"I submit they are grossly ineffective (especially for the price paid)."
But wasn't there just an Slashdot story header in the last few weeks where some editor quoted a statistic saying that TV ads are worth $1.20 per hour of ad time per viewer? That's actually quite cheap, isn't it?
If there's twenty minutes of ad time in an hour of programming then that means every hour you watch is worth about forty cents. Now, I don't know if this statistic is true or not, but if it is it really made me wonder why networks won't turn around and sell archived material for the same price over the net. A friend told me he saw a previous seasons worth of Star Trek stuff on DVD for a hundred bucks which seems absurd. If advertisers only have to pay forty cents an hour then a season of Star Trek should be a lot less than a hundred bucks.
eh hem, I'm an American in Taiwan who sells retail software for profit to people in Taiwan and China. What is your point again?
Arguments based on nothing but stereotypes don't prove much.
Where's the thiol/nanotube based FPGA?
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Future Computers
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· Score: 3, Interesting
It seems like making nano FPGAs would be the easy way to go, but never having made one myself I wouldn't really know, would I? I have done a bit of research on the subject though and apparently there is skepticism of the current king of FPGA, Xilinx, has been criticized for using an inefficient and non-standard design in their FPGAs that would supposedly work better in a much simpler layout. Obviously simplicity of design could be helpful when dealing with nanoscale materials.
On a totally separate note, I thought the DNA experiment about the party guests was a bit suspicious. I've written GRE study guides in the past and so I've spent quite a bit of time analyzing those kinds of analytical questions. From a test writer's perspective, their experiment raises some interesting issues. The GRE frequently uses seven or more entities with special requirements in the analytical section and most of the questions can be solved with a piece of paper and pencil in a few minutes using simple logic. If that wasn't the case, then how would the test writer be sure what the correct answer is if they couldn't verify it?
So, if they've got all these special case situations with perhaps dozens of variables for each party goer then how do they know what the right answer is and that there are not more than one right answer --the bane of test writers. And if they do know how to accurately calculate this data, then is it really as complicated as they make it seem?
Or. ..
The enormous advantages of socialist reform will be forced upon the government by the military. How historically appropriate.
Ever watch Battleship Potempkin? How come you can't get that on Kazaa?
America has always been a country with strong socialist tendencies. And the US military itself has some shockingly socialist tendencies. Have you ever seen military housing? It's some of the only housing I've seen in the States where they don't fence the yards. That's a bit creepy for me, but I was struck by how much it reminded me of the suggestions of various utopian socialist writers.
One could argue that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are socialist documents that Marx wouldn't have had too many problems with except for the appalling lack of a right to food and shelter. You have a right to a gun and a lawyer but not a home and food? Seems like a work in progress to me.
You say you want a revolution --hey, don't worry the military specializes in revolutions.
After seeing the pic in the Taipei Times link I was totally disapointed. I was giving the first article the benefit of the doubt that they mean super sized in terms of data, not amount of plastic. Who do they think they are making album sized media? I get pissed off at Japanese optical media manufacturers for dragging their feet on bring the newer lasers to market quicker and such, but at least they stick to the standard CD size.
It's particularly silly to see this being pushed on the island of Taiwan that entered the PC market which is now the backbone of its economy with power supplies and standardized case designs. I could understand if this was coming from Brazil or some other country trying to usurp the low end peripherals market by forcing a new form factor, but Taiwan? I don't get it.
I would have been more impressed with a 20Gig disc the size of a CD. This product is obviously strictly experimental because it's ignoring some of the most obvious market realities as anyone who looks at the picture can quickly conclude.
But how about something that is a cross between an engineer, a data miner and an IP lawyer and a programmer. That's what I'm starting to get into right now. One person taking on the USPTO database is like a chihuahua trying to screw a labrador though.
The basic premise of my new enterprise is to faciliate what was supposed to be the good side of patents --distributing valuable data about commercially viable products and processes to future generations. It seems like this is one area that is totally overlooked. Everybody is concerned, and for excellent historical reasons, about the growing power of patents since the Reagan revolution (turns head and spits on the floor) when the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) was formed and reversed the US policy that had protected American's from the monopolies that helped create the previous depression and could easily lead us into another.
We Americans of free and liberal thought should be concerned and pissed off about this, but simply reacting and being critical is where the old left always gets strung up by these devious winner-take-all mentality losers who are just looking for a chink in the armor that they can whittle away at. The only way to win that name calling game as a liberal is to be like Jesus or Ghandi and walk away from it no matter how bad you want to fight back. It's the hard road, but it's the only way. Talking shit about lawyers is pissing in the wind. It gives them a hard on. The scariest thing to a lawyer is being ignored.
So rather than fighting the power, just forget about those bozos. I think the productive thing is to do is to turn this patent lemons into a great big glass of lemonade. The promise of patents was that for the pain of a short term monopolies they would make abundant intellectual property freely available to all people over time. Well it's been a few hundred years now and nobody uses all this data except major corporations. The only use anybody has for patents is to control market positions, but they were supposed to be about sharing ideas way back once upon a time and lawyers and politicians still love to smirk and throw that shit in your face about how it's for the long term good of the citizenry at large, so if you really want to screw with them, make their rhetoric true.
To this end, I'm spending some time going through the USPTO database and trying to come up with some lesson plans for teachers based on the material. So far, it's pretty tough. The USPTO database is an enormous source of data that must be fascinating in many ways, but it's got to be contextualized and organized in order to make it interesting for students. I was really bummed to find the SGML tools project was ended because a lot of the patent database is in SGML, but none of the older stuff is which makes it even harder to deal with. But who knows, perhaps patents really can be a good thing when coupled with the free flow of information made possible by open source technologies like the Internet.
Honestly, I doubt it's true. I think it's gonna end in another depression unless the courts are reformed but the cat's out of the bag and it will take a major crisis to put it back. Last time it required a World War.
But in the mean time I'll see if I can't come up with something relatively entertaining and informative to pass the time. If you've got any experience working with the USPTO's SGML, feel free to chip in on your experiences as I'm just getting started on this.
Last time I checked their home page, Capstone said they were selling in volume and they've also got several sizes now. GE also does a good business in multi megawatt gas turbines and has for decades. In fact, my dear uncle who has a private hydro concern has complained for years that the widespread use of gas turbines for peak power load balancing has prevented other alternative forms of energy from becoming price competitive which is basically a good thing for the consumer. The downside is it keeps power generation from being an exciting field with current technologies since the answers are already in place and unless you can beat the price per watt by a long shot nobody is going to care about your gee whiz technology or environmental benefits. After all, a gas turbine is rather environmentally friendly already not to mention low maintenance and flexible operation.
But speaking of Capstone, I can't remember where I saw it but there was a new patent done in conjunction with Capstone where someone was running a Capstone gas turbine with waste heat from a fuel cell and the bizarre thing was that they were just using hot air to run the thing. It was real specific in the patent that they weren't combusting fuel in the turbine, but relying on the heat generated by the fuel cell.
Well, that blew me out of the water. I had always wondered if it was possible to power a gas turbine on hot air alone because obviously solar concentrators can produce hot air, but I thought there was no such beast and then I run across this patent where it sounds like they're doing exactly that.
So, to get back to this article, if it's true you can spin gas turbines off of hot air alone, how about putting these microturbines in a parabolic solar concentrator? Let's hear about that shit.
Small office, only around a dozen machines. We went with RedHat 7.1 and OpenOffice1.0. after getting hit with a threat for an audit by the BSA delivered by a local cop --we're in Taiwan.
We did have some bizarre problems with Open Office that we can't figure out, but we just used Star Office instead on those machines and so far there's no complaints although the OpenOffice screw up didn't look good. Overall, the staff definitely prefer it. Some of the younger staff actually have experience using Linux in their college dorms which we were very surprised to learn.
The management tends to panic over any little delay the transition causes, but as long as they see desktops and word processors they don't really know the difference.
I think it's important to mention that we've been using CodeWeavers RH rpms of Wine and we've found quite a few apps that worked fine with no adjustments from the standard rpm install that aren't in their database. In fact, it seemed most of the MS shareware type stuff that we wanted to keep worked just fine and that the database should be arranged so that it shows apps that DONT work rather than ones that DO. And what bears even more attention is that this self same database is filled with posts like --you dirty scoundrels will never get this app working under Linux. I find this totally bizarre. If you go check it out, look at some of the comments on Photoshop. Why would anybody take their precious time to go posting negative comments in such a place? It's bizarre how zealous people get over an OS.
Are you sure you're not simplifying the glassblowing scene a bit? I love it as a hobby when I can afford it, but I would hardly recommend it as a great career move.
I've taken glassblowing classes at both community colleges and state universities (you'll find it in the chemistry dept.) and I love blowing glass. It's very therapeutic and a lot of fun, but a good way to make money? Hmm. I'm not so sure. I've spent a lot of time and money buying glass stock and building custom torches to get killer bends and making all kinds of various custom equipment for filling neon signs. I spent months as an apprentice in a small neon shop and hung out in bigger shops trying to get a feel for the trade. My feeling was, avoid the big shops. You'd be better off as an auto mechanic.
As well as doing lampwork --ie making trinkets-- building chemistry lab equipment and even trying to supply paraphenalia to head shops. (The last two being an obviously risky combination.) I've tried quite a few angles on making glasswork into a paying proposition and everything I've seen in many years of amateur glassblowing and neon sign making suggests that it's difficult to make it profitable on your own even you hustle hard and if you work for someone else the pay sucks and the conditions are terrible. It's an awesome hobby and should be a requirement in school. But I'm skeptical that it pays the bills as easily as you're suggesting.
Now if you're saying you can make ten --let's say tobacco-- pipes in an hour and sell them for four bucks a piece, I've got no problem with that, but that's not really the same thing as a steady job which is what someone who used to be a programmer is hoping for.
In the end glassblowing is an art like sculpting and welding can go in the same category. That's great if you're looking to express yourself, but if you're talking about making cash bucks --you're just fucking around.
I think this is the right approach.
Understanding the mind is a an iffy proposition. In a way it's like measurement of sub-atomic particles, to define and measure your subject you must contextualize your own relationship to it so you have no choice but to define meanings arbitratily and nobody is satisfied that what you're doing is scientific. You can use language to describe the mind, but the mind is a concept that only has meaning within language and at the same time is the source of your language skills, so it has a tendency to infinitely receed from definition and lead to endless bickering over petty details that do little to clarify the object at hand.
But simply recording enough sensory data to replay the sum total of one's sensory experiences is totally doable.
I sat down and looked at how much DivX 640 by 352 compressed video you'd get on a terrabyte and it was like five or six months of non-stop video and audio data at a fairly decent quality. Given that blue laser DVD is supposed to be hitting terrabyte per disc already, it looks like recording the sights and sounds of ones entire life, albeit at compromised quality will easily become doable, if not commonly done in our lifetimes.
I think Kazaa is missing something here. If filesharing was to be totally legitimized by a coalition of ISPs setting aside funds like radio stations to pay artists --which seems amazingly sensible-- then it would be much more logical from the ISP's position to use NNTP for their wholesale music distribution than P2P for obvious bandwidth reasons. Rather than letting the users suck up the net bandwidth that the ISP pays for, they'd obviously want their users hooking up locally. I don't see where Kazaa would still have a roll.
From my experience, many ISPs don't offer full news services precisely because they think there are a lot of legal issues they don't want to get into with the binary groups. If an agreeable rate not unlike that paid by radio stations was reached which legitimized file sharing, then it seems obvious that NNTP to big ISP hosted RAID drives with months of retention would be the way to do the distribution rather than having users rely so heavily on P2P. A few hundred terrabytes of disk space may seem like a big costs at first, but compare the cost of distributing all that data locally rather than letting users go connect with who-knows-where in some other hemisphere. Sounds like a great scam for big ISPs really if they could pull it off. Users would still pay for their bandwidth, but they wouldn't really be using much of the ISPs actual pipe to the net.
Besides, using NNTP, you could have it relatively organized to the extent that you could have moderated groups along the lines you'd find in record stores or a library. It just sounds like Kazaa is asking for a solution so big it will make itself irrelevant which is fine with me. It still doesn't work under Wine, does it?
Concerts are hardly a panacea.
First of all, only certain types of music are really effective for concerts and it's also a rather grand assumption to suggest that all musicians like to perform live.
Furthermore, most people who actually go to concerts are there for numerous reasons beyond simply supporting the whoever the band happens to be and often a large part of the audiance at a concert might not even care who the band is. This concert crowd phenomena partially accounts for the reason that concerts are more popular in certain locales than other. It's not really the band that makes the concert happen as much as the audiance. Concerts are not charities for bands, they're social events that go way beyond the band and expecting this to become the "new" way for bands to get paid seems a bit naive.
I'm not overly concerned with the fate of musicians as most of my favorites are already dead or might as well be or are entirely electronic and make for great discos, but lousy concerts. Either way, I certainly don't think concerts are some magic solution any more than the idea that book authors should all become lecturers in academia. Sounds good to an outsider, but run this up on someone who it's going to affect and they're likely to have some different opinions.
Sounds like LCD incumbent FUD to me.
I've seen LCD and DLP side-by-side in a local mall and the DLP seemed to kick ass in a fairly bright environment. Now obviously there are hundreds of variables that aren't accounted for in my casual observation, but I'm surprised to hear someone who has seen DLP (wait, have you seen it?) suggest it's inferior to LCD. Everything I've seen and heard is quite the opposite --ie, DLP kicks ass over LCD in every regard and is likely to dominate the projector market within in the next few years. But I've been reading a lot of MEMs stuff and demos are easily rigged, so perhaps it's just hype. Nonetheless, I did see one that looked nice and sharp as wide as a theater screen in an environment that made LCDs look like crap.
I've also seen some very expensive DLP boxes on the web, so I don't think you can safely assume that DLP is only a bargain solution. Besides, if you're assuming that it's not as good because it's cheaper, you might consider the manufacturing technique of the DLP being a significant advantage over LCD. So far, my understanding is that TI is still asking a bit much in licensing for the cheapskate interests in Taiwan --bless their stingy little hearts-- to jump into it, but when the price looks right for both parties, I'm assuming these DLPs are going to crash the LCD party in a big way which is just as well because that party has been charging too much at the door all along and there's no sign of prices dropping precipitously with such shoddy, labor intensive manufacturing processes. How can such a process compete against a chip based solution except through FUD?
Re:I put up a web page on my CD silkscreen adventu
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Silkscreening CD-Rs?
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· Score: 2
It would be my pleasure.
The first page there you have me making silkscreening frames that are suited for CDs. The frames you buy at silkscreen shops are usually square and made for T-shirts. So, that's where I cut my thumb.
The next shot is the pivotal step where you use a bright light to expose the emulsion and devlop it by placing a transparency that was printed on an ink jet over the pattern.
Finally, you see the finished product.
The next page is just talking about various formulas for emulsions ans showing pictures of emulsions settting up. If you're not a big chemistry fan, I'd recommend just buying a product called Liquid Light which I hear comes with instructions and you can also google it to find lots of T-shirt instructions.
My own technique was to purchase silver nitrate salts and experiment with different substrates and activators but it was partly for educational purposes that I went this route. If you just want the CDs done and done quickly then I'd recommend just buying a pre-mixed batch of emulsions.
When I do finally get all the details on the chemistry worked out so I can take someone from metallic silver to hardy silkscreen emulsion, I'll be sure to share with anyone interested.
In the mean time, you can also use a stamp technique and a few stickers with reflective backgrounds to get a pretty cool looking CD that you can kick out by the thousands at low cost.
Amen on that hypertext comment. The battle has not even begun.
Most folks aren't lawyers, but generally people have seen some texts of court opinions at one point or another. I was just going over some court documents related to the patent courts --AKA, the CAFC-- and I was struck by how computer code-like the text was. The only reason people think it's hard to read court cases, especially patent court cases, is because they're riddled with links to other cases. Since the system was developed in a book only format in a rather rag-tag fashion, the text becomes very difficult to read because of all the notations they've used to indicate varying types of links.
In my opinion, requiring the legal system to use electronic hyperlinked texts for court opinions and other legal documents is absoultely essential to any kind of IP reform. Until judges are benefitting from hypertext in an immediate way, they're going to fail to see the urgency of advocating its use or deciding in favor of electronic formats.
Law and court documents should be readable by anyone with standard high school level English skills. The same is true for patents themselves. The core of a patent isn't the drawings. In fact, the drawings are often intentionally misleading to avoid disclosure of importatnt information valuable to competitors. The important part of a patent is the references to other works, these are natural places for hyperlinks. I bet Bounty Quest would move a lot quicker if patents had hyperlinks.
That's my own quote --I think-- but it was one of the major themes of Big J. Derrida's book White Mythology which was one of his more important works. In it, he gave a number of convincing arguments to the effect that text preceeds speech or that speech was something like a metaphor of text. The notion that speech came before text could be found in writings going back to the Greeks, but Derrida switched it around and presented the whole thing as a deconstruction of western civilization, christianity and knowledge. Rather heavy stuff, but fun when you're a kid.
Anyhow, I thought I'd point out that this had already been concluded in other elements of academia --yep, that's what they do over there in the English dept. Hey, English is a programming language too after all. Look at Smalltalk if you don't believe it.
Anyhow, speech being the little brother of text doesn't necessarily mean that talking computers will never exist. I agree with those who say a combo plate is usually a good bargain. We need to look to the next level rather than battling one sense against another over what the best I/O channel is. I'm talking about total sensory immersion. Hal didn't have jack shit to offer the crew compared to the holodeck. I mean come on, playing chess and you had to move the pieces for him with your hand? That aint going to cut it for entertainment these days.
Bzzt!
Nah, sorry man. That's a common misperception. Soap is much older than civilization. People used to think it was a Roman invention, but then evidence of it turned up in Egypt and now it's safe to assume it was probably one of man's favorites since before agriculture and probably not much more recent than fire and the concept of cooking. Think about it, a chunk of fat simply has to fall into the ashes of a fire to form a layer of soap. Combining fat and ashes makes soap and that's all there is to it. If you're the chief soap renderer for your tribe, it does help to heat the two ingredients in a clay jar --keep that in mind in case you ever fall into a time machine heading backwards. Never know.
Seriously, soap is not some high-tech ultra modern invention. It's cool, sure but it's not a modern invention.
Indeed, the bubbles that soap makes are very similar in structure and composition to the foam on the oceans and there is reason to believe that such omnipresent spherical lipid structures in conjunction with the action of the ocean's tides may be the true origins of the first cellular membranes. So, you could say that soap preceeds life altogether and may be the basis of life. So, there goes the idea that soap is a recent invention.
This is off-topic though, so I'll AC it in.
Your helpful tutor AhFoo
I put up a web page on my CD silkscreen adventures
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Silkscreening CD-Rs?
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· Score: 4, Informative
In itself it's not directly addressing your issues, but it's definitely about one dude's adventure in trying to silkscreen CDs from scratch and I have pics.
Although I'm still waiting to get some of the chemicals to get my emulsion formula right, ie chromium tartrate, I painted silver CDRs (uncoated twenty cents a piece) with acrylic and had no problems with either damaging the CDs or drives.
Check the page if you want to see a down and dirty DIY effort.
There's also this earlier Slashdot thread that was supposed to be on automating CDR duplication but went into various other aspects of the job as well such as silkscreening and some debates about media pricing.
CBT is an old question in computing. In Windows and to an extent in the Mac still, Macromedia Authorware is the only real choice. Director is alright for presentations. But if you need to actually manage flow in a decent way --ie, adaptive testing-- you need Authorware and its underlying Pascal logic.
But I'm not here to plug Authorware. Nah, fuck that. I'll let Macromedia handle that on their own dime.
What I'm here for is to ask if anybody can help me in my quest to make something as kick ass as Authorware for Linux. Yeah, as in help me do something for the community. Viva la puepla etcetra.
Is there any chance that anybody knows where to get source for PLATO? I think CBT is a key element that is being overlooked by open source and taking a look at the PLATO code would probably be quite helpful for someone trying to come up with something a little more tasty than what's already out there.
For those who aren't up to speed on the history of CBT, PLATO was the forerunner to the Mac app called Course of Action which later became Macromedia Authorware. PLATO was written in the language TUTOR and I've had a hard time even finding a decent implementation of TUTOR although I've found some code snippets that look very intriguing and revealing --shocking even. If you know where to get any of this early stuff, please share. I've got time these days and I'd like to take a looksie.
As it is, in open source you are SOL for CBT. I'd like to be a part of changing that and I think one way of going at it would be to simply backtrack and see how the leading Windows solution came to be in it's current state.
An updated open source implementation of PLATO with a few media widgets might be a real opportunity to actually move open source to the forefront of CBT and education in general. One thing about Authorware is that they've got no motivation to go where the real action is. They prefer things nice and proprietary. MP3 support in audio only came out quite recently as they were trying to push a proprietary shockwave audio format. As for DIVX drivers, well fergit about it. Closed source has to waste resources trying to trap consumers into purchasing decisions where open source can simply cut to the point which is media delivery.
Actually, I've drank lye solution before by accident. We were making hydrogen baloons and using the same beer bottles we were drinking as reaction vessles. Bad lab technique, I realize.
So, from my experienice, it's unlikely you'd actually swallow it because as soon as it hits the warm part of your tongue and begins to react your body tells you something is very wrong and you tend to spit it out violently and start rinsing with water.
I was with a bunch of drunk idiots who wouldn't take it seriously and call the ambulance, so I ran into a nearby grocery store and grabbed a bunch of lemons thinking this would be the logical solution to the problem --I was inexperienced in these matters at the time and not thinking very clearly.
So, I just grab a lemon right there in the store and bite into it. Holy shit! It was the wrong thing to do, the reaction was violent and excruciatingly painful. The bloody red chunk of lemon fell from my drooling mouth as I sank to the floor in drool and tears.
There was two old ladies in the produce section and when they saw what I had done and the blood on the yellow lemons they pushed each other into the bread isle looking quite concerned.
Being in such a bizarre state, I insisted on trying the lemons again. So, I bundled a bunch of them in my shirt and sat down in the cereal section forcing myself to bite down on them and moaning.
Finally, I went up to the cashier with the bloody chunks of chewed lemon and tried to smile and act casual and I said through my screwed up mouth --"I wanted to see if they were any good."
The fucker didn't even laugh.
So, I got back to the house and my associates had started to straighten up a bit in my absence. They informed me that the lye bottle itself said not to use acids if ingested and they gave me some half and half which was what the bottle suggested and it instantly eased the pain. It was like the fire went out.
So, I thought my mouth was fucked. I called poison control and they said it was too late to do anything. I'd just have to live with it.
Well, the next day I looked in the mirror and I was terrified. My gums had receeded quite a bit and my tongue looked like hell. My cheeks and lips had clearly lost tissue. I was way way bummed.
But in the end, it turned out to be no big deal. Within three days my mouth had more or less totally healed and I swear my breath was fresher than ever and my taste buds seemed totally alive and sensitive to delicate tastes. For about a year, I was overly sensitive to anything basic, but it went away.
You think on-line transations get expensive after they become mainstream? That strikes me as odd. Credit card rates that should be have been criminialized were in place long before the net went mainstream. In fact, it's not unreasonable to suspect that exact issue might have been one of the big reasons e-commerce didn't fly. It was starting out the gate with a tax going to the card companies, and for what, money handling? Isn't the government supposed to provide the currency.
According to the Constitution that's how it was supposed to go.
Net banking fees emerged AFTER it went mainstream?
Sorry, that's factually incorrect.
While it may be true that all systems can be hacked eventually, let's keep in mind that we're not comparing this digital currency flow system to a flawless real world system.
Counterfeit currency exists. According to the US Secret Service, the amount that they recovered annually prior to '96 equals about one thousandth of the paper currency in circulation. But notice this key word "recover." That doesn't mean that counterfeit currency only represents one thousandth of the circulating money supply, that's now much the SS physically inspected, identified and removed from circulation.
Furthermore, the analogy of busting into the database is more like robbing a bank than committing forgery. Let's not pretend we don't have bank robberies in the real world. And the real world break-ins are often accompanied by murder which is less frequent when some bozo hacks a database.
I'm sure that the original idea was that everybody could just apply for network numbers because that's what I did in '95 and they're still there although they subsequently became totally unroutable. But that's a long story that would be redundant for some and would take awhile to explain to others. Suffice it to say, IPV6 is certainly keeping with the spirit of the internet as it was. Numbers for all, I say --and no, not for money, just for the sake of the net.
And while we're passing out numbers, let's pass out letters as well. Why we can't have at least several hundred thousand or a million top level domains still escapes me. The domain name system was supposed to humanize the network by making addresses easy to remember. Bravo, good work. But the next step is to allow complete sentences because it is really a sentence rather than a word that encapsulates a thought and serves as a convenient unit of memory. I'm sure this will provoke some harsh facts of life lectures on routing tables or some esoteric aspect of DNS that I'm not aware of, but that's cool. It's a request for comments and those are my comments.
his adult life and who rides his bike by the CIA office where they park their convoy of matching pink 50cc scooters --I'm not kidding-- everyday on his way to work, I can tell you that spooky stories about mainland China are that. . . . spooky stories. Dime a dozen, they wrap fish with spooky China stories around here.
You want to know about a spooky country--Japan. That's a scare story that has everything to do with Taiwan. Those whacky Japanese are playing scuicide with their economy and they're going to take Taiwan with them.
DOS attacks from Mainland China are not a threat, Japan's serene implosion is a major threat to the global economy. DOS attacks, not scarry, Yen at 200, very very scarry.
I can think of a great example, I think a new intravenous delivery device based on the MEMs blood sugar monitoring devices with the bloodless micro-needles could be the answer to the vast majority of problems associated with drug abuse.
Most of the clinically documentable physical health concerns associated with drug abuse have to do with damage to the organs through which the drugs are administered and with overdose. An internally regulated device that went directly into the blood stream without exposing the user, or those around the user to the user's blood would be a panacea in my book.
But to people morally against the use of drugs rather than strictly concerned with the health effects, such a device would be the devil's own tool. For the same reason that I see such a recreation device as a promising panacea that could make even hard drugs socially acceptable and thus much more manageable, others would say is was the mark of the beast etc etc.
So, in deciding what is abusive and what is not, you get into some rather grey areas. It's easy to say don't do bad things, but getting down to brass tacks on what's bad and what's good is not quite that simple when you're dealing with laege groups of people such as nations and planets.
Even the notion championed by foresight of universal prosperity could be hard for many die hard capitalists to come to terms with.
Texas Instruments has clearly shook up the projector world with it's Digital Video Processor MEMs chips. How long before Taiwan tools up to starts making those in mainland China. What will that do to projection TV makers and projector LCDs? Entire markets can be disrupted quickly by new technologies on a micro scale.
Who knows? And what's taking so damn long? All I really care about is, when can I get a six pack of six second release Cocaine dermal patches and a few joints for me and the wife at 7-11 so I can go home and watch big screen movies from the hot tub in full effect. Is that too much to ask?
Slashdot Mirror
"I submit they are grossly ineffective (especially for the price paid)."
But wasn't there just an Slashdot story header in the last few weeks where some editor quoted a statistic saying that TV ads are worth $1.20 per hour of ad time per viewer? That's actually quite cheap, isn't it?
If there's twenty minutes of ad time in an hour of programming then that means every hour you watch is worth about forty cents. Now, I don't know if this statistic is true or not, but if it is it really made me wonder why networks won't turn around and sell archived material for the same price over the net. A friend told me he saw a previous seasons worth of Star Trek stuff on DVD for a hundred bucks which seems absurd. If advertisers only have to pay forty cents an hour then a season of Star Trek should be a lot less than a hundred bucks.
eh hem, I'm an American in Taiwan who sells retail software for profit to people in Taiwan and China. What is your point again?
Arguments based on nothing but stereotypes don't prove much.
It seems like making nano FPGAs would be the easy way to go, but never having made one myself I wouldn't really know, would I? I have done a bit of research on the subject though and apparently there is skepticism of the current king of FPGA, Xilinx, has been criticized for using an inefficient and non-standard design in their FPGAs that would supposedly work better in a much simpler layout. Obviously simplicity of design could be helpful when dealing with nanoscale materials.
On a totally separate note, I thought the DNA experiment about the party guests was a bit suspicious. I've written GRE study guides in the past and so I've spent quite a bit of time analyzing those kinds of analytical questions. From a test writer's perspective, their experiment raises some interesting issues. The GRE frequently uses seven or more entities with special requirements in the analytical section and most of the questions can be solved with a piece of paper and pencil in a few minutes using simple logic. If that wasn't the case, then how would the test writer be sure what the correct answer is if they couldn't verify it?
So, if they've got all these special case situations with perhaps dozens of variables for each party goer then how do they know what the right answer is and that there are not more than one right answer --the bane of test writers. And if they do know how to accurately calculate this data, then is it really as complicated as they make it seem?
Or. . .
The enormous advantages of socialist reform will be forced upon the government by the military. How historically appropriate.
Ever watch Battleship Potempkin? How come you can't get that on Kazaa?
America has always been a country with strong socialist tendencies. And the US military itself has some shockingly socialist tendencies. Have you ever seen military housing? It's some of the only housing I've seen in the States where they don't fence the yards. That's a bit creepy for me, but I was struck by how much it reminded me of the suggestions of various utopian socialist writers.
One could argue that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are socialist documents that Marx wouldn't have had too many problems with except for the appalling lack of a right to food and shelter. You have a right to a gun and a lawyer but not a home and food? Seems like a work in progress to me.
You say you want a revolution --hey, don't worry the military specializes in revolutions.
After seeing the pic in the Taipei Times link I was totally disapointed. I was giving the first article the benefit of the doubt that they mean super sized in terms of data, not amount of plastic. Who do they think they are making album sized media? I get pissed off at Japanese optical media manufacturers for dragging their feet on bring the newer lasers to market quicker and such, but at least they stick to the standard CD size.
It's particularly silly to see this being pushed on the island of Taiwan that entered the PC market which is now the backbone of its economy with power supplies and standardized case designs. I could understand if this was coming from Brazil or some other country trying to usurp the low end peripherals market by forcing a new form factor, but Taiwan? I don't get it.
I would have been more impressed with a 20Gig disc the size of a CD. This product is obviously strictly experimental because it's ignoring some of the most obvious market realities as anyone who looks at the picture can quickly conclude.
But how about something that is a cross between an engineer, a data miner and an IP lawyer and a programmer. That's what I'm starting to get into right now. One person taking on the USPTO database is like a chihuahua trying to screw a labrador though.
The basic premise of my new enterprise is to faciliate what was supposed to be the good side of patents --distributing valuable data about commercially viable products and processes to future generations. It seems like this is one area that is totally overlooked. Everybody is concerned, and for excellent historical reasons, about the growing power of patents since the Reagan revolution (turns head and spits on the floor) when the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) was formed and reversed the US policy that had protected American's from the monopolies that helped create the previous depression and could easily lead us into another.
We Americans of free and liberal thought should be concerned and pissed off about this, but simply reacting and being critical is where the old left always gets strung up by these devious winner-take-all mentality losers who are just looking for a chink in the armor that they can whittle away at. The only way to win that name calling game as a liberal is to be like Jesus or Ghandi and walk away from it no matter how bad you want to fight back. It's the hard road, but it's the only way. Talking shit about lawyers is pissing in the wind. It gives them a hard on. The scariest thing to a lawyer is being ignored.
So rather than fighting the power, just forget about those bozos. I think the productive thing is to do is to turn this patent lemons into a great big glass of lemonade. The promise of patents was that for the pain of a short term monopolies they would make abundant intellectual property freely available to all people over time. Well it's been a few hundred years now and nobody uses all this data except major corporations. The only use anybody has for patents is to control market positions, but they were supposed to be about sharing ideas way back once upon a time and lawyers and politicians still love to smirk and throw that shit in your face about how it's for the long term good of the citizenry at large, so if you really want to screw with them, make their rhetoric true.
To this end, I'm spending some time going through the USPTO database and trying to come up with some lesson plans for teachers based on the material. So far, it's pretty tough. The USPTO database is an enormous source of data that must be fascinating in many ways, but it's got to be contextualized and organized in order to make it interesting for students. I was really bummed to find the SGML tools project was ended because a lot of the patent database is in SGML, but none of the older stuff is which makes it even harder to deal with. But who knows, perhaps patents really can be a good thing when coupled with the free flow of information made possible by open source technologies like the Internet.
Honestly, I doubt it's true. I think it's gonna end in another depression unless the courts are reformed but the cat's out of the bag and it will take a major crisis to put it back. Last time it required a World War.
But in the mean time I'll see if I can't come up with something relatively entertaining and informative to pass the time. If you've got any experience working with the USPTO's SGML, feel free to chip in on your experiences as I'm just getting started on this.
Last time I checked their home page, Capstone said they were selling in volume and they've also got several sizes now. GE also does a good business in multi megawatt gas turbines and has for decades. In fact, my dear uncle who has a private hydro concern has complained for years that the widespread use of gas turbines for peak power load balancing has prevented other alternative forms of energy from becoming price competitive which is basically a good thing for the consumer. The downside is it keeps power generation from being an exciting field with current technologies since the answers are already in place and unless you can beat the price per watt by a long shot nobody is going to care about your gee whiz technology or environmental benefits. After all, a gas turbine is rather environmentally friendly already not to mention low maintenance and flexible operation.
But speaking of Capstone, I can't remember where I saw it but there was a new patent done in conjunction with Capstone where someone was running a Capstone gas turbine with waste heat from a fuel cell and the bizarre thing was that they were just using hot air to run the thing. It was real specific in the patent that they weren't combusting fuel in the turbine, but relying on the heat generated by the fuel cell.
Well, that blew me out of the water. I had always wondered if it was possible to power a gas turbine on hot air alone because obviously solar concentrators can produce hot air, but I thought there was no such beast and then I run across this patent where it sounds like they're doing exactly that.
So, to get back to this article, if it's true you can spin gas turbines off of hot air alone, how about putting these microturbines in a parabolic solar concentrator? Let's hear about that shit.
Small office, only around a dozen machines. We went with RedHat 7.1 and OpenOffice1.0. after getting hit with a threat for an audit by the BSA delivered by a local cop --we're in Taiwan.
We did have some bizarre problems with Open Office that we can't figure out, but we just used Star Office instead on those machines and so far there's no complaints although the OpenOffice screw up didn't look good. Overall, the staff definitely prefer it. Some of the younger staff actually have experience using Linux in their college dorms which we were very surprised to learn.
The management tends to panic over any little delay the transition causes, but as long as they see desktops and word processors they don't really know the difference.
I think it's important to mention that we've been using CodeWeavers RH rpms of Wine and we've found quite a few apps that worked fine with no adjustments from the standard rpm install that aren't in their database. In fact, it seemed most of the MS shareware type stuff that we wanted to keep worked just fine and that the database should be arranged so that it shows apps that DONT work rather than ones that DO. And what bears even more attention is that this self same database is filled with posts like --you dirty scoundrels will never get this app working under Linux. I find this totally bizarre. If you go check it out, look at some of the comments on Photoshop. Why would anybody take their precious time to go posting negative comments in such a place? It's bizarre how zealous people get over an OS.
Are you sure you're not simplifying the glassblowing scene a bit? I love it as a hobby when I can afford it, but I would hardly recommend it as a great career move.
I've taken glassblowing classes at both community colleges and state universities (you'll find it in the chemistry dept.) and I love blowing glass. It's very therapeutic and a lot of fun, but a good way to make money? Hmm. I'm not so sure. I've spent a lot of time and money buying glass stock and building custom torches to get killer bends and making all kinds of various custom equipment for filling neon signs. I spent months as an apprentice in a small neon shop and hung out in bigger shops trying to get a feel for the trade. My feeling was, avoid the big shops. You'd be better off as an auto mechanic.
As well as doing lampwork --ie making trinkets-- building chemistry lab equipment and even trying to supply paraphenalia to head shops. (The last two being an obviously risky combination.) I've tried quite a few angles on making glasswork into a paying proposition and everything I've seen in many years of amateur glassblowing and neon sign making suggests that it's difficult to make it profitable on your own even you hustle hard and if you work for someone else the pay sucks and the conditions are terrible. It's an awesome hobby and should be a requirement in school. But I'm skeptical that it pays the bills as easily as you're suggesting.
Now if you're saying you can make ten --let's say tobacco-- pipes in an hour and sell them for four bucks a piece, I've got no problem with that, but that's not really the same thing as a steady job which is what someone who used to be a programmer is hoping for.
In the end glassblowing is an art like sculpting and welding can go in the same category. That's great if you're looking to express yourself, but if you're talking about making cash bucks --you're just fucking around.
I think this is the right approach.
Understanding the mind is a an iffy proposition. In a way it's like measurement of sub-atomic particles, to define and measure your subject you must contextualize your own relationship to it so you have no choice but to define meanings arbitratily and nobody is satisfied that what you're doing is scientific. You can use language to describe the mind, but the mind is a concept that only has meaning within language and at the same time is the source of your language skills, so it has a tendency to infinitely receed from definition and lead to endless bickering over petty details that do little to clarify the object at hand.
But simply recording enough sensory data to replay the sum total of one's sensory experiences is totally doable.
I sat down and looked at how much DivX 640 by 352 compressed video you'd get on a terrabyte and it was like five or six months of non-stop video and audio data at a fairly decent quality. Given that blue laser DVD is supposed to be hitting terrabyte per disc already, it looks like recording the sights and sounds of ones entire life, albeit at compromised quality will easily become doable, if not commonly done in our lifetimes.
I think Kazaa is missing something here. If filesharing was to be totally legitimized by a coalition of ISPs setting aside funds like radio stations to pay artists --which seems amazingly sensible-- then it would be much more logical from the ISP's position to use NNTP for their wholesale music distribution than P2P for obvious bandwidth reasons. Rather than letting the users suck up the net bandwidth that the ISP pays for, they'd obviously want their users hooking up locally. I don't see where Kazaa would still have a roll.
From my experience, many ISPs don't offer full news services precisely because they think there are a lot of legal issues they don't want to get into with the binary groups. If an agreeable rate not unlike that paid by radio stations was reached which legitimized file sharing, then it seems obvious that NNTP to big ISP hosted RAID drives with months of retention would be the way to do the distribution rather than having users rely so heavily on P2P. A few hundred terrabytes of disk space may seem like a big costs at first, but compare the cost of distributing all that data locally rather than letting users go connect with who-knows-where in some other hemisphere. Sounds like a great scam for big ISPs really if they could pull it off. Users would still pay for their bandwidth, but they wouldn't really be using much of the ISPs actual pipe to the net.
Besides, using NNTP, you could have it relatively organized to the extent that you could have moderated groups along the lines you'd find in record stores or a library. It just sounds like Kazaa is asking for a solution so big it will make itself irrelevant which is fine with me. It still doesn't work under Wine, does it?
Concerts are hardly a panacea.
First of all, only certain types of music are really effective for concerts and it's also a rather grand assumption to suggest that all musicians like to perform live.
Furthermore, most people who actually go to concerts are there for numerous reasons beyond simply supporting the whoever the band happens to be and often a large part of the audiance at a concert might not even care who the band is. This concert crowd phenomena partially accounts for the reason that concerts are more popular in certain locales than other. It's not really the band that makes the concert happen as much as the audiance. Concerts are not charities for bands, they're social events that go way beyond the band and expecting this to become the "new" way for bands to get paid seems a bit naive.
I'm not overly concerned with the fate of musicians as most of my favorites are already dead or might as well be or are entirely electronic and make for great discos, but lousy concerts. Either way, I certainly don't think concerts are some magic solution any more than the idea that book authors should all become lecturers in academia. Sounds good to an outsider, but run this up on someone who it's going to affect and they're likely to have some different opinions.
Sounds like LCD incumbent FUD to me.
I've seen LCD and DLP side-by-side in a local mall and the DLP seemed to kick ass in a fairly bright environment. Now obviously there are hundreds of variables that aren't accounted for in my casual observation, but I'm surprised to hear someone who has seen DLP (wait, have you seen it?) suggest it's inferior to LCD. Everything I've seen and heard is quite the opposite --ie, DLP kicks ass over LCD in every regard and is likely to dominate the projector market within in the next few years. But I've been reading a lot of MEMs stuff and demos are easily rigged, so perhaps it's just hype. Nonetheless, I did see one that looked nice and sharp as wide as a theater screen in an environment that made LCDs look like crap.
I've also seen some very expensive DLP boxes on the web, so I don't think you can safely assume that DLP is only a bargain solution. Besides, if you're assuming that it's not as good because it's cheaper, you might consider the manufacturing technique of the DLP being a significant advantage over LCD. So far, my understanding is that TI is still asking a bit much in licensing for the cheapskate interests in Taiwan --bless their stingy little hearts-- to jump into it, but when the price looks right for both parties, I'm assuming these DLPs are going to crash the LCD party in a big way which is just as well because that party has been charging too much at the door all along and there's no sign of prices dropping precipitously with such shoddy, labor intensive manufacturing processes. How can such a process compete against a chip based solution except through FUD?
It would be my pleasure.
The first page there you have me making silkscreening frames that are suited for CDs. The frames you buy at silkscreen shops are usually square and made for T-shirts. So, that's where I cut my thumb.
The next shot is the pivotal step where you use a bright light to expose the emulsion and devlop it by placing a transparency that was printed on an ink jet over the pattern.
Finally, you see the finished product.
The next page is just talking about various formulas for emulsions ans showing pictures of emulsions settting up. If you're not a big chemistry fan, I'd recommend just buying a product called Liquid Light which I hear comes with instructions and you can also google it to find lots of T-shirt instructions.
My own technique was to purchase silver nitrate salts and experiment with different substrates and activators but it was partly for educational purposes that I went this route. If you just want the CDs done and done quickly then I'd recommend just buying a pre-mixed batch of emulsions.
When I do finally get all the details on the chemistry worked out so I can take someone from metallic silver to hardy silkscreen emulsion, I'll be sure to share with anyone interested.
In the mean time, you can also use a stamp technique and a few stickers with reflective backgrounds to get a pretty cool looking CD that you can kick out by the thousands at low cost.
Amen on that hypertext comment. The battle has not even begun.
Most folks aren't lawyers, but generally people have seen some texts of court opinions at one point or another. I was just going over some court documents related to the patent courts --AKA, the CAFC-- and I was struck by how computer code-like the text was. The only reason people think it's hard to read court cases, especially patent court cases, is because they're riddled with links to other cases. Since the system was developed in a book only format in a rather rag-tag fashion, the text becomes very difficult to read because of all the notations they've used to indicate varying types of links.
In my opinion, requiring the legal system to use electronic hyperlinked texts for court opinions and other legal documents is absoultely essential to any kind of IP reform. Until judges are benefitting from hypertext in an immediate way, they're going to fail to see the urgency of advocating its use or deciding in favor of electronic formats.
Law and court documents should be readable by anyone with standard high school level English skills. The same is true for patents themselves. The core of a patent isn't the drawings. In fact, the drawings are often intentionally misleading to avoid disclosure of importatnt information valuable to competitors. The important part of a patent is the references to other works, these are natural places for hyperlinks. I bet Bounty Quest would move a lot quicker if patents had hyperlinks.
That's my own quote --I think-- but it was one of the major themes of Big J. Derrida's book White Mythology which was one of his more important works. In it, he gave a number of convincing arguments to the effect that text preceeds speech or that speech was something like a metaphor of text. The notion that speech came before text could be found in writings going back to the Greeks, but Derrida switched it around and presented the whole thing as a deconstruction of western civilization, christianity and knowledge. Rather heavy stuff, but fun when you're a kid.
Anyhow, I thought I'd point out that this had already been concluded in other elements of academia --yep, that's what they do over there in the English dept. Hey, English is a programming language too after all. Look at Smalltalk if you don't believe it.
Anyhow, speech being the little brother of text doesn't necessarily mean that talking computers will never exist. I agree with those who say a combo plate is usually a good bargain. We need to look to the next level rather than battling one sense against another over what the best I/O channel is. I'm talking about total sensory immersion. Hal didn't have jack shit to offer the crew compared to the holodeck. I mean come on, playing chess and you had to move the pieces for him with your hand? That aint going to cut it for entertainment these days.
Bzzt!
Nah, sorry man. That's a common misperception. Soap is much older than civilization. People used to think it was a Roman invention, but then evidence of it turned up in Egypt and now it's safe to assume it was probably one of man's favorites since before agriculture and probably not much more recent than fire and the concept of cooking. Think about it, a chunk of fat simply has to fall into the ashes of a fire to form a layer of soap. Combining fat and ashes makes soap and that's all there is to it. If you're the chief soap renderer for your tribe, it does help to heat the two ingredients in a clay jar --keep that in mind in case you ever fall into a time machine heading backwards. Never know.
Seriously, soap is not some high-tech ultra modern invention. It's cool, sure but it's not a modern invention.
Indeed, the bubbles that soap makes are very similar in structure and composition to the foam on the oceans and there is reason to believe that such omnipresent spherical lipid structures in conjunction with the action of the ocean's tides may be the true origins of the first cellular membranes. So, you could say that soap preceeds life altogether and may be the basis of life. So, there goes the idea that soap is a recent invention.
This is off-topic though, so I'll AC it in.
Your helpful tutor AhFoo
In itself it's not directly addressing your issues, but it's definitely about one dude's adventure in trying to silkscreen CDs from scratch and I have pics.
Although I'm still waiting to get some of the chemicals to get my emulsion formula right, ie chromium tartrate, I painted silver CDRs (uncoated twenty cents a piece) with acrylic and had no problems with either damaging the CDs or drives.
Check the page if you want to see a down and dirty DIY effort.
There's also this earlier Slashdot thread that was supposed to be on automating CDR duplication but went into various other aspects of the job as well such as silkscreening and some debates about media pricing.
CBT is an old question in computing. In Windows and to an extent in the Mac still, Macromedia Authorware is the only real choice. Director is alright for presentations. But if you need to actually manage flow in a decent way --ie, adaptive testing-- you need Authorware and its underlying Pascal logic.
But I'm not here to plug Authorware. Nah, fuck that. I'll let Macromedia handle that on their own dime.
What I'm here for is to ask if anybody can help me in my quest to make something as kick ass as Authorware for Linux. Yeah, as in help me do something for the community. Viva la puepla etcetra.
Is there any chance that anybody knows where to get source for PLATO? I think CBT is a key element that is being overlooked by open source and taking a look at the PLATO code would probably be quite helpful for someone trying to come up with something a little more tasty than what's already out there.
For those who aren't up to speed on the history of CBT, PLATO was the forerunner to the Mac app called Course of Action which later became Macromedia Authorware. PLATO was written in the language TUTOR and I've had a hard time even finding a decent implementation of TUTOR although I've found some code snippets that look very intriguing and revealing --shocking even. If you know where to get any of this early stuff, please share. I've got time these days and I'd like to take a looksie.
As it is, in open source you are SOL for CBT. I'd like to be a part of changing that and I think one way of going at it would be to simply backtrack and see how the leading Windows solution came to be in it's current state.
An updated open source implementation of PLATO with a few media widgets might be a real opportunity to actually move open source to the forefront of CBT and education in general. One thing about Authorware is that they've got no motivation to go where the real action is. They prefer things nice and proprietary. MP3 support in audio only came out quite recently as they were trying to push a proprietary shockwave audio format. As for DIVX drivers, well fergit about it. Closed source has to waste resources trying to trap consumers into purchasing decisions where open source can simply cut to the point which is media delivery.
Actually, I've drank lye solution before by accident. We were making hydrogen baloons and using the same beer bottles we were drinking as reaction vessles. Bad lab technique, I realize.
So, from my experienice, it's unlikely you'd actually swallow it because as soon as it hits the warm part of your tongue and begins to react your body tells you something is very wrong and you tend to spit it out violently and start rinsing with water.
I was with a bunch of drunk idiots who wouldn't take it seriously and call the ambulance, so I ran into a nearby grocery store and grabbed a bunch of lemons thinking this would be the logical solution to the problem --I was inexperienced in these matters at the time and not thinking very clearly.
So, I just grab a lemon right there in the store and bite into it. Holy shit! It was the wrong thing to do, the reaction was violent and excruciatingly painful. The bloody red chunk of lemon fell from my drooling mouth as I sank to the floor in drool and tears.
There was two old ladies in the produce section and when they saw what I had done and the blood on the yellow lemons they pushed each other into the bread isle looking quite concerned.
Being in such a bizarre state, I insisted on trying the lemons again. So, I bundled a bunch of them in my shirt and sat down in the cereal section forcing myself to bite down on them and moaning.
Finally, I went up to the cashier with the bloody chunks of chewed lemon and tried to smile and act casual and I said through my screwed up mouth --"I wanted to see if they were any good."
The fucker didn't even laugh.
So, I got back to the house and my associates had started to straighten up a bit in my absence. They informed me that the lye bottle itself said not to use acids if ingested and they gave me some half and half which was what the bottle suggested and it instantly eased the pain. It was like the fire went out.
So, I thought my mouth was fucked. I called poison control and they said it was too late to do anything. I'd just have to live with it.
Well, the next day I looked in the mirror and I was terrified. My gums had receeded quite a bit and my tongue looked like hell. My cheeks and lips had clearly lost tissue. I was way way bummed.
But in the end, it turned out to be no big deal. Within three days my mouth had more or less totally healed and I swear my breath was fresher than ever and my taste buds seemed totally alive and sensitive to delicate tastes. For about a year, I was overly sensitive to anything basic, but it went away.
You think on-line transations get expensive after they become mainstream? That strikes me as odd. Credit card rates that should be have been criminialized were in place long before the net went mainstream. In fact, it's not unreasonable to suspect that exact issue might have been one of the big reasons e-commerce didn't fly. It was starting out the gate with a tax going to the card companies, and for what, money handling? Isn't the government supposed to provide the currency.
According to the Constitution that's how it was supposed to go.
Net banking fees emerged AFTER it went mainstream?
Sorry, that's factually incorrect.
While it may be true that all systems can be hacked eventually, let's keep in mind that we're not comparing this digital currency flow system to a flawless real world system.
Counterfeit currency exists. According to the US Secret Service, the amount that they recovered annually prior to '96 equals about one thousandth of the paper currency in circulation. But notice this key word "recover." That doesn't mean that counterfeit currency only represents one thousandth of the circulating money supply, that's now much the SS physically inspected, identified and removed from circulation.
Furthermore, the analogy of busting into the database is more like robbing a bank than committing forgery. Let's not pretend we don't have bank robberies in the real world. And the real world break-ins are often accompanied by murder which is less frequent when some bozo hacks a database.
I'm sure that the original idea was that everybody could just apply for network numbers because that's what I did in '95 and they're still there although they subsequently became totally unroutable. But that's a long story that would be redundant for some and would take awhile to explain to others. Suffice it to say, IPV6 is certainly keeping with the spirit of the internet as it was. Numbers for all, I say --and no, not for money, just for the sake of the net.
And while we're passing out numbers, let's pass out letters as well. Why we can't have at least several hundred thousand or a million top level domains still escapes me. The domain name system was supposed to humanize the network by making addresses easy to remember. Bravo, good work. But the next step is to allow complete sentences because it is really a sentence rather than a word that encapsulates a thought and serves as a convenient unit of memory. I'm sure this will provoke some harsh facts of life lectures on routing tables or some esoteric aspect of DNS that I'm not aware of, but that's cool. It's a request for comments and those are my comments.
his adult life and who rides his bike by the CIA office where they park their convoy of matching pink 50cc scooters --I'm not kidding-- everyday on his way to work, I can tell you that spooky stories about mainland China are that. . . . spooky stories. Dime a dozen, they wrap fish with spooky China stories around here.
You want to know about a spooky country--Japan. That's a scare story that has everything to do with Taiwan. Those whacky Japanese are playing scuicide with their economy and they're going to take Taiwan with them.
DOS attacks from Mainland China are not a threat, Japan's serene implosion is a major threat to the global economy. DOS attacks, not scarry, Yen at 200, very very scarry.
I can think of a great example, I think a new intravenous delivery device based on the MEMs blood sugar monitoring devices with the bloodless micro-needles could be the answer to the vast majority of problems associated with drug abuse.
Most of the clinically documentable physical health concerns associated with drug abuse have to do with damage to the organs through which the drugs are administered and with overdose. An internally regulated device that went directly into the blood stream without exposing the user, or those around the user to the user's blood would be a panacea in my book.
But to people morally against the use of drugs rather than strictly concerned with the health effects, such a device would be the devil's own tool. For the same reason that I see such a recreation device as a promising panacea that could make even hard drugs socially acceptable and thus much more manageable, others would say is was the mark of the beast etc etc.
So, in deciding what is abusive and what is not, you get into some rather grey areas. It's easy to say don't do bad things, but getting down to brass tacks on what's bad and what's good is not quite that simple when you're dealing with laege groups of people such as nations and planets.
Even the notion championed by foresight of universal prosperity could be hard for many die hard capitalists to come to terms with.
Texas Instruments has clearly shook up the projector world with it's Digital Video Processor MEMs chips. How long before Taiwan tools up to starts making those in mainland China. What will that do to projection TV makers and projector LCDs? Entire markets can be disrupted quickly by new technologies on a micro scale.
Who knows? And what's taking so damn long? All I really care about is, when can I get a six pack of six second release Cocaine dermal patches and a few joints for me and the wife at 7-11 so I can go home and watch big screen movies from the hot tub in full effect. Is that too much to ask?