The company freely admits that the bandage is composed of a very ubiquitous shrimp-derived compound and vinegar. So why $100 a bandage? Either because:
1 - Their product is difficult to manufacture 2 - They give money back to the Wild Shrimp Rights Society 3 - They have a patent 4 - Their customer is the military, and they don't care paying up the wazoo for that sort of thing, because their money is free (i.e. yours, the taxpayer's)
Two of these four possibilities seem correct to me...
Actually for once, the AC's feeble joke is spot on: DRM isn't as much about preventing people from cracking it as it is about having solid grounds to sue infringers.
DRM's more or less open goal is to prevent "casual theft" in the form of playground CD swapping, but it's much easier to sue someone who took deliberate, non-obvious steps to circumvent a protection than sueing someone who just copied something. For infringers, it takes away the "oops I didn't know it was forbidden" excuse.
Re:Next Stop: Mandatroy Information Pollution
on
Googling for CIA Agents
·
· Score: 3, Funny
(does GPS equipment from the US work over there?), field equipment, mapping software etc. I use both PCs and Macs
1) GPS equipment, bought anywhere in the world, works anywhere else in the world, since GPS satellites cover the entire globe
2) All you describe is fine and dandy, but it seems to me that you're forgetting one crucial part of it: power supply. In the Middle of Nowhere, West Africa, you may not be able to find wall outlets everywhere to connect your laptop to everyday. What's more, if you do find power, your laptop might not like it (voltage spikes, bad frequency...).
So my suggestion is that you start designing around your power supply. Solar? Generator? how to conserve power? PDA or laptop? what size battery to you expect to need? etc etc... all that depends on the exact application.
So.... do you want the law to enforce someone's particular morality? Is that it?
That was just a statement of facts. No law can enforce morality on anybody or anything. The reason I call corporations psychotic is because, legally, they are fictional entities that have many of the same rights that real individuals do, but they operate solely on the basis of their charters, and what the law compels them to do or not do, whereas individuals also bring their sense of morality into play when making decisions.
For example, if I change the oil on my car, I'm going to take my bottle of old oil to the collection point because I'm concerned about polluting the environment. But a corporation that specializes in car oil changes won't have any qualms throwing massive quantities of old oil in the gutter if it's legal and if nobody complains about it, since it saves money.
Personally, I think corporations will eventually be forced to consider moral issues when concerned citizens force issues onto them by voting with their wallets.
Yup, I hear you. And how is this device supposed to help identify muggers hiding behind, say, an old-fashioned hood ?
No need for hoods. Remember this story? Bozo criminal for today comes from Charlotte, North Carolina. This bozo had obviously not yet perfected his craft. Bozo Richard Reeved planned on robbing a bank. To conceal his identity, the bozo put a paper bag over his head. Only problem, he put the bag on his head in his car while he was still several blocks away from the bank. Alert drivers in nearby cars called the police and alerted them of a suspicious man driving a car wearing a bag over his head. Once inside, our bozo could not be understood because he forgot to cut a mouth hole in the bag. After repeating himself several times, he finally got a handful of money and ran out of the bank and into the waiting arms of police officers.
Everybody is looking for ways to cash in on the war-against-terrorism bullshit. Do you really need to ask?
The so-called "war on drugs" launched by Reagan did the same, and look at the market now: the job application drug-testing market (which only tests for cannabis usage, funnily enough, if you're a heroine or cocaine addict, you'll pass with flying colors and will be deemed acceptable to work at Wall-Mart) is now over $2bn, covering test paid mostly by federal money for tests (yes, that's you, the taxpayer...) and ClearP-type products sold at 50 bucks a pop, paid by applicants anxious to pass the test.
Are there some people completely devoid of privacy concerns? Or are they just greedy to make money?
As someone explained to me once, corporation are by law required to work towards enriching stakeholders. Moral concerns aren't their problems, essentially turning them into psychopathic types of entities. So, to answer your questions, yes and yes.
Re:Next time I'm arrested...
on
3D Face Cameras
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I'll have to make sure I am bloated... that way they won't be able to identify me when I am not!
Cool, not only could viruses switch what appears on your screen when you type you could also wake up and find a huge picture of goatse on your keyboard.
Goatse keyboard virus effect on the cheap! --> look carefully at the three adjacent I, O and P keys, squint a bit, and you can just about see the hands of the goatse guy stretching the, erhm, "O".
I have French and German keyboard. Occasionally, when I know I'll be typing for an extended period of time in French or German, I power off and switch keyboard.
I did try to have several keyboards connected, but it turns out it's not so great: I could either:
- daisy-chain keyboards on the PS/2 connectors, which doesn't work well because (1) they draw too much current and (2) all keyboards receive the PC codes, while only one is concerned by them, and it messes up the other keyboards' internal states
- use the US kbd on the PS/2 port, and one or two as USB keyboards. I can't combine them all as a single keyboard with XFree86 (unless someone points me to a XF86Config-4 example that doesn't rely on a patched-and-recompiled X server?)
- use a keyboard switcher: that works, but it still leaves me with 3 keyboards cluttering my desk, and since I don't want to put them away (I do tend to switch between different layouts often), it's just not very handy
All quiet keyboards I've ever had always turned out to be utter crap. Right now, I'm banging away on a IBM Modem M keyboard that is still doing fine after years of typing (obviously) but also coffee spilling (hot and cold), heavy banging, hurling across the room, and sitting on. Some of the heavily used keys are so worn out that the plastic surface feels smooth and the etching has gone, but it's still doing fine. These things sure were made to last.
I've long since forgotten about the incredible racket noises it makes. My cat loves the feel and clicks when he stretches on it though, apparently.
...for a keyboard with some sort of dynamically-assigned logo on the keys. Not anything fancy, a 5*7 monochrome LCD logo per key would be great, I don't need the fancy colors and shortcuts.
My need is to be able to see the keys when I type with a foreign keytable. My keyboard is US qwerty, but whenever I type in French or German, since I learned to write these languages using native keytables, I have to switch to azerty or qwertz, which is mostly fine with the US keyboard since I don't look at the keys, but can be a problem for odd characters like @ or ~ that I just never remember on non-US layouts.
I like the whole redistrubatable deely.. Maybe we could have an apt or portage repository.. Then one could daily do an apt-get install tvshow or emerge tvshow? Now that would be super Cow Powers!
Are you kidding? real nerds make a point of receiving NerdTV in Morse code, manually, then entering the received number in a file with ed, then un-pgp the file with a secret 2048-bit key found on an IRC channel to which you can only be invited if you request it with a phrase found in a file distributed on BitTorrent, then uudecode it, then view it with an ascii-art FLI viewer.
Javascript is dangerous, not standardized, and crap.
Javascript isn't necessarily crap if used correctly. However, the only times I get to "experience" it are when websites want to do something stupidly useless, like resizing windows or goofing with the mouse pointer, or bury me in multiple cascading popups.
So, I don't know if it's really dangerous or not standardized, but it's definitely annoying and therefore I turned it off, and I don't go to sites that insist on using it.
Find another alternative please.
Flash? same problem, it's annoying (and CPU-intensive).
Hey, here's a question-- Why do we [i]need[/i] styled checkboxes? I hear those words and I just get this mental image of style kicking contents in the nads over and over and over.
Not to mention - but it seems nobody really cares about this, and apparently bringing the subject up always generates a deluge of "we won't hold browser technologies back because of *this*" answers - web developers are so busy beautifying web pages and turning everything graphical and snazzy that you can always count on one category of people getting screwed with this trend: blind people.
They are the truly forgotten of this embelishment, and java[script]tization of the net. I wish web developers cared more about (1) complying strictly with W3C recommendations for accessibility and (2) not forgoing accessibility just for beauty...
A properly done multiple choice test is harder than any other format.
I agree somewhat, but at the end of the day, a multiple choice won't let the corrector understand why a student wrote this or that in a problem, which would allow him to help the student correct his misunderstanding. A full, written, argumented answer does that. That's my beef against MCQs, not that they're fair or that they can or cannot catch cheats.
Slashdot Mirror
The company freely admits that the bandage is composed of a very ubiquitous shrimp-derived compound and vinegar. So why $100 a bandage? Either because:
1 - Their product is difficult to manufacture
2 - They give money back to the Wild Shrimp Rights Society
3 - They have a patent
4 - Their customer is the military, and they don't care paying up the wazoo for that sort of thing, because their money is free (i.e. yours, the taxpayer's)
Two of these four possibilities seem correct to me...
2) What does this have to do with Linux?
Not Linux, BSD: he played in various Evil Dead movies...
the only explanation I have is that making love the bruce campbell way somehow involves the left hand...
Actually for once, the AC's feeble joke is spot on: DRM isn't as much about preventing people from cracking it as it is about having solid grounds to sue infringers.
DRM's more or less open goal is to prevent "casual theft" in the form of playground CD swapping, but it's much easier to sue someone who took deliberate, non-obvious steps to circumvent a protection than sueing someone who just copied something. For infringers, it takes away the "oops I didn't know it was forbidden" excuse.
the World Wide Web, the Information Super Highway
1990 called, they want their PR bullshit back...
Buy an GPS watch! No power problems!
Oh yeah? and what happens when it stops? do you rewind it?
(does GPS equipment from the US work over there?), field equipment, mapping software etc. I use both PCs and Macs
1) GPS equipment, bought anywhere in the world, works anywhere else in the world, since GPS satellites cover the entire globe
2) All you describe is fine and dandy, but it seems to me that you're forgetting one crucial part of it: power supply. In the Middle of Nowhere, West Africa, you may not be able to find wall outlets everywhere to connect your laptop to everyday. What's more, if you do find power, your laptop might not like it (voltage spikes, bad frequency...).
So my suggestion is that you start designing around your power supply. Solar? Generator? how to conserve power? PDA or laptop? what size battery to you expect to need? etc etc... all that depends on the exact application.
So.... do you want the law to enforce someone's particular morality? Is that it?
That was just a statement of facts. No law can enforce morality on anybody or anything. The reason I call corporations psychotic is because, legally, they are fictional entities that have many of the same rights that real individuals do, but they operate solely on the basis of their charters, and what the law compels them to do or not do, whereas individuals also bring their sense of morality into play when making decisions.
For example, if I change the oil on my car, I'm going to take my bottle of old oil to the collection point because I'm concerned about polluting the environment. But a corporation that specializes in car oil changes won't have any qualms throwing massive quantities of old oil in the gutter if it's legal and if nobody complains about it, since it saves money.
Personally, I think corporations will eventually be forced to consider moral issues when concerned citizens force issues onto them by voting with their wallets.
Yup, I hear you. And how is this device supposed to help identify muggers hiding behind, say, an old-fashioned hood ?
No need for hoods. Remember this story?
Bozo criminal for today comes from Charlotte, North Carolina. This bozo had obviously not yet perfected his craft. Bozo Richard Reeved planned on robbing a bank. To conceal his identity, the bozo put a paper bag over his head. Only problem, he put the bag on his head in his car while he was still several blocks away from the bank. Alert drivers in nearby cars called the police and alerted them of a suspicious man driving a car wearing a bag over his head. Once inside, our bozo could not be understood because he forgot to cut a mouth hole in the bag. After repeating himself several times, he finally got a handful of money and ran out of the bank and into the waiting arms of police officers.
Why the hell do people invent this stuff?
Everybody is looking for ways to cash in on the war-against-terrorism bullshit. Do you really need to ask?
The so-called "war on drugs" launched by Reagan did the same, and look at the market now: the job application drug-testing market (which only tests for cannabis usage, funnily enough, if you're a heroine or cocaine addict, you'll pass with flying colors and will be deemed acceptable to work at Wall-Mart) is now over $2bn, covering test paid mostly by federal money for tests (yes, that's you, the taxpayer...) and ClearP-type products sold at 50 bucks a pop, paid by applicants anxious to pass the test.
Are there some people completely devoid of privacy concerns? Or are they just greedy to make money?
As someone explained to me once, corporation are by law required to work towards enriching stakeholders. Moral concerns aren't their problems, essentially turning them into psychopathic types of entities. So, to answer your questions, yes and yes.
I'll have to make sure I am bloated... that way they won't be able to identify me when I am not!
It's a 3D *face* scan, not a tummy scan...
Cool, not only could viruses switch what appears on your screen when you type you could also wake up and find a huge picture of goatse on your keyboard.
Goatse keyboard virus effect on the cheap! --> look carefully at the three adjacent I, O and P keys, squint a bit, and you can just about see the hands of the goatse guy stretching the, erhm, "O".
I have French and German keyboard. Occasionally, when I know I'll be typing for an extended period of time in French or German, I power off and switch keyboard.
I did try to have several keyboards connected, but it turns out it's not so great: I could either:
- daisy-chain keyboards on the PS/2 connectors, which doesn't work well because (1) they draw too much current and (2) all keyboards receive the PC codes, while only one is concerned by them, and it messes up the other keyboards' internal states
- use the US kbd on the PS/2 port, and one or two as USB keyboards. I can't combine them all as a single keyboard with XFree86 (unless someone points me to a XF86Config-4 example that doesn't rely on a patched-and-recompiled X server?)
- use a keyboard switcher: that works, but it still leaves me with 3 keyboards cluttering my desk, and since I don't want to put them away (I do tend to switch between different layouts often), it's just not very handy
(for me), Is it reasonably quiet?
All quiet keyboards I've ever had always turned out to be utter crap. Right now, I'm banging away on a IBM Modem M keyboard that is still doing fine after years of typing (obviously) but also coffee spilling (hot and cold), heavy banging, hurling across the room, and sitting on. Some of the heavily used keys are so worn out that the plastic surface feels smooth and the etching has gone, but it's still doing fine. These things sure were made to last.
I've long since forgotten about the incredible racket noises it makes. My cat loves the feel and clicks when he stretches on it though, apparently.
...for a keyboard with some sort of dynamically-assigned logo on the keys. Not anything fancy, a 5*7 monochrome LCD logo per key would be great, I don't need the fancy colors and shortcuts.
My need is to be able to see the keys when I type with a foreign keytable. My keyboard is US qwerty, but whenever I type in French or German, since I learned to write these languages using native keytables, I have to switch to azerty or qwertz, which is mostly fine with the US keyboard since I don't look at the keys, but can be a problem for odd characters like @ or ~ that I just never remember on non-US layouts.
I'm proud to be a nerd. My girlfriend and I
:-)
Look, who do you think you're kidding here?
started talking initially because she "really, really likes nerdy guys"
Aw now come on, don't overdo it.
(she also likes geeky guys,
Well, large jpegs of pink moist young girls really can be lifelike, and with a little imagination, they really do seem to like everybody very much.
Okay, bad joke. I'm just kidding
(photos please?)
I like the whole redistrubatable deely.. Maybe we could have an apt or portage repository.. Then one could daily do an apt-get install tvshow or emerge tvshow? Now that would be super Cow Powers!
Are you kidding? real nerds make a point of receiving NerdTV in Morse code, manually, then entering the received number in a file with ed, then un-pgp the file with a secret 2048-bit key found on an IRC channel to which you can only be invited if you request it with a phrase found in a file distributed on BitTorrent, then uudecode it, then view it with an ascii-art FLI viewer.
their use of single-cylinder Lister engines
I much prefer Rimmer engines myself...
Javascript is dangerous, not standardized, and crap.
Javascript isn't necessarily crap if used correctly. However, the only times I get to "experience" it are when websites want to do something stupidly useless, like resizing windows or goofing with the mouse pointer, or bury me in multiple cascading popups.
So, I don't know if it's really dangerous or not standardized, but it's definitely annoying and therefore I turned it off, and I don't go to sites that insist on using it.
Find another alternative please.
Flash? same problem, it's annoying (and CPU-intensive).
Hey, here's a question-- Why do we [i]need[/i] styled checkboxes? I hear those words and I just get this mental image of style kicking contents in the nads over and over and over.
Not to mention - but it seems nobody really cares about this, and apparently bringing the subject up always generates a deluge of "we won't hold browser technologies back because of *this*" answers - web developers are so busy beautifying web pages and turning everything graphical and snazzy that you can always count on one category of people getting screwed with this trend: blind people.
They are the truly forgotten of this embelishment, and java[script]tization of the net. I wish web developers cared more about (1) complying strictly with W3C recommendations for accessibility and (2) not forgoing accessibility just for beauty...
Will Lynx render them correctly with ascii-art?
It's called doublethink. That's because Microsoft is Big Brother you see...
Hey Jeff, can you come to my office, I have a pink piece of paper for you.
Signed: Robert, your Boss
So the choices are wasting x hours/week reading Slashdot, or wasting CowboyNeal reading Slashdot?
A properly done multiple choice test is harder than any other format.
I agree somewhat, but at the end of the day, a multiple choice won't let the corrector understand why a student wrote this or that in a problem, which would allow him to help the student correct his misunderstanding. A full, written, argumented answer does that. That's my beef against MCQs, not that they're fair or that they can or cannot catch cheats.