....have stuff in place to know, themselves, that their sites are down....If a site operator doesn't know that his/her site is down, then it's almost a certainty that they don't care.
I've heard of a technology where you can actually hook up a large series of passanger areas that are driven by a single engine along a singular pathway known as rails. Changing lanes is impossible, but it's not nessicary because of the scalability of the technology. You can add or remove passanger areas, or add and remove engines to create a mass transportation system over these rail roads. Conjection is far less of an issue because the volume per person needed on a rail road is far less then that of a traditional road.
Why must the owners address and telephone number be published to the world anyway?
Same reason an e-mail address need be published... to get a hold of the owner in the event of a problem. When for example a site's dns servers go down, this can cause just a little bit of havic. As many people have their contact information on addresses hosted on the dns server, you can see where this can become a problem.
The reason brail is on the Drive-Thru machines is cost reasons.If they only have to stock,order,manufacture,track one type of keyboard rather than it is cheaper.
No I get that, I get that 100%. I have no issue with a standard keyboard where the standard is brail. This is not silly. Retrofitting the drive up cash machine with brail when that's the only one... that is silly.
It makes perfect sense to have one standard of keyboard, and it having brail bumps on it. It makes NO sense to order peel and stick brail. It ma I guess I didn't make that clear.
This is wrong for two reasons. First, this only helps blind people who can hear. Yes, that's most of them, but not 'any' individual.
It seems to me that such a device with a simple brail output like you'd find on a blind terminal would allow a blind person to read a book in text, depending on how good the OCR is. I'm not sure how common those devices are, i've only seen larger clunky 70s vintage blind terminals.
Not that anything modern isn't already in digital format by the time it's published, they don't seem to want to give those out easily.
There's actually a really good explanation for this. It actually keeps costs down to have braille on the drive-though ATMs. If braille is on every ATM the only difference between a drive-through ATM and an ATM that you can walk to is where it's located. Since only one model is needed to do everything, costs go down. It really is that simple.
Two things
1) Pedestrians are not allowed to use the drive through cash machine, blind or otherwise, for safty reasons. If you were blind would you want to wander where the cars go? Know of any fast food places that take orders for fast food without a car? Would your drive up teller do business with a pedestrian?
2) I've noticed that while they have put brail on drive up cash machines... none of the ones *I* know about have any sorta voice ability. As in a blind man can use one, know where the buttons are, but isn't going to know the first menu is 3rd button for english, 5th for spanish. Let alone the menu after you hit withdraw is asking for the hot buttons for the ammount of cash, or the last right one for other ammount, is this correct, do you want a rescript.
I have walked a few blind people through the process, well until the bank manager yelled at us for being pedestrians in the drive through lane. Each of the people I helped decided just to use the debit at the local supermarket. Far less dangerious.
I'm all for brail being standard on these machines. I'm all for rectroactivly putting brail stickers on the machines. However expeding blind people to just use the drive through lane is a touch silly!
I imagine that part of the choice to close retail shops is the simple fact that you have to pay tax in states that you have a retail presence in. On a $400 pc, this could be easily $40.00 in taxes even if you mail order it. If you buy it local, that's great, but if you buy it via mail order, you get stuck with shipping and tax. This can really add up for those who buy their more premium solutions via mail order.
I guess you could have pulled the starter, making it a non running car when you sold it
In my state, an emission test is required to transfer the title to a vehicel. I had planned to sell the car, I got a valid test, there was evidence it was running. It's not required for transfer between members of a family... but in the event I didn't sell to her, I would have been happy to sell to someone else.
Besides it wasn't needed, I just needed to sign paperwork as to why I undervalued the car. It's fair and reasonable as the law is geared tward those who try to cheat the tax, by selling a new BMW for $500.00 on paper, but actually collecting much more. Which is funny, when ever I asked about a diffrent car that I paid "too little" for, they reccomended that I lie about what I paid for it. The law wasn't designed to prevent me from selling a crappy old car for squat... but to prevent me from writing down squat and collecting more.
The theory is you can "vote" for change.
We did actually... we voted that our yearly license fee be a flat rate rather then it be based on an inflated value of a car. I actually disagree with this because it cut our state's tax income by a signifigent bit, and had no provisions to get that money from elsewhere... and was used as an excuse not to implement public transportation projects. I know all about voting for change... and how these changes can affect the big picture.
I wanted to give my niece my old car. The car was a piece of junk, but it was a running piece of junk. If I were to "give" her the car, then the state would charge her tax on what it estimates it's value to be, which I'm told was between $750-$1500... basicly base price for a running car. Tax in her region would have been 8.5% if i'm not mistaken... plus misc fees and such. Fair and reasonable, but still a $63.75 fee + misc other fees involved in the transfer of a car and yearly taxes.
Even selling it to her for $1.00 the state would be skeptical as to whether this was an honest deal, or a trick to avoid paying sales tax. I had to sign an statement of the car's value. Which was fine by me.. I signed a statement saying "it's had accidents, it has over 350,000 miles on it, family $1.00, non family $100.00".
The point is you can tax things with no value, or little value. It could be a flat non percent tax, or a tax of what the goverment believes the value should be.
I was thinking more along the lines of first design an interactive online system where you ask questions to a simulated helpful person. Yes it's a hell of alot of typing, but some people feel more comfortable with a human style responce then an obviously computer generated one. A faq or even well indexed pages of products can be tedius to sort through for some.
If that were to be pluged in with some nice voice recognition software, then you can have an automated attendent to actually take mail orders and such. Prospective customers could actually, in theory, ask questions over a standard traditional telephone without high technology, or even touch tone.
This is just one of many possible applications for AI scripts. I'll admit chatbots are silly, but research into the logic of understanding humans is not.
Actually... I love that trackball. Logictek has a similar one that i use on a regular basis which I bought pending the repair of my Microsoft one's usb cable.
I've always been a fan of that snail style ever since logictech released the trackman back when serial mice were king.
In fact... I was most annoyed at the fact the logitech one didn't offer the 2 extra buttons. I was even more annoyed that my local shops didn't carry the microsoft one anymore, and I must think you kindly for pointing out walmart carries this one.
...as long as everyone who used the spreadsheet was disciplined about how they entered data... Converting a series of data from a spreadsheet to a database can be a huge PITA. I've been there, it ain't pretty.
I would not disagree with you... however the alternative is having someone in billing for example send you a list of information they typed up in some word processor / text editor, without any sorta logical delimitation. Tabs here, spaces there. I've had the PITA, I understand the PITA, and become the PITA. People who work in an office may not have the PC experence that you do, but there is one thing they know how to do, and do well. That's fill out forms.
I'd be interested to know how you get 10 people sharing a spreadsheet.
Ummm, make one master sheet with the fields denoted on the columns. Define the columns the proper fields. Give each user a copy of this master sheet and have them all type in the information on their own personal sheet. Export the data delimited in a way that can be read by the database software.
This way the user only sees a simple form they need to fill out.
No, a spreadsheet is not an option if more than one person is using it.
As child posts have pointed out, excel does have this option... but i'd trust it about as far as I trust access.
I find excel a wonderful powerful intermediary program because of it's ease of use to take a list of information that's delimited by a field, import it, export it delimited to another format.
I don't understand the problem using excel as a small database. If you outgrow it, just export the whole shabang... delimited by whatever your database software supports. Heck, there have been times I reccomended using excel when getting groups of 10 or more people together doing manual data entry. The data gets entered, it's organized, and easily incorperated.
No, excel is not a database, but a spreadsheet can be used for more thens then calculating numbers.
Mugging someone requires a weapon (unless you are really physically intimidating) and that you look like you could chase that person down if they ran. (I assume that threatening someone with a deadly weapon carries a larger sentence than stealing a $100 car stereo.) A grab-and-run theft requires that the person be holding the object in a snatchable place (not in their pocket) and that you could get away from them and anyone that might try to stop your escape.
I was thinking of the classic bump and theft actually. Bump into a person, while they are stunned, take their crap, say pardon me and move on.
I have to say I've never had my pocket picked. I've had my car broken into, only when I've neglected to lock it, and never had my stereo stolen... only my cassette tapes.
... only because a portable 8-track would weigh like 25 pounds and you'd be one tough mofo to be just strolling down the street with one in your... hmm, can't figure out how you'd carry that inconspicuously...
They have made portable 8-track players
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&it em =3087170429&category=14999 http://cgi.ebay.com/ws /eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item =3087605049&category=14999#ebayphotohosting
None as small as an 8-pod, but not 25pounds. Portable enough to take to the beach... probally a little bit bulky to go running with.
So the second conclusion would be that you have something expensive to hide
That is possible... I know people who record nature sounds often prefer full headphones rather then earphones. There are also beach combers who have full headphones on their metal detectors, who seem to get asked if they have 8-track players.
I imagine in reality it's potluck if you decide to steal something from someone with big ass headphones.
You have freedom of speech... you can say anything you like, even if it incriminates your self. While we have this freedom, it doesn't discount the fact that if you say something that isn't true, and this does someone harm, it's slander for example. If you print something that's not true, it's liable.
I could for example say that George W. Bush is a two headed purple alien with both heads up his ass. I have every freedom to say this. It doesn't make it true, and if this statment does him harm I could be held accountable.
I imagine that car stereo are indeed a good target. I don't honestly know how common it is to have units in the $5000 bracket... with the exception of some audio geeks that I know. Most people I know either have factory radios, or buy the sub $200 models at the local shop if they bought a base model. Not that I'd be able to spot a multi grand car stereo just by looking in a car window... just most random stereos I tend to see in cars are factory.
I don't know how long it takes to jack a car stereo exactly, but one has to gain entry, remove the dash stuff, unscrew, and remove. I guess this can be done in under 120seconds or so if a person is willing to break the dash parts. Now that I know my dash, I imagine I could remove my stereo in under 5min.
A hip mounted Ipod can be grabbed from a casual passer by. It can fit in the thief's pocket and they can walk around without being paranoid about someone seeing them with the hot goods. The target market would be greater with a portable player, car stereos are usually bought by people with cars.
While I can see the car stereo being more attractive in many ways... I think it is easier to spot an Ipod or portable player in a crowd. It requires less of a backround in audio eqiupment to make a valued judgement whether it's worth your time or not.
I want to get an Ipod and use my old pair of big ass 70s style radio shack headphones. big and bulky with the 1/4 inch jack and cover up your entire ears.
http://www.radioshack.com/product.asp?catalog%5F na me=CTLG&category%5Fname=CTLG%5F007%5F003%5F004%5F0 00&product%5Fid=33%2D1176
While they can be spotted at a distance, a mugger might thing I have a portable 8-track and not steal from me.
People walk around with methanol lighters. Never really heard of anyone being so chicken that they can't even carry a lighter.
Not to nick pick... if you mean zippo style wick lighters, typicaly they use naphtha based products. While I like using methanol, ethanol, or cheep generic denatured alcohol due to it being far less smelly, it evaperates far too quickly.
I have a friend who was part of peace coups in Namibia. Part of his duties did involve HIV education. From what he said I infer that it was difficult for some guy to convience his students about something deadly they couldn't see. I imagine we had the same problem here in the western world when Aides was new.
"We are not clear what AIDS is. We have seen many people suffering from headaches, stomachaches and diarrhoea, and only after they are dead do we hear rumours that they had AIDS. Some lose weight, and only after they are dead, you hear talk that they had AIDS. We do not know what AIDS is." --http://www.fao.org/SD/2001/KN1201a_en.htm
I do believe access to the net could be used as a tool to promote education and the sharing of information... esp on the issue of agriculture. I'd have to hunt up a reference, but there was a connection with HIV and the early death of elders of family farms, and not passing down trade. Modern agiculture is all well and good, but documenting local agiculture I would consider to be paramount.
A recently published FAO report, HIV/AIDS and the commercial agriculture sector of Kenya: Impact, vulnerability, susceptibility and coping strategies, shows that the disease is affecting not only small family farms but also large agricultural estates. Kenya's commercial agricultural sector is losing a significant number of skilled workers, and companies are spending increasing amounts of money on medical expenses and employee retraining. --http://www.fao.org/news/1999/991006-e.htm
Slashdot Mirror
....have stuff in place to know, themselves, that their sites are down ....If a site operator doesn't know that his/her site is down, then it's almost a certainty that they don't care.
Not always... Co-location?
I've heard of a technology where you can actually hook up a large series of passanger areas that are driven by a single engine along a singular pathway known as rails. Changing lanes is impossible, but it's not nessicary because of the scalability of the technology. You can add or remove passanger areas, or add and remove engines to create a mass transportation system over these rail roads. Conjection is far less of an issue because the volume per person needed on a rail road is far less then that of a traditional road.
Why must the owners address and telephone number be published to the world anyway?
Same reason an e-mail address need be published... to get a hold of the owner in the event of a problem. When for example a site's dns servers go down, this can cause just a little bit of havic. As many people have their contact information on addresses hosted on the dns server, you can see where this can become a problem.
The reason brail is on the Drive-Thru machines is cost reasons.If they only have to stock,order,manufacture,track one type of keyboard rather than it is cheaper.
No I get that, I get that 100%. I have no issue with a standard keyboard where the standard is brail. This is not silly. Retrofitting the drive up cash machine with brail when that's the only one... that is silly.
It makes perfect sense to have one standard of keyboard, and it having brail bumps on it. It makes NO sense to order peel and stick brail. It ma I guess I didn't make that clear.
This is wrong for two reasons. First, this only helps blind people who can hear. Yes, that's most of them, but not 'any' individual.
It seems to me that such a device with a simple brail output like you'd find on a blind terminal would allow a blind person to read a book in text, depending on how good the OCR is. I'm not sure how common those devices are, i've only seen larger clunky 70s vintage blind terminals.
Not that anything modern isn't already in digital format by the time it's published, they don't seem to want to give those out easily.
There's actually a really good explanation for this. It actually keeps costs down to have braille on the drive-though ATMs. If braille is on every ATM the only difference between a drive-through ATM and an ATM that you can walk to is where it's located. Since only one model is needed to do everything, costs go down. It really is that simple.
Two things
1) Pedestrians are not allowed to use the drive through cash machine, blind or otherwise, for safty reasons. If you were blind would you want to wander where the cars go? Know of any fast food places that take orders for fast food without a car? Would your drive up teller do business with a pedestrian?
2) I've noticed that while they have put brail on drive up cash machines... none of the ones *I* know about have any sorta voice ability. As in a blind man can use one, know where the buttons are, but isn't going to know the first menu is 3rd button for english, 5th for spanish. Let alone the menu after you hit withdraw is asking for the hot buttons for the ammount of cash, or the last right one for other ammount, is this correct, do you want a rescript.
I have walked a few blind people through the process, well until the bank manager yelled at us for being pedestrians in the drive through lane. Each of the people I helped decided just to use the debit at the local supermarket. Far less dangerious.
I'm all for brail being standard on these machines. I'm all for rectroactivly putting brail stickers on the machines. However expeding blind people to just use the drive through lane is a touch silly!
I imagine that part of the choice to close retail shops is the simple fact that you have to pay tax in states that you have a retail presence in. On a $400 pc, this could be easily $40.00 in taxes even if you mail order it. If you buy it local, that's great, but if you buy it via mail order, you get stuck with shipping and tax. This can really add up for those who buy their more premium solutions via mail order.
I guess you could have pulled the starter, making it a non running car when you sold it
In my state, an emission test is required to transfer the title to a vehicel. I had planned to sell the car, I got a valid test, there was evidence it was running. It's not required for transfer between members of a family... but in the event I didn't sell to her, I would have been happy to sell to someone else.
Besides it wasn't needed, I just needed to sign paperwork as to why I undervalued the car. It's fair and reasonable as the law is geared tward those who try to cheat the tax, by selling a new BMW for $500.00 on paper, but actually collecting much more. Which is funny, when ever I asked about a diffrent car that I paid "too little" for, they reccomended that I lie about what I paid for it. The law wasn't designed to prevent me from selling a crappy old car for squat... but to prevent me from writing down squat and collecting more.
The theory is you can "vote" for change.
We did actually... we voted that our yearly license fee be a flat rate rather then it be based on an inflated value of a car. I actually disagree with this because it cut our state's tax income by a signifigent bit, and had no provisions to get that money from elsewhere... and was used as an excuse not to implement public transportation projects. I know all about voting for change... and how these changes can affect the big picture.
a 100% sales tax on $0 = $0. sheesh.
I wanted to give my niece my old car. The car was a piece of junk, but it was a running piece of junk. If I were to "give" her the car, then the state would charge her tax on what it estimates it's value to be, which I'm told was between $750-$1500... basicly base price for a running car. Tax in her region would have been 8.5% if i'm not mistaken... plus misc fees and such. Fair and reasonable, but still a $63.75 fee + misc other fees involved in the transfer of a car and yearly taxes.
Even selling it to her for $1.00 the state would be skeptical as to whether this was an honest deal, or a trick to avoid paying sales tax. I had to sign an statement of the car's value. Which was fine by me.. I signed a statement saying "it's had accidents, it has over 350,000 miles on it, family $1.00, non family $100.00".
The point is you can tax things with no value, or little value. It could be a flat non percent tax, or a tax of what the goverment believes the value should be.
Wouldn't a FAQ be simpler?
I was thinking more along the lines of first design an interactive online system where you ask questions to a simulated helpful person. Yes it's a hell of alot of typing, but some people feel more comfortable with a human style responce then an obviously computer generated one. A faq or even well indexed pages of products can be tedius to sort through for some.
If that were to be pluged in with some nice voice recognition software, then you can have an automated attendent to actually take mail orders and such. Prospective customers could actually, in theory, ask questions over a standard traditional telephone without high technology, or even touch tone.
This is just one of many possible applications for AI scripts. I'll admit chatbots are silly, but research into the logic of understanding humans is not.
For this to work it needs to happen within the context of some event or thing or understanding from outside the confines of a chatroom
I need more information about your mice.
Sales bot: What would you like to know
Well, do you have any trackballs?
Sales bot: We have seven trackballs, would you like a url?
Any that use a thumb ball?
Sales bot: Yes, we a Logitech Trackman Wheel, Logitech Trackman Wheel wireless, and a Microsoft Trackball Optical. Would you like a url?
Yes, show me the wireless one.
Sales bot: There you go, would you like to buy one?
Yes, here is my credit card number.
Sales bot: Thank you, have a nice day.
...where the heck is Johnny Five!?
disassembled
but the high-resolution images is really what the magazine is about.
Really? I thought it was about reviews of consumer electronics, and high end watches.
... just try playing networked Quake 3 over that!
... but multi-player duck hunt works quite well.
Yes, Quake would be bad
Actually... I love that trackball. Logictek has a similar one that i use on a regular basis which I bought pending the repair of my Microsoft one's usb cable.
i ls /US/EN,CRID=6,CONTENTID=5002
http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/products/deta
I've always been a fan of that snail style ever since logictech released the trackman back when serial mice were king.
In fact... I was most annoyed at the fact the logitech one didn't offer the 2 extra buttons. I was even more annoyed that my local shops didn't carry the microsoft one anymore, and I must think you kindly for pointing out walmart carries this one.
I would not disagree with you... however the alternative is having someone in billing for example send you a list of information they typed up in some word processor / text editor, without any sorta logical delimitation. Tabs here, spaces there. I've had the PITA, I understand the PITA, and become the PITA. People who work in an office may not have the PC experence that you do, but there is one thing they know how to do, and do well. That's fill out forms.
I'd be interested to know how you get 10 people sharing a spreadsheet.
Ummm, make one master sheet with the fields denoted on the columns. Define the columns the proper fields. Give each user a copy of this master sheet and have them all type in the information on their own personal sheet. Export the data delimited in a way that can be read by the database software.
This way the user only sees a simple form they need to fill out.
No, a spreadsheet is not an option if more than one person is using it.
As child posts have pointed out, excel does have this option... but i'd trust it about as far as I trust access.
I find excel a wonderful powerful intermediary program because of it's ease of use to take a list of information that's delimited by a field, import it, export it delimited to another format.
I don't understand the problem using excel as a small database. If you outgrow it, just export the whole shabang... delimited by whatever your database software supports. Heck, there have been times I reccomended using excel when getting groups of 10 or more people together doing manual data entry. The data gets entered, it's organized, and easily incorperated.
No, excel is not a database, but a spreadsheet can be used for more thens then calculating numbers.
Mugging someone requires a weapon (unless you are really physically intimidating) and that you look like you could chase that person down if they ran. (I assume that threatening someone with a deadly weapon carries a larger sentence than stealing a $100 car stereo.) A grab-and-run theft requires that the person be holding the object in a snatchable place (not in their pocket) and that you could get away from them and anyone that might try to stop your escape.
I was thinking of the classic bump and theft actually. Bump into a person, while they are stunned, take their crap, say pardon me and move on.
I have to say I've never had my pocket picked. I've had my car broken into, only when I've neglected to lock it, and never had my stereo stolen... only my cassette tapes.
... only because a portable 8-track would weigh like 25 pounds and you'd be one tough mofo to be just strolling down the street with one in your ... hmm, can't figure out how you'd carry that inconspicuously ...
t em =3087170429&category=14999s /eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item =3087605049&category=14999#ebayphotohosting
They have made portable 8-track players
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&i
http://cgi.ebay.com/w
None as small as an 8-pod, but not 25pounds. Portable enough to take to the beach... probally a little bit bulky to go running with.
So the second conclusion would be that you have something expensive to hide
That is possible... I know people who record nature sounds often prefer full headphones rather then earphones. There are also beach combers who have full headphones on their metal detectors, who seem to get asked if they have 8-track players.
I imagine in reality it's potluck if you decide to steal something from someone with big ass headphones.
You have freedom of speech... you can say anything you like, even if it incriminates your self. While we have this freedom, it doesn't discount the fact that if you say something that isn't true, and this does someone harm, it's slander for example. If you print something that's not true, it's liable.
I could for example say that George W. Bush is a two headed purple alien with both heads up his ass. I have every freedom to say this. It doesn't make it true, and if this statment does him harm I could be held accountable.
Why not just use the usenet? With goggle's cache, the newsgroups can be searched for serial numbers with ease.
An entrepreneur could follow the procedure to creating a news group, and offer an easy web based engine for post and search via google.
or
A casual person could already post "Ipod xxxx-xxxx stolen"
As a person who finds and tries to return lost items, I have actually found a person via a newsgroup cache.
I imagine that car stereo are indeed a good target. I don't honestly know how common it is to have units in the $5000 bracket... with the exception of some audio geeks that I know. Most people I know either have factory radios, or buy the sub $200 models at the local shop if they bought a base model. Not that I'd be able to spot a multi grand car stereo just by looking in a car window... just most random stereos I tend to see in cars are factory.
I don't know how long it takes to jack a car stereo exactly, but one has to gain entry, remove the dash stuff, unscrew, and remove. I guess this can be done in under 120seconds or so if a person is willing to break the dash parts. Now that I know my dash, I imagine I could remove my stereo in under 5min.
A hip mounted Ipod can be grabbed from a casual passer by. It can fit in the thief's pocket and they can walk around without being paranoid about someone seeing them with the hot goods. The target market would be greater with a portable player, car stereos are usually bought by people with cars.
While I can see the car stereo being more attractive in many ways... I think it is easier to spot an Ipod or portable player in a crowd. It requires less of a backround in audio eqiupment to make a valued judgement whether it's worth your time or not.
I want to get an Ipod and use my old pair of big ass 70s style radio shack headphones. big and bulky with the 1/4 inch jack and cover up your entire ears.
F na me=CTLG&category%5Fname=CTLG%5F007%5F003%5F004%5F0 00&product%5Fid=33%2D1176
http://www.radioshack.com/product.asp?catalog%5
While they can be spotted at a distance, a mugger might thing I have a portable 8-track and not steal from me.
People walk around with methanol lighters. Never really heard of anyone being so chicken that they can't even carry a lighter.
Not to nick pick... if you mean zippo style wick lighters, typicaly they use naphtha based products. While I like using methanol, ethanol, or cheep generic denatured alcohol due to it being far less smelly, it evaperates far too quickly.
I do believe access to the net could be used as a tool to promote education and the sharing of information... esp on the issue of agriculture. I'd have to hunt up a reference, but there was a connection with HIV and the early death of elders of family farms, and not passing down trade. Modern agiculture is all well and good, but documenting local agiculture I would consider to be paramount.