Well, the electoral process had never been so close and so scrutinized before. They had to develop a standard on-the-fly, which as I recall was something like: "hanging" chads (three corners removed) counted as "voted" but "swinging" chads (two corners removed) and "dimple" chads (one corner) didn't count as votes. But then the clock ran out, so it didn't matter anyway. And don't forget the butterfly ballot, and all the Jews who voted for Pat Robertson!
With all the scrutiny paid to the chads, nobody paid much attention to the systemic abuses: Thousands of black voters showed up to vote and were turned away as a result of the very careless (deliberately so for the conspiratorial among us) purging of felons from the voter rolls. A project that was outsourced to a private out-of-state agency, thereby deflecting any accountability away from officials of the State. And it's not even clear that the chad problem stems from "operator error" -- the equipment was obviously pretty old and could have been upgraded, but wasn't. Then there's Jeb Bush promising his brother that he will win Florida...
The whole thing is a mess. Jimmy Carter and his Project Democracy or whatever would not have certified the Florida election process. In other words, the standards in place in FLA were below the standards for a free election in a third-world country. Come to think of it much of Florida reminds me of a third-world country! (for example: incredible wealth of South Beach vs. poverty and gangs just a few miles away, legal and illegal immigrants from around the globe, entire communities where people don't speak english, crazy drivers, being white = not a crime suspect, drug cartels, etc.)
How are they keeping rights intact if they're effectively looking inside the package without opening it? They're not. The evidence they get is equivalent to what they'd find by opening the package.
The Supreme Court ruled in the Kyllo case that the cops can't just run around and IR-scan your house without a warrant. They decided that was an intrusive search, in spite of the fact that they physically didn't enter your house. I don't see this as much different. Where is the imminent danger to the public if you posses some cocaine? Anthrax, I can see, but illegal drugs don't rise to the threshhold of "imminent harm."
Of course this is completely different as our freedom is at stake. And a crucial element of securing that freedom is not allowing robots into the whitehouse.gov web page?
My truck gets about ten miles per gallon. It's an old wreck. I'm actually too afraid to do the math and see what my real MPG is.
Even at cheap US fuel prices, it's extremely expensive just to drive somewhere. However, I barely drive anywhere. I just have the truck because once in a while, I need to go somewhere that my legs/bike/the bus/a cab won't take me.
I don't disagree, I just want to know what that "right persepctive" is. Is it the one in which all the pollution from buring fossil fuels blots out the sun? Or the one where, after consuming resources 365x faster than they were made, we run out?
Or does the right perspective include some sort of "light at the end of the tunnel" like when we get fusion up and running. Of course then we'll have to do a calculation for how much water we atomize in a day vs. how long it took to accrete on primordial Earth.
Okay, my examples are extreme, but I am not seeing the paltriness of our burn ratio.
I look at it this way: Even if these numbers are too large, this still makes you think about how inefficientthe Industrial Revolution is. Or Western Civilization is.
Right on. I think the tablet is too big/unwieldy. Maybe the technology isn't there yet, to make it sort of just like a clipboard. But something a little bigger (and esp. better resolution) than a crappy PocketPC (320x240, ugh) but smaller than the 9x12 or so of a tablet PC seems right to me. Something about 9x6 or so.
The solution to getting doctors to enter data into whatever is to make it actually help them in some way, right away. I realize that the job of making this application is large, but you need to make the entry app actually provide them some kind of information they will find useful right away. That will make it worth it to use it
17 seconds? But I'm hungry now! Yeah, I agree. One of our biggest features was templates, "one touch reporting" it was called. And it is a big seller. I forget the name of the law in economics, maybe it's diminishing returns, but once you've got the big features the lesser ones cost more and more to get, and aren't as valuable as the first ones. We added voice recognition for the transcriptionists, all kinds of bells and whistles, but at the end of the day the software is still basically just a reporting tool, generating the paperwork mandated by the FDA and such. So sometimes the cool features aren't really relevant to the market. a la the tablet pc.
Interesting. Can't believe I overlooked that one. But, there was the dangling sword of litigation. I guess I'm thinking of partnerships where both companies go in willingly -- like nvidia making the xbox chips, for example, and then having to write off big $$$ after the xbox got hacked and MS demanded new chips. My poor nvidia stock:(
I guess my mind isn't open enough to see the nazi-style roundup and execution of gun owners and religious people you think are happening. I'll work on that.
BitGeek, you need your morning coffee. Check out this line:
Perhaps I'm mudslinging when I call you a troll, but at least I never called you a Republican. I am by no means a Democrat, and your assumption that I must be a Clinton fanboy simply because I disagree with you, well, let's just say that you show that you have a closed mind and are apparently incapable of actually thinking about an opinion that disagrees with yours.
They missed the market because it didn't exist. They were hoping to create a market, kind of the way Sony created the need for the Walkman.
If you look at the images in their ads, it shows people doing all sorts of neat stuff with their TabletPC, such as the inventory stuff you mentioned. Trouble is, there are already established methods of taking inventory and none of them will be significantly improved by an employer spending a month's pay on each employee to re-tool the process. And that's just for the data entry task, what about the back end? It's probably all AS400. Not that many people are running Windows in their production facilities or warehouses. Think of the costs, man!
I worked at a medical software company. Tablet PC could, potentially, be a great boon for our Windows-based product, by letting doctors enter info right into the computer, rather than taking notes and handing it off to a transcriptionist. One less person needed. But you know what? Doctors don't do "data entry" work. It's beneath them. They will never type anything at a computer unless they absolutely have to. It's not their job! Now, mabye there's a bit of arrogance here, but there's also decades of momentum behind this trend.
The point is, Tablet PC only made sense inside Microsoft's Redmond campus. Bill Gates likes to call office drones "Knowledge Workers" but so many people using Windows don't need their file system to be based on SQL so they can find the crucial document among thousands (sorry that's a little convoluted but I hope you see what I'm saying.) Similarly the Tablet PC has a bunch of whiz-bang features which could revolutionize the way a few jobs get done, but the market's not ready yet. And the market is, I think, a tad leery of buying Microsoft's hype yet again. Microsoft's marketing is clearly the best in the industry, but I think they tried too hard to sell ice cube trays to Eskimos on this one.
Rounding up drug users was Nixon's idea, greatly expanded under Reagan.
The rest of your diatribe is just baseless and nonsensical, but your commentary on the War on Drugs is the polar opposite of what's known as "the truth."
Sadly, no political party has a monopoly on hypocrisy or annoyingness. Similarly, there is no one troll who can meet all of SlashDot's trolling needs. But your efforts are appreciated!
from the article Currently my grid is about 1.57 million points on a side
If he's saying that the 2 worms hit the end of the 1.57million^2 grid, in a non-repeating pattern, that's pretty neato. We must know where it ends! Put it on Big Mac, make the grid bigger, and call it iWorms.
The general purpose computer will eventually price crush the game box.
it may price crush them (it's close to that now) but it is nowhere closer to having three things:
1. appliance-style instant-on "plug and play" -- instead you have to load the OS then install the game, then load the game, and so many things can go wrong there.
2. unified controller architecture (man the buzzwords) so that game developers don't have to worry about which version of Microsoft Sidewinder you're going to use, or maybe you'll just use the keyboard and a trackball or what have you.
3. "franchise" games like Nintendo's Mario, oh so popular with the young 'uns.
Now, what the PC does have, is mods. I think that's the big weakness of Xbox live and all that, there's no ability for the community to "embrace and extend" as it were. Kinda ironic, but not surprising. The PC is an open architecture computer, the game consoles are closed-architecture appliances.
This is really quite interesting, but I wish you had some references for your initial statement. Not that I disagree with you... I never quite saw it in your terms, more like (one) function of public school is to "socialize" humans so they tend to stay within the acceptable bounds of, well, society.
in many places driving is increasingly unpleasant as a result of the sheer number of other people that want to do it Yes, you're right. The suburbs are a mistake. Probably the biggest domestic American mistake in the latter half of the twentieth century. And one we continue to make even as I type this.
When you live in the suburbs you *need* a car. Well, technically, I guess you could try to get around on the bus, but it doesn't work too well. Buses in the suburbs are mainly good at getting 9-to-5ers to their jobs and back. They aren't really designed so much for trasnporting people within their "community," which I had to put in quotes since it's hard to have a sense of community with the "neighbors" who happen to live on the other side of the four-lane divided road from you.
I hate the suburbs. I pity my friends who live there. On the other hand, they can afford houses in the suburbs, which is why they do it. But I'll stick with renting (aka pissing my money away) and be a few blocks walk from grocery stores, theaters, bars, library. All the stuff that my suburban friends have to get in a car to go to.
If you're really opposed to all this Big Oil and Big SUV nonsense, maybe the thing to do is try a way of life that's existed for thousands of years, a throwback to an era when most people had little choice but to travel on foot. It's called "the city."
The really sad part is the pittance that school disticts get for selling access to their customers. It's practically nothing. As mentioned in the story, this group spent $100,000 for access to 900,000 students. That's eleven cents per student.
The commercialization of education is something we should all be up in arms about. Why do they even sell sodas at school? They are proven to be a health risk. If kids want Coke that bad, let mom pack it in their lunch. Why do we sit kids down in front of Channel One for thirty minutes? Don't they get enough TV at home? It's absolutely appaling, and I wish that somebody with power (clearly not the NEA) would do something about it.
And yes, I recognize the irony of going off on this, since when I was in high school I had a Snickers bar and a Coke for lunch most days of the week. Thank God I didn't have to watch Channel One, though. I mean, really, teachers are giving kids detention for talkking DURING THE ADS on Channel One.
Perhaps it's being called "propaganda" because of the way the message is being conveyed. Students have no choice but to hear this message. They can't change the channel. This point of view is being "crammed down their throats." There's no discussion of the underlying IP laws, copyright extensions, etc.
In the same sense, the Pledge of Allegiance is also propaganda, and probably just as effective. In my day, I usually just stood up and never said anything, and certainly never believed it. Especially the "Under God" part. The "War on Drugs" crap that kids younger than me have to endure is propaganda too.
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Shouldn't we wait until Microsoft has to pay Eolas billions before questioning the authenticity of this patent???
Well, the electoral process had never been so close and so scrutinized before. They had to develop a standard on-the-fly, which as I recall was something like: "hanging" chads (three corners removed) counted as "voted" but "swinging" chads (two corners removed) and "dimple" chads (one corner) didn't count as votes. But then the clock ran out, so it didn't matter anyway. And don't forget the butterfly ballot, and all the Jews who voted for Pat Robertson!
With all the scrutiny paid to the chads, nobody paid much attention to the systemic abuses: Thousands of black voters showed up to vote and were turned away as a result of the very careless (deliberately so for the conspiratorial among us) purging of felons from the voter rolls. A project that was outsourced to a private out-of-state agency, thereby deflecting any accountability away from officials of the State. And it's not even clear that the chad problem stems from "operator error" -- the equipment was obviously pretty old and could have been upgraded, but wasn't. Then there's Jeb Bush promising his brother that he will win Florida...
The whole thing is a mess. Jimmy Carter and his Project Democracy or whatever would not have certified the Florida election process. In other words, the standards in place in FLA were below the standards for a free election in a third-world country. Come to think of it much of Florida reminds me of a third-world country! (for example: incredible wealth of South Beach vs. poverty and gangs just a few miles away, legal and illegal immigrants from around the globe, entire communities where people don't speak english, crazy drivers, being white = not a crime suspect, drug cartels, etc.)
How are they keeping rights intact if they're effectively looking inside the package without opening it? They're not. The evidence they get is equivalent to what they'd find by opening the package.
The Supreme Court ruled in the Kyllo case that the cops can't just run around and IR-scan your house without a warrant. They decided that was an intrusive search, in spite of the fact that they physically didn't enter your house. I don't see this as much different. Where is the imminent danger to the public if you posses some cocaine? Anthrax, I can see, but illegal drugs don't rise to the threshhold of "imminent harm."
It was: "We (the Supreme Court) will make the decision that results in the guy we want getting the White House."
The vote was right down party lines, don't kid yourself about the legal "excuses" they came up with. Equal protection? Come on.
I think communism would "work" on a large scale about as well as we see capitailism and democracy "work" today.
The fact that the Roman Empire fell didn't stop the Fouding Fathers from using that model for our Republic.
All mushrooms are edible. Some mushrooms are only edible once.
I wonder if they considered embedded windows xp.
Of course this is completely different as our freedom is at stake.
And a crucial element of securing that freedom is not allowing robots into the whitehouse.gov web page?
My truck gets about ten miles per gallon. It's an old wreck. I'm actually too afraid to do the math and see what my real MPG is.
Even at cheap US fuel prices, it's extremely expensive just to drive somewhere. However, I barely drive anywhere. I just have the truck because once in a while, I need to go somewhere that my legs/bike/the bus/a cab won't take me.
I don't disagree, I just want to know what that "right persepctive" is. Is it the one in which all the pollution from buring fossil fuels blots out the sun? Or the one where, after consuming resources 365x faster than they were made, we run out?
Or does the right perspective include some sort of "light at the end of the tunnel" like when we get fusion up and running. Of course then we'll have to do a calculation for how much water we atomize in a day vs. how long it took to accrete on primordial Earth.
Okay, my examples are extreme, but I am not seeing the paltriness of our burn ratio.
I look at it this way: Even if these numbers are too large, this still makes you think about how inefficient the Industrial Revolution is. Or Western Civilization is.
Right on. I think the tablet is too big/unwieldy. Maybe the technology isn't there yet, to make it sort of just like a clipboard. But something a little bigger (and esp. better resolution) than a crappy PocketPC (320x240, ugh) but smaller than the 9x12 or so of a tablet PC seems right to me. Something about 9x6 or so.
The solution to getting doctors to enter data into whatever is to make it actually help them in some way, right away. I realize that the job of making this application is large, but you need to make the entry app actually provide them some kind of information they will find useful right away. That will make it worth it to use it
17 seconds? But I'm hungry now! Yeah, I agree. One of our biggest features was templates, "one touch reporting" it was called. And it is a big seller. I forget the name of the law in economics, maybe it's diminishing returns, but once you've got the big features the lesser ones cost more and more to get, and aren't as valuable as the first ones. We added voice recognition for the transcriptionists, all kinds of bells and whistles, but at the end of the day the software is still basically just a reporting tool, generating the paperwork mandated by the FDA and such. So sometimes the cool features aren't really relevant to the market. a la the tablet pc.
Interesting. Can't believe I overlooked that one. But, there was the dangling sword of litigation. I guess I'm thinking of partnerships where both companies go in willingly -- like nvidia making the xbox chips, for example, and then having to write off big $$$ after the xbox got hacked and MS demanded new chips. My poor nvidia stock :(
I guess my mind isn't open enough to see the nazi-style roundup and execution of gun owners and religious people you think are happening. I'll work on that.
BitGeek, you need your morning coffee. Check out this line:
Perhaps I'm mudslinging when I call you a troll, but at least I never called you a Republican. I am by no means a Democrat, and your assumption that I must be a Clinton fanboy simply because I disagree with you, well, let's just say that you show that you have a closed mind and are apparently incapable of actually thinking about an opinion that disagrees with yours.
They missed the market because it didn't exist. They were hoping to create a market, kind of the way Sony created the need for the Walkman.
If you look at the images in their ads, it shows people doing all sorts of neat stuff with their TabletPC, such as the inventory stuff you mentioned. Trouble is, there are already established methods of taking inventory and none of them will be significantly improved by an employer spending a month's pay on each employee to re-tool the process. And that's just for the data entry task, what about the back end? It's probably all AS400. Not that many people are running Windows in their production facilities or warehouses. Think of the costs, man!
I worked at a medical software company. Tablet PC could, potentially, be a great boon for our Windows-based product, by letting doctors enter info right into the computer, rather than taking notes and handing it off to a transcriptionist. One less person needed. But you know what? Doctors don't do "data entry" work. It's beneath them. They will never type anything at a computer unless they absolutely have to. It's not their job! Now, mabye there's a bit of arrogance here, but there's also decades of momentum behind this trend.
The point is, Tablet PC only made sense inside Microsoft's Redmond campus. Bill Gates likes to call office drones "Knowledge Workers" but so many people using Windows don't need their file system to be based on SQL so they can find the crucial document among thousands (sorry that's a little convoluted but I hope you see what I'm saying.) Similarly the Tablet PC has a bunch of whiz-bang features which could revolutionize the way a few jobs get done, but the market's not ready yet. And the market is, I think, a tad leery of buying Microsoft's hype yet again. Microsoft's marketing is clearly the best in the industry, but I think they tried too hard to sell ice cube trays to Eskimos on this one.
Just on a side note... Can anyone think of a company that has partnered with Microsoft and profited from it? Just curious.
Rounding up drug users was Nixon's idea, greatly expanded under Reagan.
The rest of your diatribe is just baseless and nonsensical, but your commentary on the War on Drugs is the polar opposite of what's known as "the truth."
Sadly, no political party has a monopoly on hypocrisy or annoyingness. Similarly, there is no one troll who can meet all of SlashDot's trolling needs. But your efforts are appreciated!
Also, your link is broken.
PC == PC running Windows
It's kinda like the old "Mac vs. IBM" mindset, I guess. There are still Mac people who refer to it as IBM, which I find very cute.
Just use VMWare. It's better than VirtualPC anyway.
Pnysics is just natural philosophy.
from the article Currently my grid is about 1.57 million points on a side
If he's saying that the 2 worms hit the end of the 1.57million^2 grid, in a non-repeating pattern, that's pretty neato. We must know where it ends! Put it on Big Mac, make the grid bigger, and call it iWorms.
The general purpose computer will eventually price crush the game box.
it may price crush them (it's close to that now) but it is nowhere closer to having three things:
1. appliance-style instant-on "plug and play" -- instead you have to load the OS then install the game, then load the game, and so many things can go wrong there.
2. unified controller architecture (man the buzzwords) so that game developers don't have to worry about which version of Microsoft Sidewinder you're going to use, or maybe you'll just use the keyboard and a trackball or what have you.
3. "franchise" games like Nintendo's Mario, oh so popular with the young 'uns.
Now, what the PC does have, is mods. I think that's the big weakness of Xbox live and all that, there's no ability for the community to "embrace and extend" as it were. Kinda ironic, but not surprising. The PC is an open architecture computer, the game consoles are closed-architecture appliances.
This is really quite interesting, but I wish you had some references for your initial statement. Not that I disagree with you... I never quite saw it in your terms, more like (one) function of public school is to "socialize" humans so they tend to stay within the acceptable bounds of, well, society.
Again, references please.
in many places driving is increasingly unpleasant as a result of the sheer number of other people that want to do it
Yes, you're right. The suburbs are a mistake. Probably the biggest domestic American mistake in the latter half of the twentieth century. And one we continue to make even as I type this.
When you live in the suburbs you *need* a car. Well, technically, I guess you could try to get around on the bus, but it doesn't work too well. Buses in the suburbs are mainly good at getting 9-to-5ers to their jobs and back. They aren't really designed so much for trasnporting people within their "community," which I had to put in quotes since it's hard to have a sense of community with the "neighbors" who happen to live on the other side of the four-lane divided road from you.
I hate the suburbs. I pity my friends who live there. On the other hand, they can afford houses in the suburbs, which is why they do it. But I'll stick with renting (aka pissing my money away) and be a few blocks walk from grocery stores, theaters, bars, library. All the stuff that my suburban friends have to get in a car to go to.
If you're really opposed to all this Big Oil and Big SUV nonsense, maybe the thing to do is try a way of life that's existed for thousands of years, a throwback to an era when most people had little choice but to travel on foot. It's called "the city."
The really sad part is the pittance that school disticts get for selling access to their customers. It's practically nothing. As mentioned in the story, this group spent $100,000 for access to 900,000 students. That's eleven cents per student.
The commercialization of education is something we should all be up in arms about. Why do they even sell sodas at school? They are proven to be a health risk. If kids want Coke that bad, let mom pack it in their lunch. Why do we sit kids down in front of Channel One for thirty minutes? Don't they get enough TV at home? It's absolutely appaling, and I wish that somebody with power (clearly not the NEA) would do something about it.
And yes, I recognize the irony of going off on this, since when I was in high school I had a Snickers bar and a Coke for lunch most days of the week. Thank God I didn't have to watch Channel One, though. I mean, really, teachers are giving kids detention for talkking DURING THE ADS on Channel One.
Perhaps it's being called "propaganda" because of the way the message is being conveyed. Students have no choice but to hear this message. They can't change the channel. This point of view is being "crammed down their throats." There's no discussion of the underlying IP laws, copyright extensions, etc.
In the same sense, the Pledge of Allegiance is also propaganda, and probably just as effective. In my day, I usually just stood up and never said anything, and certainly never believed it. Especially the "Under God" part. The "War on Drugs" crap that kids younger than me have to endure is propaganda too.