Real men don't fool around anymore with digital potentiometers and op-amps when it comes down to the nitty-gritty task of controlling an LED.
Now it's far cheaper to use a microcontroller with pulse-width modulation to guide the LED into it luministic destiny. Get an 8-pin AVR (like the Tiny11) or even a 6-pin PIC microprocessor for less than 50 cents US, preferably one that is in a new surface-mount package much smaller than the LED and fits underneath it. Then write the code that gently awakens the LED from its inner darkness. Be guided in your code by the idea that just as the LED is being raised from its inherent chaotic darkness, so too is man raised from his internal chaotic darkness by the direction and focused energy of Jesus, God, Jehovah, Allah, Buddha, Krishna, Great Spirit, or Whoever (grammar goblins, note the proper capitalization of the indirect pronoun that refers to the deity).
The point is that now it is cheaper to effect a hardware solution with an ultra-cheap microcontroller than it was in the 20th century to do with cheap 555 timers coupled with resistors and caps or to do with TTL clusters. It does require software skills that weren't needed previously. It's a whole new frame of reference for electronic designers. This trend will continue as very fast, (50 MegaHertz system clocks, fast for microcontrollers), very powerful 32-bit microcontrollers with large internal memory continue to fall in price [the 50MHz/32K FlashROM ARM controller has broken the $5 barrier].
Will we ever use a 32-bit microprocessor to control a single LED? Don't laugh too hard. Using a chip that has more internal resources than the original IBM PC to control a few LEDs is not rare now. If some future 128-bit CPU has the ability to be programmed just by talking to it, and it's cheaper than an LED, then why not?
I've often wondered if parallel programming would be easier if it were done in Chinese characters instead of English/European alphabetical characters.
Perhaps having a Chinese character represent a simple block of pre-compiled code that does one simple thing. Then the characters could be placed in two-dimensional order to form parallel threads. This would require a completely different approach to compiler development. But that would be OK because compilers are stuck in the 1970s anyway.
Just getting away from the idea of having code based on a very limited set of alphanumeric characters strung together like beads on a string might help unlock a whole new era of innovative approaches to parallel program development strategies.
It does go without saying that Chinese programmers would have an incredible advantage in any new system of programming that is based on Chinese characters. It may be possible that this subject is already a project under development in China. I'm a bit thick, so whenever I think of something independently that seems to be a completely new idea, inevitably someone smarter than me is already developing it.
If you get your angle just right in advance, you might just be able to get them both with one shot. Best to use armor-piercing bullets because both of them tend to be rather dense at times like this.
This is a case of scorpion and frog. You know, the scorpion needed to cross the river. He asks the frog to carry him. Frog says no, 'cause you'll kill me. Scorpion says 'why would I do that? I'd drown. Let's be friends. Frog gets halfway across, scorpion stings him. As they both die, frog asks why. Scorpion says 'because I'm a scorpion, this is what I do'.
The global music media corporations know that all the fighting new technology and RIAA extortion is not in their best interest. But they can't help it. It's what they do. They're on auto-pilot self-destruct. They're smart guys, they know this. They just can't do anything about it.
Their entire perspective is based on the not-unrealistic assumption that they are the focal point of the best music in the world. The best groups, the most talented artists have and will continue to come to them in order to distribute the recordings. They don't believe that anyone interested in a musical career would not come to them, on their terms. That's the key to their entire 'take it or leave it' approach. Because they honestly believe that no one will leave it.
What may happen is a transformation of media from a centralized distribution to a scattered and disorganized collection of xenophobic subcultures who aren't interested in sharing their music or media works. Should this happen, the media corporations most likely won't notice it. They sell primarily to young people and the percentage of people who are young is rapidly growing. So their market is growing. The fact that their sales of CDs are stagnant is truly amazing. Most likely, it's not true.
I encourage people to gradually disassociate themselves from the products of the global media corporations. Yes, it is true that you will miss great music. You will suffer the occasional social embarrassment of not knowing (actually not knowing, not pretending to not know) who the latest stars are. I'm not going to claim that it's worth it or a self-righteous thing to do. I'm just suggesting, all the celebrity media, let it slide away. There are other things more important. Concentrate on them instead.
I'm always amazed that the people who design GUI user interfaces don't study anatomy or even have a basic understanding of the relationship between the screen elements and the body activities needed to interact with them.
The most glaring example of this is ever-present and manifestly stupid Windows message box that appears right in the center of the screen at the wrong time and demands that you reposition the mouse pointer on it and click before continuing with your work. Inevitably the movement to reposition the cursor is outside the 15-20 lateral movement range of the wrist that is guiding the mouse which forces an upper arm movement that completely disrupts the mental concentration on the user's current task.
Every time I bring up this issue to a programmer they give this look that resembles that of a monkey encountering his first music synthesizer. Windows makes it so 'easy' to deal with program exceptions by just slapping an error box in the center of the screen. But from the perspective of a user seriously engaged with using the software inactively, it is just so wrong and boneheaded. And, of course, since it was introduced in the Windows GUI, it tends to migrate into the Open Source GUIs as well.
People who design interactive weaponry for a living spend a lot of time getting the interface between the solder's body movement and weapon response exactly right. In these situations, 100 millisecond intervals are critical.
Would be that programmers started thinking in the same way. For more discussion in this area, I suggest the AskTog website.
Universities tend to be sluggish in the internal politics of their administrations, despite their reputation of being progressive and cutting edge. There seems to be a time lag of about ten years between the opinions of most of the students on an issue and that of the university administration. But when the administration does change, it often seems to go overly towards the opinion that the previous university administration was so against. There seems to this pattern of bonehead inertia followed by a swing too much in the other direction ten years later. I noticed this during the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s when lots of quality professors were being fired for protesting the war in its early years and then having universities go strongly anti-military in the 1970s. This pattern also showed up in the 1980s with resistance to 'political correctness' in the 1980s followed by a stiff overreaction towards PC mentality in the 1990s.
So if there is any validity to these observations, then there may be a complete change of view against the RIAA and restrictive copyrights on the part of university administrations in about ten years that will last for another twenty or so afterwards. This pattern of overreaction to extremes followed by an idealogical reversal in the other direction seems to be the general dynamic of university administrations as the younger people who suffered from their positions in the beginning take control of the administrations through the long personnel change process. Often they are the only ones interested in gaining control of universities given the tediousness of administrative processes. Revenge seems to be a good motivator and would explain this tendency to shift between extremes.
So don't worry too much about your university being a poodle to the RIAA cokeheads. It will most likely change over time. In the meantime, set up websites where you can support the fellow students who have been randomly selected for RIAA extortion.
This is not really a joke. Here in Oregon USA we have large tracts of land that are, politely said, undeveloped. In southern Oregon, in the area north of the California border and south of Eugene, there is one superhighway and three major roads that go the rough 150 kilometers between the superhighway and the coast. Off those major roads there are many very rough dirt roads used mainly by special trucks to haul out logged trees. These roads are not maintained or paved or used after the logging is finished.
However they are listed on GPS maps as 'roads'. They're also listed in the big DeLorme map books as roads. So your map may show a hundred roads covering an area of a thousand square kilometers, but they are all overgrown and washed-out dirt paths that may not have had any vehicle activity on them in thirty years.
Occasionally someone in an SUV with a GPS will get the notion that they are going to take a short-cut between the superhighway I-5 and the coast on one of these roads listed on the GPS and confirmed by the big DeLorme map book. They will start driving on a dirt road that gets rougher every mile. If they're smart, they'll stop and back-up when they start scraping the bottom of their SUV on the 'road'. If they're not smart, they'll put on their headphones, slip the latest Norah Jones into the CD player, continue on and ignore the fact that the tree branches are scraping the side mirrors. If they're luckly, they'll get stuck in a rut and have to walk back no more than ten kilometers to get a tow. If they're not lucky, they'll be doing this in the winter, take side roads and blind turns into unknown directions and get lost in deep woods. Or they'll marvel at the ability of their $30000 SUV to climb thousands of feet on snow covered paths, get lost, get stuck and immobile in the snow, and realize that (1) they're completly lost, (2) the car is hopelessly stuck, (3) they're low on gas, (4) it's rather cold outside, (5) they're wearing Los Angeles clothes with no coats, (6) they didn't tell anyone that they were going to be taking this 'shortcut to the beach', and finally (7) the cell phone doesn't work.
Now the local people know that the stupid tourists can get into a jam like this and will try to warn people with out-of-state license plates driving in the deep woods. But if your GPS says that you're on a major road, but your on a rutted dirt path and tree branches have been scraping your windows for the past ten minutes and you still drive on, well there isn't much that they can do for you.
Eventually someone will find your vehicle and body, probably next summer after the mud dries and people start exploring the woods in their mini-monster trucks again.
This exact thing happened last winter. The family lucked out when the people that they were going to visit reported them missing and credit card records showed them to have bought gas at a station near the roadless areas. The authorities called out a major search-and-rescue and was able to save most of the people in the SUV after five days of being stuck in the snow. The next people may not be so lucky
So trust your instincts. Don't trust the GPS. Pay attention to reality.
Yes, the same corporations that have paid many many thousands of dollars to the campaigns of the state legislators of Washington (and your state) have, for your education and benefit, placed hundreds of billboards along the most heavily used commuter routes.
Your text messages disrupt the flow of information from their expensive investment directly into your brain while you're driving. That can't be allowed to happen; it's much too dangerous for road safety!
When the text message companies have paid as much money to the reelection funds as the billboard company (there's really only one now - Clear Channel, the same people who own all the radio stations, ticket sellers, and concert halls in the USA), well, then and only then will you be safely be able to receive and read text messages while you're operating a motor vehicle.
Of course, by then most of your text messages will be adverts from Clear Channel.
Am I cynical? Horsepoop! This is America. Any time someone says 'safely', they mean 'give me money'.
Being an American who had the opportunity to study Spanish in junior high and high school, I could probably pick up enough French in a semester to be able to survive in France without using English. Hell, I can sort-of read French books, and I've never studied it.
Please allow me to suggest without sarcasm or ill-will that this might be an illusion on your part. These languages are all very difficult to learn even though they have many similarities in their written form.
For example, get a couple French and Mexican (spanish) DVDs from the library and try to understand what is being said without the subtitles being on. Then turn on the subtitles in the native language, i.e. the titles for the deaf if they are available and follow the spoken dialog with the text in the original language. Still very difficult because the verbal flow is not the same as English (the breathing between phrases and things like that).
If you want to take this experiment so far as to actually rent a French video from Blockbuster or a speciality video store then I suggest checking out La Femme Nikita by Luc Bresson 1991. It's the best French film made in the past 25 years. It also has the French dialog in both English and French subtitles.
Hollywood movies in DVD often have the dialog in audio French soundtracks and subtitles for the Canadian market. But the written subtitles in French usually don't match the spoken audio dialog because the movies are actually translated into French twice by different teams. One for the subtitles and the other for the spoken dialog. La Femme Nikita is one of the few French films available on DVD in the USA where the French subtitles actually match 100% the actual original dialog spoken by the original actors. It's a great film.
Most recent French films are absurdly dull and difficult to watch. The French in 1970s used to make very good films as a matter of course. But the era of the Hollywood global blockbuster that started with Star Wars in the late 1970s knocked them out of the picture, so to speak. The entire French film industry lost it totally when their guiding master Francois Truffaut died in the mid-1980s.
Anyway, don't underestimate how difficult it is learn a language.
USA should follow the Indian model where everyone learns English and Hindi the official languages
I think that it would be very difficult to convince 300 million Americans for the necessity of learning Hindi. Even if you could convince them for the need to do so, the actual task of teaching Hindi to 300 million Americans would be quite the arduous undertaking. Indeed!
All the endless discussion about copyright on Slashdot seems to assume that there is some mythical god-like entity that is enforcing a law that rational men (very few Slashdaughters, you must admit) have agreed upon after rigorous debate.
Nonsense, what passes for law is actually a collection of barbarous opposing forces that care nothing about reason and justice. And that especially applies to the forces of law enforcement.
By perpetually extending the copyright period through bribery, the media corporations have stolen the public domain for all intellectual properties created in the 20th century and the present. This is the greatest crime against creative works ever committed. Until this crime has been restituted, we have no option but to take the position that there can be no copyright whatsoever. Copyright law is meant to be a balance between authors and the public domain. No public domain; no copyright. We don't want to take such an extreme position, but it was forced upon us. Extremism in defense of liberty in no vice - said Barry Goldwater.
If someone writes a program and it is stolen by some corporation, then in all likelyhood they will price it far beyond the reach of the intended audience. The reasonable thing to do would be to just copy it, krak it, and use it. Which most people do now anyway (outside the wealthy parts of the world). In the open-source version (downloadable from a website beyond the reach of the fore-mentioned corporation), the author would attach a text file documenting how the code was stolen....we've established what kind of girl you are. Now we're just haggling over the price...
This vicious sexist nonsense really leaves sick. A woman who would have sex with a man for a million dollars is not a prostitute. She is willing to have sex once for a huge windfall gain whose effect on her life and family will far outweigh any distasteful feelings that she may (or may not) have about the individual sex act. Besides there isn't a woman in the world who would let a man like this get away from her. You think Mrs. G lets Mr. G just jump into bed with a dozen beautiful $1000 an hour courtesans every time he goes off on a fact-finding tour for his foundation? No way, she goes with him. Million dollar boners find it hard to just walk away from the women that they've offered themselves to.
No. A prostitute is someone has sex everyday, for relatively small amounts of money, with normal men. It's a job. It's a really bad job.
Men should stop using this so-called joke as a metaphor for whatever point that their trying to make. No woman thinks that it's funny. And it doesn't make any sense to anyone who knows anything about the real-world experiences of sex workers. As a metaphore, it's meaningless. As a joke, it's stupid and offensive. Best not to use it.
Again I seem to be the only one in Slashdot-land that has a certain opinion. And I thought my opinion was the most rational and reasonable position to take.
Let's see here: It seems that people are creating a fantasy and then calling upon a mythical higher power to defend this fantasy. The fantasy being that one can restrict through moral suasion the copying of software when there are hundreds of millions of machines in every home and office in the civilized world that freely and infinitely copy this software. And that this software has some natural intrinsic value simply because the writer spent many hours creating it, even though once created it can be inifinitely copied.
The higher mythical power here is the concept of law: fair and universal justice willing to go to any length to defend to software creator's believed natural right to restrict access to 'his' software, and, by extension, the unlimited use of the world's collective governmental authority and resources to back up this developer's desire to restrict assess to a item that can be freely and infinitely copied.
And, having declared this fantasy to be a natural reality that is endorsed by all civilized beings and governmental entities, my opponents in this debate assume the natural right to defend this fantasy with unlimited use of violence against the personage and property of anyone who would undertake to dispute this fantasy given the logic and limitations that presently exist in the real world where all must live.
Jeez, correct me if I'm wrong, but you'all just must be Americans!
So Simonetta, what exactly do you do for a living? If you refuse to pay my company what we ask you to pay for our software, then why should anyone pay you and/or your company for the work you do?
We make medical equipment. If you need our stuff, and you don't pay us, you die.
If we don't pay you for the software, we get to use the software anyway. And if you don't get enough money from selling your software, you die.
If you don't agree with the price my company wants to charge for our software, you have exactly one choice: don't buy it and don't use it.
Actually, we have two choices: that is the point of this discussion. We can chose to pay you, or we can chose not to. Either way we still get to use the software. And if you don't get enough money from selling your software, you die.
You knew that the software business was like this, and you chose to make a career in it anyway. Don't waste your time trying to force people to pay for software. Better for you to come up with reasons to pay you for your skills and expertise that don't rely on unenforcable laws.
You work for your employer. They pay you. You make more money for them with the work that you do than they pay you. Inform them about better alternatives to the programs that they are using and how you can improve their IT processes. Don't tell them that they are 'breaking the law'. Then install the software and go back to your work.
I personally have serious reservations about what passes for law. I'm not a criminal or an anarcharist. I am one of the twenty five million Americans who have been arrested for possession of herbal intoxicant cannibus and can point out many instances of having suffered discrimination as a result. This experience has led me to real-word realization that most of what passes for law is just bullshit designed to keep someone rich. And that especially applies to any law related to software.
You're a software developer and I'm ripping you off and taking food out the mouths of your children? I don't care. Go be a plumber. No one needs you to be a software developer. If there is a need for the software, then someone will write it. If I need it then I'll copy it. That bothers you? Grow up. Software is common good. Copying it, using it, modifing it is not a crime.
Again I don't do crimes. I don't murder (I'm not one of the troops that we are endlessly told to support). I don't steal (I've never used my position as a company executive to short sell the company stock and backrupt the pension fund of my employees, like MANY of the big buck campaign contributers to the current rack of sleezeball politicians). I've don't rape (I'm from Providence and our former mayor raped, admitted it, laughed, and walked away untouchable).
I do copy software. I do it at work if it can improve my personal productivity. I am used to my text editor and my user interface configuration. Ditto my graphics image processing software. I'm not going to learn yours. If my company won't buy it and install it for my use, then I do it myself. I'm too old and worldwise to give a shit about whether someone has a problem with this. I don't care.
Fortunately nearly all of the companies that I have worked for have the same realistic perspective on this issue. They want me to be productive. They want me to be discrete. So I'm productive and discrete. Everybody's happy.
If you boss wants you to install ten thousand copys of BozoWord on the corporate network, just do it.
The whole purpose of NASA was to implement US President John F. Kennedy's macho infatuation of going to the moon before the Soviets. At the time, for some reason lost to history, this was considered important. Later, after some reflection on the cost and the missed opportunities that a huge space program would entail, JFK had many second thoughts on the entire project. One of the reasons for his fateful trip to Texas in November 1963 was to go to the Houston Space Center and reduce the space program costs.
After his murder, this project became a 'tribute to his spirit' and no cost was spared getting astronauts onto the moon by 1970. This was accomplished in July 1969. Subsequent presidents have reduced the budget and scope of NASA since in effect their initial mission has been successfully accomplished.
Wise presidents have always known that space exploration is just a money sink hole that returns little useful results for the amount of expense. It's basically a welfare program for unemployable aerospace scientists and technicians who would otherwise be subjected to the extreme boom-and-bust cycles of that industry.
NASA is lost in space. All the easy goals have been reached. There is no payoff either financially or in terms of national prestige. Space exploration has little propaganda value today. Except for the NASA employees themselves, the Slashdaughter SciFi dreamer crowd, and the people getting rich from huge NASA construction contracts, no one cares any more.
As for the question of how to deal with the biosexual needs of the crew during hypothetical long space flights, the answer is simple. It's called (in English) 'fucking'. Basically the male places his erect penis into the lubricated vagina of the female. Ejaculation of semen follows which leads to the creation of a fetus in the female. Various ways can be used by the female to prevent the sperm in the semen from creating a fetus. This is a manageable problem.
Unfortunately one of the mental attributes that drives young males to seek a career in space exploration also retards them from the ability to deal rationally with biosexual subjects. This leads to elaborate and extensive reports and projections of long-term space travel in which the subject is not even discussed even though it is one of the basic factors governing human behavior. This reluctance and perhaps even inability to deal with human sexuality is one more reason why enormous amounts of public money should not be spent on NASA and their projects.
Piracy is tolerated only when we have what they want. When they have something that we want, and we copy it, they go fuckin' nuts (to quote Serial Mom).
For example, I'd be interested in getting a Chinese Optical Character Reader and English translator program combo. Then I could compare what the people in Singapore are actually saying about the Americans when they assume that the Caucs can't read what they say. [This would have been more fun about twenty years ago because now the Singaporians are too busy for creative bigotry]
I'm sure that such a program would cost thousands of dollars, though. I would have absolutely no intention of even considering paying for it. I just would like to have it. I would have the same amount of reservation about copying it that the Asians had about copying American technology and software back in the 1960s and 1970s, that is, absolutely none at all.
In fact, I would even go so far as to claim that I have a right to copy it since we as Americans looked the other way when the Asians copied our stuff back when they were poor. Our allowing them to do so was an investment, a long-term investment, and our copying a Chinese-English OCR program is but a return on this investment. They should be happy in the interest that we are showing in their culture and our willingness to allow the light of 3000 years of Chinese civilization to dimly shine upon our barbaric souls. It is even possible that we might actually learn something from all of their experience.
But no, if you copy an expensive program that they developed, for themselves, for their sale and profit, they go fuckin' nuts (again quoting John Water's Serial Mom, great job there, Ms. Turner). 'You are climinal asshore: you are theef' you will be told. Fingers pointing, eyes glaring, turn and spit on the ground, look around for a policeman to have you arrested, dipping into the purse to find the cellphone to call the authorities to have you arrested and deported. Caucausian scum barbarian.
Hey, I love you guys, but, please, grow up. There's no such thing as intellectual property. Never has been, never will be. It's just another junk meme like racism, communism, and religion destined for the junk heap of history (to coin a phrase).
A better idea would be to put a high speed downloading machine into the local video rental store. The store could download the top ten Hollywood movies in high res (or get a shipment of disks). Then the home movie viewer/renter could bring a hard disk or iPod-like device to the local video rental store and download the movie into the device. Then plug it into the home theater for viewing. That way they don't have to tie up their movie machine for hours downloading a single copy of the movie.
This whole idea is lame because it completely underestimates the value of the high-speed bandwidth needed to download gigabytes of redundant movie data. I'd bet the farm that the people who thought this up have no idea that bandwidth costs money, or that it takes time to download full-length feature length films. I'd bet that they thought that the user would just call some telephone number, press a button at a movie title, and the entire film would just appear for free in 15 seconds into the user's settop box. I'll bet that the people that they pitched for the startup capital actually believe this too.
This idea is so lame. It will go nowhere. Too bad the people who dream up this stuff don't read Slashdot.
Music Industry needs pricing flexibility. In other words, the business needs to face reality. They are selling every title at exactly the same price. The only time that a CD disk goes to a lower price category is when it doesn't sell for a LONG time and the retailer wants to get it out of the building.
This retail methodology is based on the concept that every customer has a different level of interest in each music CD title being sold. Rather than be flexible on the price, the retailer marks everything at the same price and has customers buy according to their want. If a customer feels that the release by the Anal Probes is worth $40, then they get a 'deal' by being able to buy it for $18, which is more or less the average price of all new CDs. Some other customer who doesn't feel that the new Probes CD is worth the standard $18 sale price won't buy, or will postpone the purchase.
So the business model is based on retail storage of the selection of CD titles. If the cost of the retail storage time of a CD title is greater than the rent or opportunity cost of the space that the title has on the store shelf, the retailer loses money on the title. If the particular CD is popular, it sells quickly and the profit on the sale is greater than the cost rent for of space that the physical CD occupies during the time that it was physically in the store.
A different business model would be to have the customers bid on the individual physical CDs that are in a retail store. The store would have ten copies of the latest Anal Probes CD. Buy_It_Now price would be $30. Each week two copies of the CD would be auctioned. The two high bidders would come to the store the day the auction finished and pay the high bid that the individual CD received. Half of this price would go to the retailer and half to the record company (who would toss a few pennies to the band, if they felt like it).
In this model there is constant turnover of CD stock and people would be more likely to try and buy new music based on written reviews and word-of-mouth. This model was never adopted in the 20th century because it required enormous amounts of record keeping. But now that we have cheap powerful computers, keeping detailed and extensive records is not an issue. The issue is the record companies and retailers being willing to try a new form of marketing. Which they are loath to do.
So the next time that you hear about some media retailer complain about how difficult it is to do business in the age of downloading and how castration is the only suitable solution to P2P users so that they don't reproduce, ask them quite pointedly and emphatically if they EVER considered a different way of conducting their business. Explain this CD auction concept to them. They say "It's an interesting idea, but not practical". In other words, it would mean that they would actually have to adapt to a changing reality and actually work for their free money and they don't want to do that. Much easier to just to get psychopathic lawyers to extort thousands of dollars from randomly selected former customers in order to bring back the good-old-days of Fleetwood Mac-Rumours and Saturday Night Fever-level record sales.
Open source medical equipment is where the electronic designs, software, and diagnostic skills are completely and freely available to anyone who wants to build this piece of equipment for their own use. It will probably happen first in the developing world where this kind of equipment is not quite as illegal as it is sure to be in the West.
A lot of what passes for 'advanced' medical equipment in the US is actually kludged ancient technology. It sells for absurd amounts of money because of the bizarre 'cost-is-no-object' state of the American Health Care industry. And a lot of people are beginning to be denied basic medical care because they don't have the money to pay for it.
But a lot of medical tests could be done with inexpensive high-tech equipment that has been modified for home medical use. There may come an underground movement to build very high-tech medical equipment cheaply. Equipment that surpasses the quality of what is found in ordinary hospitals, but costs one tenth of the price. It would have no FDA certification, and would be quite illegal. No accredited doctor would use it.
The difference between open source software and open source medical equipment would be that the medical equipment would be illegal. And the people doing the test and interpreting the results would be subject to arrest for practicing medicine without a license.
But in many cases, the test results are just electronic data and can be analyzed by computer to give same level of professionalism as found in the hospital. An example of this would be having to pay $150 for a blood pressure test in a hospital that is identical to the test that you would get from the machine next to the door of your local grocery store.
The US electronic medical equipment industry is in about the same place as the US automobile industry was in early 1970's. Overly restricted by trivial regulations, smug in their belief in their omnipresent power, and completely unaware that they are about to get totally blindsided by people overseas who can do the job much cheaper and much better.
The USA lost the machine tools industry, the consumer electronics industry, most of the automobile industry, and many other industries by not paying attention to what the global consumers of these products actual need and want to buy. The US medical electronics industry is most likely being targetted now because it is showing all the same characteristics as those other industries that were dominated by American companies after World War Two.
The article describes what seems to be an AC/DC coupled photoplethysmograph (PPG). However I am having a hard time believing that an infra-red signal can penetrate three centimeters through the skull, reflect off a blood clot, and be detected again. I recently worked at a company that made PPG devices that put an infra-red diode against the skin and then used a photo-detector to sense blood volume changes according to the amount of IR radiation that got reflected.
The product that I worked with was a kluge from the late 1970s. All that company's technology was based on simple op-amps, TTL chips, resistors and capacitors hand-stuffed into through-hole PCBs. I got fired for incessantly insisting that they bring their technology up to 21st century standards. They said that there was no money (they wouldn't even let us buy a vacuum desoldering station), but the 80-year-old owner was constantly giving away millions of dollars to ultra-conservative local politicians. And lecturing his employees about how cancer could be cured by positive mental attitude.
Anyway, a lot of what passes for 'advanced' medical equipment in the US is actually kludged ancient technology. It sells for absurd amounts of money because of the bizarre 'cost-is-no-object' state of the American Health Care industry. And a lot of people are beginning to be denied basic medical care because they don't have the money to pay for it. But a lot of medical tests could be done with inexpensive high-tech equipment that has been modified for home medical use.
This concept of an inexpensive device that uses state-of-the-art technology is a good place to bring up the subject of open source biomedical devices. There may come an underground movement to build very high-tech medical equipment cheaply for people like us. Equipment that surpasses the quality of what is found in ordinary hospitals, but costs one tenth of the price. It would have no FDA certification, and would be quite illegal. No accredited doctor would use it.
But when you have no medical insurance (or you are paying $300 a month for it and have a $3000 deductable, which is the same thing as having no realistic medical care available), then the choice of paying $1500 for a medical test with FDA certified equipment and paying $50 for the same test to someone who has non-FDA-certified equipment really isn't any choice at all. Of course, if you do have a great job where all your medical expenses are covered and the insurance company picks up the tab for your $1500 test (and charges you a $20 co-payment fee), well then yes, you would be aghast at even the idea that someone would submit to a medical test without the most expensive possible equipment.
But chances are that you're not one of those people. So the idea of open-source medical equipment doesn't repulse you.
The difference between open source software and open source medical equipment would be that the medical equipment would be illegal. And the people doing the test and interpreting the results would be subject to arrest for practicing medicine without a license. But in many cases, the test results are just electronic data and can be analyzed by computer to give same level of professionalism as found in the hospital. And again as millions of middle class people find themselves shut out from licensed health care due to the collapse of the insatiable greed of the health care industry, more and more people will be willing to accept and trust the data from an unlicensed high-tech medical device that costs a tiny fraction of the same machine in a for-profit medical facility. There's nothing holy about the medical industry.
The electronic medical equipment industry in the USA is in about the same place as the US automobile industry was in early 1970's. Obsessed with trivial regulations, smug in their belief in their omnipresent power, and completely unaware that they are about to get totally blindsided by people w
The flaw in this insane argument is that the ARIA (and the ISP) becomes responsible for anything that results from the former customer not having a telephone line.
Did I read this correctly? The ARIA is going to get the telephone company to permanently disconnect some poor Australian's telephone if they believe that they are downloading music? Not everyone has a cell phone or will be getting a cell phone. What about the lawsuits that happen against them when a child dies because there wasn't the ability to call the emergency authorities after a household accident? The parents sue the ARIA on the grounds that the child would not have died if the ARIA had not forced the removal of the telephone line on superficial and unproven reasons. The newspapers start yelling about innocent Australian children forced to die to protect trashy American pop music profits.
The above poster is right about the hard disk swap to build music collections. I do this with older 40-120 Gig hard drives. Fill them full of high-quality 200+ bps MP3s, package them in bubble-wrap, and loan them to friends, co-workers, and any interested party. This and inexpensive double-layer DVDs that hold 150 albums is the real future of music distribution, not commercial music download services.
It's too bad that the ARIA/RIAA doesn't understand this. The era of selling individual recordings is just about over. Not just the idea of selling a single three minute song on a plastic disk or a download of a song for a set price. People in the future will be buying large collections of music and media that has a common theme, like all the 'classic rock recordings' of the 1970s, on a hard disk or DVD set. And they won't be buying these items from the five multinational corporations who persist in holding the illusion that they own them.
My nonsense detector is going off with this latest Imus thing. I suspect that the media powers that be are about 1/3 concerned about what they superficially claim to be concerned with, that is the 'offensiveness and inappropriateness of the remarks', and about 2/3's concerned about getting out of the huge contract that they signed with Imus.
They can't be making money off his show or they wouldn't have fired him. Plain and simple. Now that he has been 'fired for cause', there has to be some clause in his multi-million dollar contract that allows the radio corporation to get out of paying him. In America, you can usually find out what is happening in the background by following the money.
I'm quite sure that after a month or two, Imus will be back on the air. Most likely through a satellite radio service like Howard Stern is. He'll be paid somewhat less than what he was on broadcast and a lot less than Mr. Stern (whose contract is choking the satellite radio company that signed him). But he'll be back.
The other poster was right, Imus was fired because Euro-Americans are not allowed to say anything non-reverential about anyone who isn't Euro-American. African Americans can say anything about anyone, no matter how violent, libelous, or insane, just as long as they have a synthetic electronic drum beat in the background, use a loud angry voice, and frame their speech inside childish inane rhymes.
Don't take these people seriously. Remember, we control the technology, and therefore we ultimately control the people who depend upon technology.
The computer industry and its followers needs to stop using overblown metaphors. Like a company is "dead" when it is simply facing a slight change in its marketing strategy.
Microsoft isn't 'dead'. The company has billions of US dollars in reserves and makes a healthy profit each year. It employs tens of thousands of people.
So why the fuck did this clown say that the company was dead? And why are we paying any attention to this hysterical shit-for-brains anyway? Why do we give credibility to anyone who uses outlandish and absurd metaphors in order to draw attention to his (or her) less-that-stellar insights and opinions?
Just take this fool's name off your list of people in the industry who should be taken seriously in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
Real men don't fool around anymore with digital potentiometers and op-amps when it comes down to the nitty-gritty task of controlling an LED.
Now it's far cheaper to use a microcontroller with pulse-width modulation to guide the LED into it luministic destiny. Get an 8-pin AVR (like the Tiny11) or even a 6-pin PIC microprocessor for less than 50 cents US, preferably one that is in a new surface-mount package much smaller than the LED and fits underneath it. Then write the code that gently awakens the LED from its inner darkness. Be guided in your code by the idea that just as the LED is being raised from its inherent chaotic darkness, so too is man raised from his internal chaotic darkness by the direction and focused energy of Jesus, God, Jehovah, Allah, Buddha, Krishna, Great Spirit, or Whoever (grammar goblins, note the proper capitalization of the indirect pronoun that refers to the deity).
The point is that now it is cheaper to effect a hardware solution with an ultra-cheap microcontroller than it was in the 20th century to do with cheap 555 timers coupled with resistors and caps or to do with TTL clusters. It does require software skills that weren't needed previously. It's a whole new frame of reference for electronic designers. This trend will continue as very fast, (50 MegaHertz system clocks, fast for microcontrollers), very powerful 32-bit microcontrollers with large internal memory continue to fall in price [the 50MHz/32K FlashROM ARM controller has broken the $5 barrier].
Will we ever use a 32-bit microprocessor to control a single LED? Don't laugh too hard. Using a chip that has more internal resources than the original IBM PC to control a few LEDs is not rare now. If some future 128-bit CPU has the ability to be programmed just by talking to it, and it's cheaper than an LED, then why not?
I've often wondered if parallel programming would be easier if it were done in Chinese characters instead of English/European alphabetical characters.
Perhaps having a Chinese character represent a simple block of pre-compiled code that does one simple thing. Then the characters could be placed in two-dimensional order to form parallel threads. This would require a completely different approach to compiler development. But that would be OK because compilers are stuck in the 1970s anyway.
Just getting away from the idea of having code based on a very limited set of alphanumeric characters strung together like beads on a string might help unlock a whole new era of innovative approaches to parallel program development strategies.
It does go without saying that Chinese programmers would have an incredible advantage in any new system of programming that is based on Chinese characters. It may be possible that this subject is already a project under development in China. I'm a bit thick, so whenever I think of something independently that seems to be a completely new idea, inevitably someone smarter than me is already developing it.
If you get your angle just right in advance, you might just be able to get them both with one shot. Best to use armor-piercing bullets because both of them tend to be rather dense at times like this.
This is a case of scorpion and frog. You know, the scorpion needed to cross the river. He asks the frog to carry him. Frog says no, 'cause you'll kill me. Scorpion says 'why would I do that? I'd drown. Let's be friends. Frog gets halfway across, scorpion stings him. As they both die, frog asks why. Scorpion says 'because I'm a scorpion, this is what I do'.
The global music media corporations know that all the fighting new technology and RIAA extortion is not in their best interest. But they can't help it. It's what they do. They're on auto-pilot self-destruct. They're smart guys, they know this. They just can't do anything about it.
Their entire perspective is based on the not-unrealistic assumption that they are the focal point of the best music in the world. The best groups, the most talented artists have and will continue to come to them in order to distribute the recordings. They don't believe that anyone interested in a musical career would not come to them, on their terms. That's the key to their entire 'take it or leave it' approach. Because they honestly believe that no one will leave it.
What may happen is a transformation of media from a centralized distribution to a scattered and disorganized collection of xenophobic subcultures who aren't interested in sharing their music or media works. Should this happen, the media corporations most likely won't notice it. They sell primarily to young people and the percentage of people who are young is rapidly growing. So their market is growing. The fact that their sales of CDs are stagnant is truly amazing. Most likely, it's not true.
I encourage people to gradually disassociate themselves from the products of the global media corporations. Yes, it is true that you will miss great music. You will suffer the occasional social embarrassment of not knowing (actually not knowing, not pretending to not know) who the latest stars are. I'm not going to claim that it's worth it or a self-righteous thing to do. I'm just suggesting, all the celebrity media, let it slide away. There are other things more important. Concentrate on them instead.
Thanks for the reference. I read that book but didn't remember the quote. I had heard it from another source. All this stuff floats around.
People sometimes get upset when they can't give their new daughter the name that sounds like " She-thay-hahd", but is spelled Shithead.
I'm always amazed that the people who design GUI user interfaces don't study anatomy or even have a basic understanding of the relationship between the screen elements and the body activities needed to interact with them.
The most glaring example of this is ever-present and manifestly stupid Windows message box that appears right in the center of the screen at the wrong time and demands that you reposition the mouse pointer on it and click before continuing with your work. Inevitably the movement to reposition the cursor is outside the 15-20 lateral movement range of the wrist that is guiding the mouse which forces an upper arm movement that completely disrupts the mental concentration on the user's current task.
Every time I bring up this issue to a programmer they give this look that resembles that of a monkey encountering his first music synthesizer. Windows makes it so 'easy' to deal with program exceptions by just slapping an error box in the center of the screen. But from the perspective of a user seriously engaged with using the software inactively, it is just so wrong and boneheaded. And, of course, since it was introduced in the Windows GUI, it tends to migrate into the Open Source GUIs as well.
People who design interactive weaponry for a living spend a lot of time getting the interface between the solder's body movement and weapon response exactly right. In these situations, 100 millisecond intervals are critical.
Would be that programmers started thinking in the same way. For more discussion in this area, I suggest the AskTog website.
Universities tend to be sluggish in the internal politics of their administrations, despite their reputation of being progressive and cutting edge. There seems to be a time lag of about ten years between the opinions of most of the students on an issue and that of the university administration. But when the administration does change, it often seems to go overly towards the opinion that the previous university administration was so against. There seems to this pattern of bonehead inertia followed by a swing too much in the other direction ten years later. I noticed this during the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s when lots of quality professors were being fired for protesting the war in its early years and then having universities go strongly anti-military in the 1970s. This pattern also showed up in the 1980s with resistance to 'political correctness' in the 1980s followed by a stiff overreaction towards PC mentality in the 1990s.
So if there is any validity to these observations, then there may be a complete change of view against the RIAA and restrictive copyrights on the part of university administrations in about ten years that will last for another twenty or so afterwards. This pattern of overreaction to extremes followed by an idealogical reversal in the other direction seems to be the general dynamic of university administrations as the younger people who suffered from their positions in the beginning take control of the administrations through the long personnel change process. Often they are the only ones interested in gaining control of universities given the tediousness of administrative processes. Revenge seems to be a good motivator and would explain this tendency to shift between extremes.
So don't worry too much about your university being a poodle to the RIAA cokeheads. It will most likely change over time. In the meantime, set up websites where you can support the fellow students who have been randomly selected for RIAA extortion.
This is not really a joke. Here in Oregon USA we have large tracts of land that are, politely said, undeveloped. In southern Oregon, in the area north of the California border and south of Eugene, there is one superhighway and three major roads that go the rough 150 kilometers between the superhighway and the coast. Off those major roads there are many very rough dirt roads used mainly by special trucks to haul out logged trees. These roads are not maintained or paved or used after the logging is finished.
However they are listed on GPS maps as 'roads'. They're also listed in the big DeLorme map books as roads. So your map may show a hundred roads covering an area of a thousand square kilometers, but they are all overgrown and washed-out dirt paths that may not have had any vehicle activity on them in thirty years.
Occasionally someone in an SUV with a GPS will get the notion that they are going to take a short-cut between the superhighway I-5 and the coast on one of these roads listed on the GPS and confirmed by the big DeLorme map book. They will start driving on a dirt road that gets rougher every mile. If they're smart, they'll stop and back-up when they start scraping the bottom of their SUV on the 'road'. If they're not smart, they'll put on their headphones, slip the latest Norah Jones into the CD player, continue on and ignore the fact that the tree branches are scraping the side mirrors. If they're luckly, they'll get stuck in a rut and have to walk back no more than ten kilometers to get a tow. If they're not lucky, they'll be doing this in the winter, take side roads and blind turns into unknown directions and get lost in deep woods. Or they'll marvel at the ability of their $30000 SUV to climb thousands of feet on snow covered paths, get lost, get stuck and immobile in the snow, and realize that (1) they're completly lost, (2) the car is hopelessly stuck, (3) they're low on gas, (4) it's rather cold outside, (5) they're wearing Los Angeles clothes with no coats, (6) they didn't tell anyone that they were going to be taking this 'shortcut to the beach', and finally (7) the cell phone doesn't work.
Now the local people know that the stupid tourists can get into a jam like this and will try to warn people with out-of-state license plates driving in the deep woods. But if your GPS says that you're on a major road, but your on a rutted dirt path and tree branches have been scraping your windows for the past ten minutes and you still drive on, well there isn't much that they can do for you.
Eventually someone will find your vehicle and body, probably next summer after the mud dries and people start exploring the woods in their mini-monster trucks again.
This exact thing happened last winter. The family lucked out when the people that they were going to visit reported them missing and credit card records showed them to have bought gas at a station near the roadless areas. The authorities called out a major search-and-rescue and was able to save most of the people in the SUV after five days of being stuck in the snow. The next people may not be so lucky
So trust your instincts. Don't trust the GPS. Pay attention to reality.
Yes, the same corporations that have paid many many thousands of dollars to the campaigns of the state legislators of Washington (and your state) have, for your education and benefit, placed hundreds of billboards along the most heavily used commuter routes.
Your text messages disrupt the flow of information from their expensive investment directly into your brain while you're driving. That can't be allowed to happen; it's much too dangerous for road safety!
When the text message companies have paid as much money to the reelection funds as the billboard company (there's really only one now - Clear Channel, the same people who own all the radio stations, ticket sellers, and concert halls in the USA), well, then and only then will you be safely be able to receive and read text messages while you're operating a motor vehicle.
Of course, by then most of your text messages will be adverts from Clear Channel.
Am I cynical? Horsepoop! This is America. Any time someone says 'safely', they mean 'give me money'.
Being an American who had the opportunity to study Spanish in junior high and high school, I could probably pick up enough French in a semester to be able to survive in France without using English. Hell, I can sort-of read French books, and I've never studied it.
Please allow me to suggest without sarcasm or ill-will that this might be an illusion on your part. These languages are all very difficult to learn even though they have many similarities in their written form.
For example, get a couple French and Mexican (spanish) DVDs from the library and try to understand what is being said without the subtitles being on. Then turn on the subtitles in the native language, i.e. the titles for the deaf if they are available and follow the spoken dialog with the text in the original language. Still very difficult because the verbal flow is not the same as English (the breathing between phrases and things like that).
If you want to take this experiment so far as to actually rent a French video from Blockbuster or a speciality video store then I suggest checking out La Femme Nikita by Luc Bresson 1991. It's the best French film made in the past 25 years. It also has the French dialog in both English and French subtitles.
Hollywood movies in DVD often have the dialog in audio French soundtracks and subtitles for the Canadian market. But the written subtitles in French usually don't match the spoken audio dialog because the movies are actually translated into French twice by different teams. One for the subtitles and the other for the spoken dialog. La Femme Nikita is one of the few French films available on DVD in the USA where the French subtitles actually match 100% the actual original dialog spoken by the original actors. It's a great film.
Most recent French films are absurdly dull and difficult to watch. The French in 1970s used to make very good films as a matter of course. But the era of the Hollywood global blockbuster that started with Star Wars in the late 1970s knocked them out of the picture, so to speak. The entire French film industry lost it totally when their guiding master Francois Truffaut died in the mid-1980s.
Anyway, don't underestimate how difficult it is learn a language.
USA should follow the Indian model where everyone learns English and Hindi the official languages
I think that it would be very difficult to convince 300 million Americans for the necessity of learning Hindi. Even if you could convince them for the need to do so, the actual task of teaching Hindi to 300 million Americans would be quite the arduous undertaking. Indeed!
...support an author's right to dictate...
...we've established what kind of girl you are. Now we're just haggling over the price...
All the endless discussion about copyright on Slashdot seems to assume that there is some mythical god-like entity that is enforcing a law that rational men (very few Slashdaughters, you must admit) have agreed upon after rigorous debate.
Nonsense, what passes for law is actually a collection of barbarous opposing forces that care nothing about reason and justice. And that especially applies to the forces of law enforcement.
By perpetually extending the copyright period through bribery, the media corporations have stolen the public domain for all intellectual properties created in the 20th century and the present. This is the greatest crime against creative works ever committed. Until this crime has been restituted, we have no option but to take the position that there can be no copyright whatsoever. Copyright law is meant to be a balance between authors and the public domain. No public domain; no copyright. We don't want to take such an extreme position, but it was forced upon us. Extremism in defense of liberty in no vice - said Barry Goldwater.
If someone writes a program and it is stolen by some corporation, then in all likelyhood they will price it far beyond the reach of the intended audience. The reasonable thing to do would be to just copy it, krak it, and use it. Which most people do now anyway (outside the wealthy parts of the world). In the open-source version (downloadable from a website beyond the reach of the fore-mentioned corporation), the author would attach a text file documenting how the code was stolen.
This vicious sexist nonsense really leaves sick. A woman who would have sex with a man for a million dollars is not a prostitute. She is willing to have sex once for a huge windfall gain whose effect on her life and family will far outweigh any distasteful feelings that she may (or may not) have about the individual sex act. Besides there isn't a woman in the world who would let a man like this get away from her. You think Mrs. G lets Mr. G just jump into bed with a dozen beautiful $1000 an hour courtesans every time he goes off on a fact-finding tour for his foundation? No way, she goes with him. Million dollar boners find it hard to just walk away from the women that they've offered themselves to.
No. A prostitute is someone has sex everyday, for relatively small amounts of money, with normal men. It's a job. It's a really bad job.
Men should stop using this so-called joke as a metaphor for whatever point that their trying to make. No woman thinks that it's funny. And it doesn't make any sense to anyone who knows anything about the real-world experiences of sex workers. As a metaphore, it's meaningless. As a joke, it's stupid and offensive. Best not to use it.
Again I seem to be the only one in Slashdot-land that has a certain opinion. And I thought my opinion was the most rational and reasonable position to take.
Let's see here: It seems that people are creating a fantasy and then calling upon a mythical higher power to defend this fantasy.
The fantasy being that one can restrict through moral suasion the copying of software when there are hundreds of millions of machines in every home and office in the civilized world that freely and infinitely copy this software. And that this software has some natural intrinsic value simply because the writer spent many hours creating it, even though once created it can be inifinitely copied.
The higher mythical power here is the concept of law: fair and universal justice willing to go to any length to defend to software creator's believed natural right to restrict access to 'his' software, and, by extension, the unlimited use of the world's collective governmental authority and resources to back up this developer's desire to restrict assess to a item that can be freely and infinitely copied.
And, having declared this fantasy to be a natural reality that is endorsed by all civilized beings and governmental entities, my opponents in this debate assume the natural right to defend this fantasy with unlimited use of violence against the personage and property of anyone who would undertake to dispute this fantasy given the logic and limitations that presently exist in the real world where all must live.
Jeez, correct me if I'm wrong, but you'all just must be Americans!
So Simonetta, what exactly do you do for a living? If you refuse to pay my company what we ask you to pay for our software, then why should anyone pay you and/or your company for the work you do?
We make medical equipment. If you need our stuff, and you don't pay us, you die.
If we don't pay you for the software, we get to use the software anyway. And if you don't get enough money from selling your software, you die.
If you don't agree with the price my company wants to charge for our software, you have exactly one choice: don't buy it and don't use it.
Actually, we have two choices: that is the point of this discussion. We can chose to pay you, or we can chose not to. Either way we still get to use the software. And if you don't get enough money from selling your software, you die.
You knew that the software business was like this, and you chose to make a career in it anyway. Don't waste your time trying to force people to pay for software. Better for you to come up with reasons to pay you for your skills and expertise that don't rely on unenforcable laws.
You work for your employer. They pay you. You make more money for them with the work that you do than they pay you. Inform them about better alternatives to the programs that they are using and how you can improve their IT processes. Don't tell them that they are 'breaking the law'. Then install the software and go back to your work.
I personally have serious reservations about what passes for law. I'm not a criminal or an anarcharist. I am one of the twenty five million Americans who have been arrested for possession of herbal intoxicant cannibus and can point out many instances of having suffered discrimination as a result. This experience has led me to real-word realization that most of what passes for law is just bullshit designed to keep someone rich. And that especially applies to any law related to software.
You're a software developer and I'm ripping you off and taking food out the mouths of your children? I don't care. Go be a plumber. No one needs you to be a software developer. If there is a need for the software, then someone will write it. If I need it then I'll copy it. That bothers you? Grow up. Software is common good. Copying it, using it, modifing it is not a crime.
Again I don't do crimes. I don't murder (I'm not one of the troops that we are endlessly told to support). I don't steal (I've never used my position as a company executive to short sell the company stock and backrupt the pension fund of my employees, like MANY of the big buck campaign contributers to the current rack of sleezeball politicians). I've don't rape (I'm from Providence and our former mayor raped, admitted it, laughed, and walked away untouchable).
I do copy software. I do it at work if it can improve my personal productivity. I am used to my text editor and my user interface configuration. Ditto my graphics image processing software. I'm not going to learn yours. If my company won't buy it and install it for my use, then I do it myself. I'm too old and worldwise to give a shit about whether someone has a problem with this. I don't care.
Fortunately nearly all of the companies that I have worked for have the same realistic perspective on this issue. They want me to be productive. They want me to be discrete. So I'm productive and discrete. Everybody's happy.
If you boss wants you to install ten thousand copys of BozoWord on the corporate network, just do it.
The whole purpose of NASA was to implement US President John F. Kennedy's macho infatuation of going to the moon before the Soviets. At the time, for some reason lost to history, this was considered important. Later, after some reflection on the cost and the missed opportunities that a huge space program would entail, JFK had many second thoughts on the entire project. One of the reasons for his fateful trip to Texas in November 1963 was to go to the Houston Space Center and reduce the space program costs.
After his murder, this project became a 'tribute to his spirit' and no cost was spared getting astronauts onto the moon by 1970. This was accomplished in July 1969. Subsequent presidents have reduced the budget and scope of NASA since in effect their initial mission has been successfully accomplished.
Wise presidents have always known that space exploration is just a money sink hole that returns little useful results for the amount of expense. It's basically a welfare program for unemployable aerospace scientists and technicians who would otherwise be subjected to the extreme boom-and-bust cycles of that industry.
NASA is lost in space. All the easy goals have been reached. There is no payoff either financially or in terms of national prestige. Space exploration has little propaganda value today. Except for the NASA employees themselves, the Slashdaughter SciFi dreamer crowd, and the people getting rich from huge NASA construction contracts, no one cares any more.
As for the question of how to deal with the biosexual needs of the crew during hypothetical long space flights, the answer is simple. It's called (in English) 'fucking'. Basically the male places his erect penis into the lubricated vagina of the female. Ejaculation of semen follows which leads to the creation of a fetus in the female. Various ways can be used by the female to prevent the sperm in the semen from creating a fetus. This is a manageable problem.
Unfortunately one of the mental attributes that drives young males to seek a career in space exploration also retards them from the ability to deal rationally with biosexual subjects. This leads to elaborate and extensive reports and projections of long-term space travel in which the subject is not even discussed even though it is one of the basic factors governing human behavior. This reluctance and perhaps even inability to deal with human sexuality is one more reason why enormous amounts of public money should not be spent on NASA and their projects.
Piracy is tolerated only when we have what they want. When they have something that we want, and we copy it, they go fuckin' nuts (to quote Serial Mom).
For example, I'd be interested in getting a Chinese Optical Character Reader and English translator program combo. Then I could compare what the people in Singapore are actually saying about the Americans when they assume that the Caucs can't read what they say. [This would have been more fun about twenty years ago because now the Singaporians are too busy for creative bigotry]
I'm sure that such a program would cost thousands of dollars, though. I would have absolutely no intention of even considering paying for it. I just would like to have it. I would have the same amount of reservation about copying it that the Asians had about copying American technology and software back in the 1960s and 1970s, that is, absolutely none at all.
In fact, I would even go so far as to claim that I have a right to copy it since we as Americans looked the other way when the Asians copied our stuff back when they were poor. Our allowing them to do so was an investment, a long-term investment, and our copying a Chinese-English OCR program is but a return on this investment. They should be happy in the interest that we are showing in their culture and our willingness to allow the light of 3000 years of Chinese civilization to dimly shine upon our barbaric souls. It is even possible that we might actually learn something from all of their experience.
But no, if you copy an expensive program that they developed, for themselves, for their sale and profit, they go fuckin' nuts (again quoting John Water's Serial Mom, great job there, Ms. Turner). 'You are climinal asshore: you are theef' you will be told. Fingers pointing, eyes glaring, turn and spit on the ground, look around for a policeman to have you arrested, dipping into the purse to find the cellphone to call the authorities to have you arrested and deported. Caucausian scum barbarian.
Hey, I love you guys, but, please, grow up. There's no such thing as intellectual property. Never has been, never will be. It's just another junk meme like racism, communism, and religion destined for the junk heap of history (to coin a phrase).
A better idea would be to put a high speed downloading machine into the local video rental store. The store could download the top ten Hollywood movies in high res (or get a shipment of disks). Then the home movie viewer/renter could bring a hard disk or iPod-like device to the local video rental store and download the movie into the device. Then plug it into the home theater for viewing. That way they don't have to tie up their movie machine for hours downloading a single copy of the movie.
This whole idea is lame because it completely underestimates the value of the high-speed bandwidth needed to download gigabytes of redundant movie data. I'd bet the farm that the people who thought this up have no idea that bandwidth costs money, or that it takes time to download full-length feature length films. I'd bet that they thought that the user would just call some telephone number, press a button at a movie title, and the entire film would just appear for free in 15 seconds into the user's settop box. I'll bet that the people that they pitched for the startup capital actually believe this too.
This idea is so lame. It will go nowhere. Too bad the people who dream up this stuff don't read Slashdot.
Music Industry needs pricing flexibility. In other words, the business needs to face reality. They are selling every title at exactly the same price. The only time that a CD disk goes to a lower price category is when it doesn't sell for a LONG time and the retailer wants to get it out of the building.
This retail methodology is based on the concept that every customer has a different level of interest in each music CD title being sold. Rather than be flexible on the price, the retailer marks everything at the same price and has customers buy according to their want. If a customer feels that the release by the Anal Probes is worth $40, then they get a 'deal' by being able to buy it for $18, which is more or less the average price of all new CDs. Some other customer who doesn't feel that the new Probes CD is worth the standard $18 sale price won't buy, or will postpone the purchase.
So the business model is based on retail storage of the selection of CD titles. If the cost of the retail storage time of a CD title is greater than the rent or opportunity cost of the space that the title has on the store shelf, the retailer loses money on the title. If the particular CD is popular, it sells quickly and the profit on the sale is greater than the cost rent for of space that the physical CD occupies during the time that it was physically in the store.
A different business model would be to have the customers bid on the individual physical CDs that are in a retail store. The store would have ten copies of the latest Anal Probes CD. Buy_It_Now price would be $30. Each week two copies of the CD would be auctioned. The two high bidders would come to the store the day the auction finished and pay the high bid that the individual CD received. Half of this price would go to the retailer and half to the record company (who would toss a few pennies to the band, if they felt like it).
In this model there is constant turnover of CD stock and people would be more likely to try and buy new music based on written reviews and word-of-mouth. This model was never adopted in the 20th century because it required enormous amounts of record keeping. But now that we have cheap powerful computers, keeping detailed and extensive records is not an issue. The issue is the record companies and retailers being willing to try a new form of marketing. Which they are loath to do.
So the next time that you hear about some media retailer complain about how difficult it is to do business in the age of downloading and how castration is the only suitable solution to P2P users so that they don't reproduce, ask them quite pointedly and emphatically if they EVER considered a different way of conducting their business. Explain this CD auction concept to them. They say "It's an interesting idea, but not practical". In other words, it would mean that they would actually have to adapt to a changing reality and actually work for their free money and they don't want to do that. Much easier to just to get psychopathic lawyers to extort thousands of dollars from randomly selected former customers in order to bring back the good-old-days of Fleetwood Mac-Rumours and Saturday Night Fever-level record sales.
But those days are gone. So adapt or die.
Open source medical equipment is where the electronic designs, software, and diagnostic skills are completely and freely available to anyone who wants to build this piece of equipment for their own use. It will probably happen first in the developing world where this kind of equipment is not quite as illegal as it is sure to be in the West.
A lot of what passes for 'advanced' medical equipment in the US is actually kludged ancient technology. It sells for absurd amounts of money because of the bizarre 'cost-is-no-object' state of the American Health Care industry. And a lot of people are beginning to be denied basic medical care because they don't have the money to pay for it.
But a lot of medical tests could be done with inexpensive high-tech equipment that has been modified for home medical use. There may come an underground movement to build very high-tech medical equipment cheaply. Equipment that surpasses the quality of what is found in ordinary hospitals, but costs one tenth of the price. It would have no FDA certification, and would be quite illegal. No accredited doctor would use it.
The difference between open source software and open source medical equipment would be that the medical equipment would be illegal. And the people doing the test and interpreting the results would be subject to arrest for practicing medicine without a license.
But in many cases, the test results are just electronic data and can be analyzed by computer to give same level of professionalism as found in the hospital. An example of this would be having to pay $150 for a blood pressure test in a hospital that is identical to the test that you would get from the machine next to the door of your local grocery store.
The US electronic medical equipment industry is in about the same place as the US automobile industry was in early 1970's. Overly restricted by trivial regulations, smug in their belief in their omnipresent power, and completely unaware that they are about to get totally blindsided by people overseas who can do the job much cheaper and much better.
The USA lost the machine tools industry, the consumer electronics industry, most of the automobile industry, and many other industries by not paying attention to what the global consumers of these products actual need and want to buy. The US medical electronics industry is most likely being targetted now because it is showing all the same characteristics as those other industries that were dominated by American companies after World War Two.
The article describes what seems to be an AC/DC coupled photoplethysmograph (PPG). However I am having a hard time believing that an infra-red signal can penetrate three centimeters through the skull, reflect off a blood clot, and be detected again. I recently worked at a company that made PPG devices that put an infra-red diode against the skin and then used a photo-detector to sense blood volume changes according to the amount of IR radiation that got reflected.
The product that I worked with was a kluge from the late 1970s. All that company's technology was based on simple op-amps, TTL chips, resistors and capacitors hand-stuffed into through-hole PCBs. I got fired for incessantly insisting that they bring their technology up to 21st century standards. They said that there was no money (they wouldn't even let us buy a vacuum desoldering station), but the 80-year-old owner was constantly giving away millions of dollars to ultra-conservative local politicians. And lecturing his employees about how cancer could be cured by positive mental attitude.
Anyway, a lot of what passes for 'advanced' medical equipment in the US is actually kludged ancient technology. It sells for absurd amounts of money because of the bizarre 'cost-is-no-object' state of the American Health Care industry. And a lot of people are beginning to be denied basic medical care because they don't have the money to pay for it. But a lot of medical tests could be done with inexpensive high-tech equipment that has been modified for home medical use.
This concept of an inexpensive device that uses state-of-the-art technology is a good place to bring up the subject of open source biomedical devices. There may come an underground movement to build very high-tech medical equipment cheaply for people like us. Equipment that surpasses the quality of what is found in ordinary hospitals, but costs one tenth of the price. It would have no FDA certification, and would be quite illegal. No accredited doctor would use it.
But when you have no medical insurance (or you are paying $300 a month for it and have a $3000 deductable, which is the same thing as having no realistic medical care available), then the choice of paying $1500 for a medical test with FDA certified equipment and paying $50 for the same test to someone who has non-FDA-certified equipment really isn't any choice at all. Of course, if you do have a great job where all your medical expenses are covered and the insurance company picks up the tab for your $1500 test (and charges you a $20 co-payment fee), well then yes, you would be aghast at even the idea that someone would submit to a medical test without the most expensive possible equipment.
But chances are that you're not one of those people. So the idea of open-source medical equipment doesn't repulse you.
The difference between open source software and open source medical equipment would be that the medical equipment would be illegal. And the people doing the test and interpreting the results would be subject to arrest for practicing medicine without a license. But in many cases, the test results are just electronic data and can be analyzed by computer to give same level of professionalism as found in the hospital. And again as millions of middle class people find themselves shut out from licensed health care due to the collapse of the insatiable greed of the health care industry, more and more people will be willing to accept and trust the data from an unlicensed high-tech medical device that costs a tiny fraction of the same machine in a for-profit medical facility. There's nothing holy about the medical industry.
The electronic medical equipment industry in the USA is in about the same place as the US automobile industry was in early 1970's. Obsessed with trivial regulations, smug in their belief in their omnipresent power, and completely unaware that they are about to get totally blindsided by people w
The flaw in this insane argument is that the ARIA (and the ISP) becomes responsible for anything that results from the former customer not having a telephone line.
Did I read this correctly? The ARIA is going to get the telephone company to permanently disconnect some poor Australian's telephone if they believe that they are downloading music? Not everyone has a cell phone or will be getting a cell phone. What about the lawsuits that happen against them when a child dies because there wasn't the ability to call the emergency authorities after a household accident? The parents sue the ARIA on the grounds that the child would not have died if the ARIA had not forced the removal of the telephone line on superficial and unproven reasons. The newspapers start yelling about innocent Australian children forced to die to protect trashy American pop music profits.
The above poster is right about the hard disk swap to build music collections. I do this with older 40-120 Gig hard drives. Fill them full of high-quality 200+ bps MP3s, package them in bubble-wrap, and loan them to friends, co-workers, and any interested party. This and inexpensive double-layer DVDs that hold 150 albums is the real future of music distribution, not commercial music download services.
It's too bad that the ARIA/RIAA doesn't understand this. The era of selling individual recordings is just about over. Not just the idea of selling a single three minute song on a plastic disk or a download of a song for a set price. People in the future will be buying large collections of music and media that has a common theme, like all the 'classic rock recordings' of the 1970s, on a hard disk or DVD set. And they won't be buying these items from the five multinational corporations who persist in holding the illusion that they own them.
My nonsense detector is going off with this latest Imus thing. I suspect that the media powers that be are about 1/3 concerned about what they superficially claim to be concerned with, that is the 'offensiveness and inappropriateness of the remarks', and about 2/3's concerned about getting out of the huge contract that they signed with Imus.
They can't be making money off his show or they wouldn't have fired him. Plain and simple. Now that he has been 'fired for cause', there has to be some clause in his multi-million dollar contract that allows the radio corporation to get out of paying him. In America, you can usually find out what is happening in the background by following the money.
I'm quite sure that after a month or two, Imus will be back on the air. Most likely through a satellite radio service like Howard Stern is. He'll be paid somewhat less than what he was on broadcast and a lot less than Mr. Stern (whose contract is choking the satellite radio company that signed him). But he'll be back.
The other poster was right, Imus was fired because Euro-Americans are not allowed to say anything non-reverential about anyone who isn't Euro-American. African Americans can say anything about anyone, no matter how violent, libelous, or insane, just as long as they have a synthetic electronic drum beat in the background, use a loud angry voice, and frame their speech inside childish inane rhymes.
Don't take these people seriously. Remember, we control the technology, and therefore we ultimately control the people who depend upon technology.
The computer industry and its followers needs to stop using overblown metaphors. Like a company is "dead" when it is simply facing a slight change in its marketing strategy.
Microsoft isn't 'dead'. The company has billions of US dollars in reserves and makes a healthy profit each year. It employs tens of thousands of people.
So why the fuck did this clown say that the company was dead? And why are we paying any attention to this hysterical shit-for-brains anyway? Why do we give credibility to anyone who uses outlandish and absurd metaphors in order to draw attention to his (or her) less-that-stellar insights and opinions?
Just take this fool's name off your list of people in the industry who should be taken seriously in the future.