Did they manage to make their patent cover an image of a bitten apple falling into a wastebasket? If not, I know what icon I'm going to use from now on.
The problem I see is that you can't actually buy an HDTV. Go to the store and look around. Where are they? There are lots of humongo-screen sets that are "HDTV-ready", but you have to buy a converter box to have a complete HDTV.
Okay, where are the converters? I've never seen one advertised and I've never come across one in any store.
(If I *could* buy a converter, I'd probably just hook it to my 25" set, which is plenty large enough for now.)
Why do you think this would be useful. Enough time is already wasted on the "latest thing". We need some gadget which tends to start people thinking, not to identify what is making them stop thinking.
I thought the headline meant they were going to crack down on all the spammers who *use* Hotmail (or at least claim to). I can't recall ever receiving a legitimate message from a Hotmail account, but I have piles of porn offers, Viagra-by-mail, etc. with Hotmail return addresses. One of these days I may go ahead and add that procmail recipe::0 * ^From:.*@hotmail/dev/null
Here I saw the title and thought that someone else had come up with my idea: to reduce the danger from planet-killer sized debris, locate all the troublesome objects and mine them out of existence. We save the planet and get valuable materials besides.
I'm still trying to figure out what, if anything,.Net has to do with my work or my life. I haven't even found a reasonable explanation of what it *is*, other than "something you should buy into right now."
I think it'll be a long time before we can film Clarke's _The Fountains of Paradise_ entirely on location. Even if we have lab. samples of the materials, there's a whole lot of engineering to do. We already know how to build a shuttle, and after two decades we probably know how to do it a lot better, either from scratch or by evolving the existing design.
As for voluntary contributions to support NASA, why bother with tax checkoffs? Just send them money. Maybe gather a few volunteers and set up a foundation to aggregate contributions and send a few large checks instead of a zillion small ones. It would be an interesting way to find out how much value people really place on space exploration and exploitation.
Indeed, the main use for those expensive video conference gizmos around here seems to be to aim the camera at the projection screen on which someone's Powerpoint slides are being displayed, so people elsewhere can see said slides. Magicpoint in server mode would be a MUCH better use of bandwidth (i.e. it wouldn't use nearly as much and the image quality would be much better).
Unless the speaker is using sign language, demonstrating a manual process, or doing a real old-fashioned chalk-talk, nobody needs to see him.
I don't. I'd pay a modest premium, if necessary, to get a phone without video, games, cute ring-tones, etc. Or maybe just stick a piece of black electrical tape over the pickup. I certainly would not pay one penny more for a phone *with* video.
I can't help remembering that the only Picturephone(tm) that I ever saw is sitting in a museum. (The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, IL if you're curious.)
I thought the surviving.COMs were doing *better* than their bricks-based brethren. Besides, I already have to not only *pay* "use tax" on out-of-state purchases along with my Indiana income tax, I have to keep records and figure the tax myself. It's more work than all the rest of the form combined, and it's the part that bugs me the most. I wish the states would get off their collective rumps and agree on sales tax pass-through standards, since I gotta pay the tax anyway and I'd rather see it computed by thousands of merchants instead of millions of customers.
(Some of my emotion on this issue is my conviction that I'm one of perhaps as many as nine Hoosiers who don't just ignore the use tax.)
Ya know, the news agencies *could* just wait and announce the *real* results after *all* of the votes are counted, instead of spending millions on guessing. I never believe their conjectures anyway; I always wait for the next day's paper to tell me what actually happened.
IIRC Poul Anderson showed that this is not so, when some of his characters needed to transport heavy equipment while stranded on a world where the wheel was subject to a religious taboo. I think it was collected in "The Trouble Twisters".
If you think hard enough, there is often a truly different way to get the same result.
OTOH they could go after the distro makers, lose big time, and we wind up with (say) *Red Hat* owning what's left of SCO, including Unix(tm). Comments?
Eeek, I do *not* want stock quotes on my watch
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Assorted CES Gizmos
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· Score: 1
Not to mention the inevitable tidal wave of advertising. I expect a timepiece to show me the time of day, the time of year, and that's it. I would pay a modest premium *not* to have information services intruding on my wristwatch (or my phone, for that matter).
BillG *always* wants exactly the *opposite* of what I want, somehow. I wish he cared.
And that Seiko would still be locked to an atomic clock if it had been designed to sync. to WWV instead of some proprietary data service. Radio Shack sells clocks like that.
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Did they manage to make their patent cover an image of a bitten apple falling into a wastebasket? If not, I know what icon I'm going to use from now on.
Indeed, read Clarke's "A Meeting with Medusa" to see why.
"I'm surprised this didn't happen in 2001."
:-)
Discovery only has one computer (HAL), so why would it have routers?
"It's excellent handling of Windoze apps is part of what killed OS/2."
Huh? IBM is *still selling* OS/2 Warp 4.
The problem I see is that you can't actually buy an HDTV. Go to the store and look around. Where are they? There are lots of humongo-screen sets that are "HDTV-ready", but you have to buy a converter box to have a complete HDTV.
Okay, where are the converters? I've never seen one advertised and I've never come across one in any store.
(If I *could* buy a converter, I'd probably just hook it to my 25" set, which is plenty large enough for now.)
Yup, I figure that has to be the way it works:
Customer always pays the agreed amount. *Peppercoin* bills customer's card when customer's balance grows large enough to be worth it.
Merchant collects N*agreed amount *from Peppercoin* 1 in N times.
As long as Peppercoin's RNG doesn't produce a string of a billion 1s, they should be in good shape.
Why do you think this would be useful. Enough time is already wasted on the "latest thing". We need some gadget which tends to start people thinking, not to identify what is making them stop thinking.
I thought the headline meant they were going to crack down on all the spammers who *use* Hotmail (or at least claim to). I can't recall ever receiving a legitimate message from a Hotmail account, but I have piles of porn offers, Viagra-by-mail, etc. with Hotmail return addresses. One of these days I may go ahead and add that procmail recipe: :0 /dev/null
* ^From:.*@hotmail
Cleaning undersea stables would indeed be a Herculean task, but I think you meant "Augean".
Wow, armed robbery of a vehicle under way? I had no idea. How many dead?
I *knew* there was another reason I always use AltaVista.
...I'm too busy switching from Microsoft-based systems to Linux. I might buy a used Apple and put Linux on it -- will that do? :-}
Wowee, another case of the Internet catching up to OSI, which defined address prefixes based on E.164 telephone numbers a decade ago.
Here I saw the title and thought that someone else had come up with my idea: to reduce the danger from planet-killer sized debris, locate all the troublesome objects and mine them out of existence. We save the planet and get valuable materials besides.
I'm still trying to figure out what, if anything, .Net has to do with my work or my life. I haven't even found a reasonable explanation of what it *is*, other than "something you should buy into right now."
...my first thought was, "how do I turn this off?"
My second thought was to recall a _Calvin and Hobbes_ panel: "Calvin's Pitcher of Plague: $1.00 not to have any."
Would I pay? To get rid of it, maybe....
I think it'll be a long time before we can film Clarke's _The Fountains of Paradise_ entirely on location. Even if we have lab. samples of the materials, there's a whole lot of engineering to do. We already know how to build a shuttle, and after two decades we probably know how to do it a lot better, either from scratch or by evolving the existing design.
As for voluntary contributions to support NASA, why bother with tax checkoffs? Just send them money. Maybe gather a few volunteers and set up a foundation to aggregate contributions and send a few large checks instead of a zillion small ones. It would be an interesting way to find out how much value people really place on space exploration and exploitation.
Indeed, the main use for those expensive video conference gizmos around here seems to be to aim the camera at the projection screen on which someone's Powerpoint slides are being displayed, so people elsewhere can see said slides. Magicpoint in server mode would be a MUCH better use of bandwidth (i.e. it wouldn't use nearly as much and the image quality would be much better).
Unless the speaker is using sign language, demonstrating a manual process, or doing a real old-fashioned chalk-talk, nobody needs to see him.
I don't. I'd pay a modest premium, if necessary, to get a phone without video, games, cute ring-tones, etc. Or maybe just stick a piece of black electrical tape over the pickup. I certainly would not pay one penny more for a phone *with* video.
I can't help remembering that the only Picturephone(tm) that I ever saw is sitting in a museum. (The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, IL if you're curious.)
They're probably still smarting from that sequence in AfterY2K a while back....
I thought the surviving .COMs were doing *better* than their bricks-based brethren. Besides, I already have to not only *pay* "use tax" on out-of-state purchases along with my Indiana income tax, I have to keep records and figure the tax myself. It's more work than all the rest of the form combined, and it's the part that bugs me the most. I wish the states would get off their collective rumps and agree on sales tax pass-through standards, since I gotta pay the tax anyway and I'd rather see it computed by thousands of merchants instead of millions of customers.
(Some of my emotion on this issue is my conviction that I'm one of perhaps as many as nine Hoosiers who don't just ignore the use tax.)
Ya know, the news agencies *could* just wait and announce the *real* results after *all* of the votes are counted, instead of spending millions on guessing. I never believe their conjectures anyway; I always wait for the next day's paper to tell me what actually happened.
"Only a wheel has the function of a wheel."
IIRC Poul Anderson showed that this is not so, when some of his characters needed to transport heavy equipment while stranded on a world where the wheel was subject to a religious taboo. I think it was collected in "The Trouble Twisters".
If you think hard enough, there is often a truly different way to get the same result.
OTOH they could go after the distro makers, lose big time, and we wind up with (say) *Red Hat* owning what's left of SCO, including Unix(tm). Comments?
Not to mention the inevitable tidal wave of advertising. I expect a timepiece to show me the time of day, the time of year, and that's it. I would pay a modest premium *not* to have information services intruding on my wristwatch (or my phone, for that matter).
BillG *always* wants exactly the *opposite* of what I want, somehow. I wish he cared.
And that Seiko would still be locked to an atomic clock if it had been designed to sync. to WWV instead of some proprietary data service. Radio Shack sells clocks like that.