your TV is going to sit in the same place most of the time, this wouldn't be a big deal. You'd have a pad you need to keep under the TV most of the time, but you could move the TV for short periods if you felt like it, and you wouldn't have any cords or plugs on the part you move.
The problem with wireless power is that it's either directional, which tends to fry stuff, or it's not, and it's worthless beyond a short distance. But the latter is good for cases where the point is just to not have a wire between two points which are near each other anyway.
But then anything that prints a time has to find out how many leap seconds there have been. Computers do use TAI internally, but then can't identify exactly what local time is. This software doesn't get confused by time zone changes or DST because it's using TAI anyway (and, generally, pretending it's UTC).
What I'm not clear on is what the point of astronomically synchronized time is. The sun rises at a time which is determined by location, altitude, what day it is, how close it is to a leap year, etc., and has to be looked up in a table anyway. Why can't they just change those tables to adjust for variation in the earth's rotation (aside from the obvious problem that those tables tend not to have seconds anyway)?
People need your SSN if they're going to pay you, since half of the point is for reporting payments for tax reasons. It is an ID number, although it is not a form of identification (which is why the social security card is in List C instead of List A on the I-9); there aren't official documents you can use to prove your SSN directly (without going through a document that does establish your identity).
A large part of the problem is not stupidity, but culture. People lack a taboo against giving out their passwords which would basically stop any social engineering attacks of this form. It's not a matter of protecting passwords with intelligence, but of protecting them by instinct.
People should pick passwords which aren't pronouncable or can't be determined from the spoken form. If people are having a hard time remembering the passwords, tell them to write them on the inside of their underwear. People are generally pretty good at keeping the contents of their underwear hidden, and ought to apply the same sorts of thought to their passwords. (Yes, I know, people don't necessarily hide the underwear they aren't wearing very well, so it's not that good an idea. But it's still a good way for people to think about privacy)
What I really like is having monospaced fonts with the same family as proportional fonts. It used to be the case that a document would be all proportional or all monospaced, but these days you see a lot of text with code embedded in it, and it always looks wrong with unrelated fonts for the two pieces.
Without anti-aliasing, scaled fonts are just terrible. It would be theoretically possible to have a nice bitmap cursive font, but somebody would have to sit down and tweak a whole lot of pixels for a whole lot of curves.
The anti-aliasing problems are probably due to either using a buggy version of freetype (like the one XFree86 4.3 came with), using an old version that didn't support as good an engine, or needing gamma correction. Fortunately, there are now skilled people working on the problem.
Why exactly does PowerPoint support scrunched up, barely legible text? What are the chances that a user actually wants this, let alone a user who didn't specifically ask for it?
Not that this is a MicroSoft-specific complaint; why do all of the web browsers I use let web pages choose ugly fonts? Being nice to look at is much more important than being exactly what the page specifies. It's not like I browse the web for the fonts...
Which is actually longer than my estimate for if you don't know the last digit. Giving the attacker 1/3 of the key is generally a bad policy, even if it's an easy habit.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm holding out for the brick fileserver (has more battery life than you'll survive, rechargable inductively if you insist; all the storage you'll ever use for non-bulk content; exports the filesystem wirelessly with encryption; watertight, rustproof, silent; has one button, used to tell it when the owner connects the first time). Then you put your graphics card and DVD drive in your flat panel display, run your OS and software on the GPU, and donate your computer to charity. Or maybe you run your OS and software on your smart card.
TV shows and films aren't generally trying to give a good impression of the surroundings of the camera, and they can also compensate for the confusion with clever editing and set design (in particular, putting the camera outside the room). Computer games and architectural models, however, are trying to provide a useable picture of the space that the user navigates and generally put the camera inside the space.
I assume that the limit is just under 180 degrees, and the transform isn't the cylindrical camera; I don't think cylindrical camera is supported by graphics cards, and games generally don't want to lose the acceleration. The edges of a perspective image are much lower quality than the middle, too, which means that a 85 degree angle gives significantly less useful information.
Pov-ray, however, supports it, and I've generated some images if you want to see what it looks like: 90 degrees, 135 degrees. I think the 90-degree one looks perfectly natural (but notice that the top of the far wall bends slightly), and the 135-degree one is odd but comprehensible. Notice that the edges of both are as sharp as any other part of the image.
These are based on a model of my kitchen (the room next to the one my computer is in), and give a good impression of what it's like to stand where the camera is; a non-cylindrical camera image like this one gives the impression of being closer than the camera actually is and feels like staring at a point.
Incidentally, the cylindrical camera idea isn't new; Escher used it in "Up and Down", which gives the effect of looking at a tall building while bending your neck to see it, and he said he got the idea from looking around cathedrals.
The issue with IPv6 isn't so much adoption as that the thing is still partially being specified; it's the second-system effect on a large scale, but with no time constraints, so it will take a really long time to get done, but it will never fail. IPv6 has actually gotten widely adopted at the network infrastructure level. Most of your packets today probably go over IPv4 tunnels over IPv6 routers at some point getting across the internet. User adoption takes longer, but this is also due to there being IPv6 features which aren't yet worked out, and nobody's going to switch the users to something incomplete.
Personally, I think POPn and IMAP are far more in need of replacement, and probably first; if there was a good replacement, people would actually send all of their outgoing mail through their incoming mail host, reducing the number of programs that actually had any reason to use SMTP, and making the problems that SMTP or a replacement faces much easier.
But replacing SMTP with a better alternative would go quickly; if the next sendmail, outlook, and exchange supported it and a couple of other MTAs supported it, people would pick it up with their next set of security fixes (or non-sendmail/outlook/exchange users would pick it up on its merits or for the novelty), and most other programs actually pass the info off to a local MTA or can be set to do so.
There would probably be a year to get critical mass such that you can turn off SMTP and get anyone who wants to email you to upgrade.
On the other hand, the replacement specification is a bit tricky. PKI isn't really an option, since the "trusted" authorities aren't necessarily usefully picky, even when they aren't downright fraudulent. Charging money runs into collection issues, even if there were actually a suitable micropayment infrastructure, and charging processing is hard to make effective against the sorts of budgets spammers get. I think that a mixture of DNSSEC, IPSEC, and actually getting mail only from a host that receives mail to the sender's address would be effective against spam (at least spam that tries to hide its origin), without any change to SMTP and only slight changes to server behavior.
One important thing to realize about storage is that people's storage needs for some types of files grow over time, but storage needs for other things do not grow significantly. For example, if you separate attachments and filter spam, you can now buy an SD card which will store all of the email you will get in the next few years; when that runs out, you'll be able to buy a card which will store the rest of the email you will ever receive. There are similar effects for all of the text you'll ever write.
Furthermore, there are a number of important directories on any system whose total size won't double in the next ten years, because they add one more file of about the same size for each program you install, and they already have ten years of stuff.
In the cases where you do have exponential growth of storage use, the structure of the stored data is extremely simple; you have directories with huge files which are read sequentially and have a flat structure.
I see a real opportunity for a system when you have one gig of solid-state storage for your structured data and HDDs (note that you can now add a new HDD without any trouble, because it's only data storage, not a filesystem) for the bulk data.
The GFDL actually makes separate provisions for author and version information; they have to keep the History section from your version with you name on it (of course, they have to add their name, too, so you don't get blamed for their mistakes).
They're also particularly down on shows that require a lot of special effects and sets every episode. Law & Order, for instance, is probably a lot cheaper, because it only needs an occasional stunt. The real problem is that they keep coming up with new shows to fill the timeslots and viewer segments vacated by shows they cancelled, meaning that sci-fi TV is full of shows you haven't gotten into yet and shows that are being cancelled. If the shows are trying not to be short or interchangable, it's not going to be good storytelling.
On the other hand, if they made a sci-fi reality show, I'd watch that. Perhaps a show like Firefly, except that they killed off a character each week, with the plot point that something really great was going to happen to any crew member who survived the season. Alternatively, "Survivor: B5" would be really amusing; you follow a set of random residents who have to avoid getting themselves killed by the disasters that are always happening on the station, and also have to avoid getting voted out an airlock, shipped back to their home planet, etc.; it would be based on interpersonal skills and dexterity, but with more exciting things they have to do.
I've always wondered why computers tend to render the view that you would see of the model if you were looking through your screen and expect people to have some clue of their surroundings inside a model. I mean, if you block out all of your vision except for an area the size of your screen and try to walk around, you'll find it extremely hard to tell where you are, especially in a new place. Beyond that, if you were actually in a new place, you'd turn your head frequently to get an even larger viewing angle (about 120 degrees of clear vision, with peripheral past 180). Computer rendered pictures are really not a very accurate likeness of the experience of being in a place.
It's actually possible to get significantly better results with a cylindrical camera, which renders as if you turned your head to face each column as it was rendered; it can do a wider angle without getting badly distorted and makes more efficient use of horizontally off-center pixels while not warping any local region of the image. It also means that, as you turn, the image just moves sideways without the scales of columns changing. If you turn your head, you'll notice that your brain corrects for perspective, but it has a harder time doing this with images on a computer screen because you aren't moving your head and the rest of your visual field isn't changing.
So interpreting a standard 3D computer image is actually relatively difficult, especially from within the model. Some people may be able to do it (or maybe the men couldn't do it either, but refused to stop for directions...), but it's less informative than you'd expect and it's takes a significant amount of effort.
The biggest advantage I've noticed is that the shows are aligned with you, not with the clock. When you sit down to watch an hour of TV while eating, the hour show actually is ending when you've been watching for an hour, even if you start watching at 7:15. This makes it much easier to watch the amount of TV you plan to, rather than watching for an hour and then being 15 minutes into another hour show.
If you make a point of never watching anything live, it also means that there's nothing bad on, there's a limited amount of TV, and it stops if you just sit there. This makes it much easier to stop than if you can always watch the next thing that's on, even if it's no good. You can't just let it run, you can't channel surf. You have to be in control and decide what you're going to do next, and that might involve doing something other than staring at a screen. (Like, for example, posting on slashdot...)
I suspect that print news will die long before other printed things. The benefits of a physical copy aren't worth it with lousy ink and paper and pages that big. Newspapers also have to be delivered or distributed to boxes and stands every day, and they still tend to be at least half a day out of date. It'll be a while before nicely-printed ergonomic publications that stay current for years go away, though; those will probably last until there are electronic versions with their form factor and quality.
Can you call a kernel Linux if it is not the Linux kernel (being, say, a vendor-supplied kernel instead)?
I can't actually find any evidence that the FSF (or anyone) has a trademark on "the GPL" or "General Public License", so MicroSoft could, in fact, legally offer software "under the GPL" where the GPL was, in fact, a standard MicroSoft EULA, so long as it wasn't based on the GNU GPL.
The other issue is people changing the license in the distribution of some software. Someone could modify the file COPYING in a package to give the distributor more rights or less responsibilities. Of course, it isn't the copyright on the GPL that prevents this, either; you could avoid the copyright issue on the GPL itself by replacing the file with an unrelated file. The GPL (being the license you were given to distribute the work), however, specifies that (regardless of what files are included in the derived distribution), you must license it to others under the (official) GPL, regardless of what you've done to the file in which you received the license.
What the copyright on the GPL does do is prevent people from distributing just the actual license from that document without the preamble, instructions on using the GPL for a new package, etc.
Unfortunately for that plan, invariant sections have to be "Secondary Sections", which are not about the subject matter of the document. You could, however, use an invariant section to tell readers where the official version of the primary data can be found (under your control), and to advise the reader to be extremely suspicious of claims that misrepresent the primary data.
Actually, I suspect that it's not useful to require the document to contain the original data; if people change the method due to lab conditions (they have different machines, different supplies in stock, etc), your data becomes irrelevant. They'll want to provide the data that people replicating the procedure with their equipment can be expected to get, not the data which could be replicated with supplies they don't have.
In order to avoid this, invariant sections must not be about the subject matter of the documentation (e.g., in the mathematics text, they could not be about mathematics). As to why the GFDL provides extra protection for content which does not actually belong in the document, I have no idea. Somewhat ironically, the FSF has a diatribe which makes the same point you've made, which is an invariant section in the gdb manual.
The FSF has an unfortunate habit of trying to make a soap box out of any piece of text they touch. In fact, the GPL itself states that programs under the GPL should, in addition to anything else they might do, display sections of the GPL (which, according to the license of the GPL itself, would mean that they would have to show the whole thing, since you can't modify the GPL), and it includes a substantial amount of text which is not actually part of the license and which the author of the software may not agree with.
Debian's distribution mechanism does provide for packages from non-free and even non-debian sources, which should be sufficient for all practical applications. For the packages for which there is a desire and the legal permission to do so, debian maintains their own patches, packaging information, etc. to make the software work smoothly with the rest of debian; they use their guidelines to determine whether they can do this with a particular package or whether they have to use a less hands-on method of dealing with it.
It actually makes a lot of sense for debian to have a policy of distinguishing between packages they are licensed to maintain and packages which can only be maintained effectively by other people.
Right, but localtime(3) assumes that your timezone will always have the same offset from TAI (unless you change timezones), and it can have a table giving the correct offset for each timezone; this isn't true once you factor in leap seconds, because the offset is different today from what it was twenty years ago in the same time zone, and we won't know for twenty years what it will be in twenty years.
"Yes, I'd like you to pick up a package at these GPS coordinates, and ship it to me. I have no idea what it will be."
On the other hand, it would be kind of neat to have UPS deliver something to the location output from your GPS. Driving down the highway, the UPS truck honks at you, you pull over, and the driver gives you the books you bought online...
The point of this software is to let people who aren't twits and know what's actually important information figure out what charts to show to the managers, who will then make the right decision and have something to justify what they did. The point is to make the twits (who are largely chosen for their ability to get people to do what they say) less significant in figuring out what to do, without obviously insulting them.
The real trick is to get someone who really knows what's important to figure out what to show, and not let the users pick random charts (which will tend to look interesting, but not promote the right decisions).
They have a wireless means of charging batteries, sort of. It's called inductive charging, and works much like a transformer (which has no physical contact between the input and output). The idea is that you put a big coil of wire (big meaning lots of twists, not large) in the device, and another big coil of wire nearby, and you run current through the second one and current flows in the first one. Of course, now your device has to be in one particular place, but you don't need a plug or anything, and you don't have bare metal that you could shock yourself with (unless, I guess, you hold a spring up to it...). Given that your TV is going to sit in the same place most of the time, this wouldn't be a big deal. You'd have a pad you need to keep under the TV most of the time, but you could move the TV for short periods if you felt like it, and you wouldn't have any cords or plugs on the part you move.
The problem with wireless power is that it's either directional, which tends to fry stuff, or it's not, and it's worthless beyond a short distance. But the latter is good for cases where the point is just to not have a wire between two points which are near each other anyway.
But then anything that prints a time has to find out how many leap seconds there have been. Computers do use TAI internally, but then can't identify exactly what local time is. This software doesn't get confused by time zone changes or DST because it's using TAI anyway (and, generally, pretending it's UTC).
What I'm not clear on is what the point of astronomically synchronized time is. The sun rises at a time which is determined by location, altitude, what day it is, how close it is to a leap year, etc., and has to be looked up in a table anyway. Why can't they just change those tables to adjust for variation in the earth's rotation (aside from the obvious problem that those tables tend not to have seconds anyway)?
People need your SSN if they're going to pay you, since half of the point is for reporting payments for tax reasons. It is an ID number, although it is not a form of identification (which is why the social security card is in List C instead of List A on the I-9); there aren't official documents you can use to prove your SSN directly (without going through a document that does establish your identity).
A large part of the problem is not stupidity, but culture. People lack a taboo against giving out their passwords which would basically stop any social engineering attacks of this form. It's not a matter of protecting passwords with intelligence, but of protecting them by instinct.
People should pick passwords which aren't pronouncable or can't be determined from the spoken form. If people are having a hard time remembering the passwords, tell them to write them on the inside of their underwear. People are generally pretty good at keeping the contents of their underwear hidden, and ought to apply the same sorts of thought to their passwords. (Yes, I know, people don't necessarily hide the underwear they aren't wearing very well, so it's not that good an idea. But it's still a good way for people to think about privacy)
What I really like is having monospaced fonts with the same family as proportional fonts. It used to be the case that a document would be all proportional or all monospaced, but these days you see a lot of text with code embedded in it, and it always looks wrong with unrelated fonts for the two pieces.
Without anti-aliasing, scaled fonts are just terrible. It would be theoretically possible to have a nice bitmap cursive font, but somebody would have to sit down and tweak a whole lot of pixels for a whole lot of curves.
The anti-aliasing problems are probably due to either using a buggy version of freetype (like the one XFree86 4.3 came with), using an old version that didn't support as good an engine, or needing gamma correction. Fortunately, there are now skilled people working on the problem.
Why exactly does PowerPoint support scrunched up, barely legible text? What are the chances that a user actually wants this, let alone a user who didn't specifically ask for it?
Not that this is a MicroSoft-specific complaint; why do all of the web browsers I use let web pages choose ugly fonts? Being nice to look at is much more important than being exactly what the page specifies. It's not like I browse the web for the fonts...
Which is actually longer than my estimate for if you don't know the last digit. Giving the attacker 1/3 of the key is generally a bad policy, even if it's an easy habit.