While it might be somewhat impracticable to put blimps up over major cities for cell coverage all the time, the use of this technology for emergancies isn't such a bad idea.
Unfortunately, there are really two issues here. First, the ability to communicate during the disater. I'm not sure if we really need to invest too much in the problem of how to make a cell phone call during a hurricane. Evacuation is done for a reason. If you can't be bothered to leave I'm not all to sympathetic if you can't call out either.
That said, when rescue crews start operating in the city following a catastrophe like this, we need to have a working telecommunications infrastructure. Blimps or some other form of airborn system can aid immeasurably in this.
Of course, cell phones are only good as long as their batteries hold out. Still, solar power and a decent sat uplink can temporarily solve the infrastructure problem.
Even if Capchas are broken in, say, 1 second by this system - we have greatly raised the cost of sending an email, posting a blog-spam comment, or some other such irritant.
Sure, maybe they're not perfect.
I use them on my website mostly because I want to avoid people posting advertisements on my blog. Individuals do it occasionaly, but those are easy enough to delete. When someone coded my blog comment form into a bot somewhere and I started getting 100+ spam comments a day I started useing captchas.
I'm sure the one I'm using is one of the weakest ones out there - but it's free and required very little time and energy to deploy.
I use Captchas.net's free service. Here is an example page rendered from my server.
Key to making this work is patience. For me it took about 60-90 seconds for Trillian to connect to the google server and indicate that the connection was successfull. Once it's configured, just hit connect and wait. Be patient, it takes a while.
They're highly trained and skilled professionals - but skilled in a profession that is more or less the lowest common denominator of our species.
I'm not saying it doesn't need to be done, just that humans are pretty good at killing stuff - it's something we're born with.
Unlike the position of Aeronautical Engineer, anyone can be trained to be an infantryman. That's the point. That's why we had a draft for a while.
I doubt the GP is saying that the poor sap should be handed a rifle and shipped to Iraq, but military service could be an excelent manner in which to repay your society for debts incurred.
It's pathetic that this got modded as Troll. Sure, it's not the groupthink that we often bandy about here on Slashdot, and the guy is, if not a spammer, an accomplice to spammers, so I can understand the desire to dash his brains out with a large rock.
That said, he's a human being. He was fined a huge amount of money and he was getting 28k from AOL to work as a software engineer. That's highway robbery. Why he took the job is beyond me, but 28k doesn't cover a software engineer here in south-western Virginia where I live (low cost of living). Isn't AOL based in DC or thereabouts?
AOL screwed this guy in my estimation. What he did was illegal, wrong, and deplorable, but he did it for a reason.
There's another side to this coin. Not everything is black and white, 1 and 0. Give that some thought. What makes a person do this, particularly someone like us in IT who knows what a pain in the ass that can be?
Not really, this is a common concept in economics. Certain industries don't cover the carrying costs of their own activities.
Example - Dow Chemical (not picking on Dow, they just come to mind) makes Paint-X. Paint-X's manufacturing process requires chemicals X,Y, and Z which Dow pays for, as well as a chemical process V.
Dow sells Paint-X for V+X+Y+Z+W(profit for Dow).
Now, Paint-X has other costs too, because process V produces waste U which Dow dumps into a river. It floats down stream and contaminates an underground aquifer, causing evironmental damage to some farmers crops further down stream.
Clearly, the cost of cleaning up that aquifer and the cost of the farmers crops that were destroyed are both costs associated with the production of Paint-X, but those costs are not included in the price of Paint-X and they aren't sholdered by Dow.
That's an example of this concept. It's not circular reasoning, it's the law of unintended consequences applied to economics.
I hate to say it, but given the responce from people here over Kevin Mitnick's conviction, I'd say that a life - or very long sentence - prohibiting the use of certain technologies would be an adequate deterant.
Sure, Kevin got a bum rap - and I don't want to drag up that debate, so if you think I'm full of crap just let it drop on that count - but his sentence gave most of us pause.
I'm not saying that a sentence like that would do a hell of a lot for the kind of white collar crime you see in accounting and other diciples of its ilk, but in the IT industry that kind of sentence could go a long way.
The AIDS Cocktail can run $10,000 - $15,000 per year. Since the research has allready been done, the drug companies are looking at almost pure profit on the manufacture of the pills.
Given the corporate behavior of Enron and Worldcom I'm disinclined to trust Merk or some other pharma corp to do anything altruistic with a one-shot cure/vaccine for AIDS.
This gets a lot of discussion on Slashdot and other sites of similar ilk. We're oft told that the reason we don't see a keyboard and mouse with a console is that both of these things benefit from the desk that they typicaly sit on.
You're right - for a FPS or a strategy game, a mouse and keyboard are, by far, the best interface (yet).
I just wonder how true that bit about the desk being necessary really is. I've played with gyro mice (expensive, yes, but mostly because they're a niche product) and have pretty much always been able to use a keyboard on my lap -- so why don't we see more keyboard/mouse interfaces becoming available for the couch environment?
MSFT is supposed to be playing the XBox 360 as a home media device -- perhaps a keyboard will become standard issue with that.
The article mentions a built in display - configured by the player to show in game information or data from an outside application.
Two questions:
1 - Who really looks at their keyboard that much during a game session?
2 - How are they pulling data from a game engine? Is this assuming that developers will build software for this keyboard system for major releases? That seems presumptive.
You keep infering that there is some kind of double standard being employed here, and -- well -- there's not.
I, for example, am one of those who am for Embryonic Stem Cell Research, but against this kind of testing. It's not a double standard -- to say that there's an ethical component doesn't connect the two at all.
Embryonic Stem Cell research has little ethical complications for me as I do not belive a fetus to be the same thing as a human being. There is a difference, in my mind, between what may be and what is.
Genetic testing in the work place (particularly secret or coerced testing) has ethical complications, primarily privacy concerns.
Now if I saw ethical problems with Stem Cell work and chose to ignore them because human lives can be saved, that might make me guilty of some kind of hipocracy, or at least guilty of making a hard call with reguard to the value of human life.
Showing that two things both have ethical components isn't really that strong of a link. I'm hard pressed to think of any decision from where I buy lunch to who I vote for that doesn't have ethical components. Ethics are pervasive -- that's kind of the point.
Wow -- that was judgemental. My company is doing a lot of development using AJAX and a lot of useability testing with it. Most of what you listed relies on highly sophisticated visual clues to tell the user what's going on -- those cues work well for what Google has done with AJAX, but the thread of discussion here is a more generalized application than just Gmail or Google Maps.
We're encountering many of the problems I've listed. They require good user design and some serious design work to overcome. AJAX can change the way a browser navigates, and, depending on the precentage of the screen it redraws, can very easily fool a user into thinking that a new pageload has occured.
What it really comes down to is this - we rely on space based systems to protect and enhance our military. Without these spaced based force multipliers, the US military is in some pretty serious trouble. GPS, Satellite Communications, Orbital Imaging -- if we don't have our multibillion dollar toys in the sky, we're not the worlds most powerful military anymore.
Now, the deployment of weapons that can take away our space based advantage is something that we should expect other countries to pursue. After all, they become more secure when they can hold the US military at by debilitating our satellites.
In a classical prisoners dilemma, we are thus forced to develop our own anti-satellite weapons to protect our existing infrastructure -- we can't risk being left behind in this matter because the security of our other military capabilities rests upon
If debris is such a big deal, it would seem that we might see some value in cleaning up after ourselves.
Of course, the development of a space elevator changes this whole game. Knocking down satellite systems that aid ground forces is one thing - and not of earth shattering importance. But when one country gains the ability to drop very heavy things from orbit more or less at will -- then priorities shift.
If anyone can point me at some good information on these topics I'd be most appreciative. Particularly, how can I support "back" behavior without double loading content in an iframe?
Well as long as they're tied to a web browser, there are a lot of usage considerations to worry about. Users expect a web browser to behave in a certain way. AJAX breaks that model -- back buttons become non-functional, or function differently than expected. Reload may or may not get you anywhere -- there's a host of problems.
For AJAX to replace the desktop binary, it's going to need a new generation of browsers. Either that, or we're going to have to train a lot of users -- and we all know how that works out.
Ultimately the difference in what should and should not be opened to public scrutiny comes down to where the information originates. Corporate information should be open to the public because corporations exist only through the legal protections of Government, which exists only at the consent of the governed.
There are only two places this line blurs - when a person interacts with a corporation and when a person acts like a corporation.
In the first, while a corporation may choose to collect data on its customers, that data should never be for sale or distribution. Carelessness with or misuse of that data should meet with harsh consequences.
In the second, a person is engaging in public actions (such as the creation of intellectual properties) -- in such a case the information should be opened to public scrutiny.
These are my opinions. They are based around the fundamental assumption that, despite present legal structures, a corporation is not the same thing as an individual. Individuals have natural rights, and the right of a corporation to exist is something granted by a government. The two are not equal and thus the information they produce should also be unequal.
But a big part of that is what kind of connectors are available. I bought a HDTV about a year ago - it wasn't from the bargin bin, but it doesn't have HDMI. DVI, yes, but only one socket.
A friend of mine picked up a Sony Wega last month, glorious system, supports HDMI, but no DVI. So if MSFT is going to sell us both a Xbox 360 what standard do they use? Component -- everything supports component. It may be inferior to a more sophisticated system like HDMI, but it has way more market penetration. If they want the Xbox to have out of the box HD gaming for most of it's audiance, they need component connections.
They can slap HDMI on it too, but I'd have said that bout DVI last year, and look where it would have gotten them with my friend's Wega.
Are you on crack? Warner's approval rating is at 63% and trending up [source]
Bush, in contrast, as an approval rating below 50% [source], lower according to some sources.
Warner would make an excelent candidate - Virginia has the strongest executive branch in the country, giving him a strong background and good experiance. The GOP lacks an obvious successor, unless Cheney quits/drops dead before January 2007.
Yea, pretty much. But my wife's a poly sci student and I get yelled at a lot about this - so you're going to get it too.
The 1st, 2nd, and 3rd world nomenclature isn't used anymore, at least not in PolySci (historians use it, but then, that's not the present we're talking about is it?)
Today we call them: Developed Countries Developing Countries and Highly Indebted Poor Counties
I maintain that the 1st 2nd 3rd system is easier on everyone involved, but it doesn't get me anywhere.
So, there you are. Technicaly Russia falls into the "Developing Countries" area, but only just.
It's also worth pointing out that Ethanol based fuels rarely if ever come from corn grown specificly for that purpose. Generaly a cattle farmer would harvest feed corn, and stuff it in a silo to ferment. The fermented feed corn would have the Ethanol removed and used for fuel, while the broken down corn and husks is removed and fed to the cattle.
This is one of the reasons that Ethanol energy studies often find Ethanol a net energy loss -- they don't consider that the fuel being used to harvest and grown the corn would be used ANYWAY because the corn is cattle feed.
Take out the enormous cost of farming the corn (which is allready factored into your beef prices) and the Ethanol byproducts are just icing on the cake.
Once again -- where is Truman telling us that this bomb is any different than other bombs? Ok -- it's big. Big bombs are very well and good, but not categoricaly different than a large number of smaller bombs.
If you seek to differentiate the atomic bombing of Japan from the firebombing of Japan (which killed more people by the way) you must do so on the basis of something other than scope - at least if you want to establish the use of nuclear weapons as any more repugnant than another other form of warfare.
So yea -- still waiting for those vaunted documents.
Allright -- fine. You seem to see yourself as authoritive on this subject matter, so I'll defer to you on this.
owever, contrary to what you imply not fully understanding the effects doesn't mean that the people weren't aware of the special nature of the atomic bomb.
Please supply
Documentation on the "special nature" of the atomic bomb from pre 1946
A concise explanation of what your personal thoughts are on the morality of the atomic bombing -- since you obviously disagree with mine
Further about the issue of anachronism, as I didn't judge them that is a moot point anyway, but as I repeatedly pointed out you and others are overlooking that at the time, not now, the issue was hotly debated and there were many people, Eisenhower was just one example, who in the context of the time held the opinion that using the atomic bombs was unjustifiable, unjustified and morally wrong. How is pointing this out anachronistic?
None of the objections raised in the wikipedia article you provide deal with the "special" nature of the bomb, including Eisenhower. If your judgements are tinged by your modern knowledge of nuclear weapons - that's anachronism. Again, please provide these vaunted documents discussing the "special" characteristics of the atomic bomb.
Slashdot Mirror
While it might be somewhat impracticable to put blimps up over major cities for cell coverage all the time, the use of this technology for emergancies isn't such a bad idea.
Unfortunately, there are really two issues here. First, the ability to communicate during the disater. I'm not sure if we really need to invest too much in the problem of how to make a cell phone call during a hurricane. Evacuation is done for a reason. If you can't be bothered to leave I'm not all to sympathetic if you can't call out either.
That said, when rescue crews start operating in the city following a catastrophe like this, we need to have a working telecommunications infrastructure. Blimps or some other form of airborn system can aid immeasurably in this.
Of course, cell phones are only good as long as their batteries hold out. Still, solar power and a decent sat uplink can temporarily solve the infrastructure problem.
Love it when my "n" key doesn't work. Lets try that again. My Website. There we are. Much better
Even if Capchas are broken in, say, 1 second by this system - we have greatly raised the cost of sending an email, posting a blog-spam comment, or some other such irritant.
Sure, maybe they're not perfect.
I use them on my website mostly because I want to avoid people posting advertisements on my blog. Individuals do it occasionaly, but those are easy enough to delete. When someone coded my blog comment form into a bot somewhere and I started getting 100+ spam comments a day I started useing captchas.
I'm sure the one I'm using is one of the weakest ones out there - but it's free and required very little time and energy to deploy.
I use Captchas.net's free service. Here is an example page rendered from my server.
Key to making this work is patience. For me it took about 60-90 seconds for Trillian to connect to the google server and indicate that the connection was successfull. Once it's configured, just hit connect and wait. Be patient, it takes a while.
Me Too!
(Obligitory AOL joke - kind of shocked I haven't seen one yet)
They're highly trained and skilled professionals - but skilled in a profession that is more or less the lowest common denominator of our species.
I'm not saying it doesn't need to be done, just that humans are pretty good at killing stuff - it's something we're born with.
Unlike the position of Aeronautical Engineer, anyone can be trained to be an infantryman. That's the point. That's why we had a draft for a while.
I doubt the GP is saying that the poor sap should be handed a rifle and shipped to Iraq, but military service could be an excelent manner in which to repay your society for debts incurred.
It's pathetic that this got modded as Troll. Sure, it's not the groupthink that we often bandy about here on Slashdot, and the guy is, if not a spammer, an accomplice to spammers, so I can understand the desire to dash his brains out with a large rock.
That said, he's a human being. He was fined a huge amount of money and he was getting 28k from AOL to work as a software engineer. That's highway robbery. Why he took the job is beyond me, but 28k doesn't cover a software engineer here in south-western Virginia where I live (low cost of living). Isn't AOL based in DC or thereabouts?
AOL screwed this guy in my estimation. What he did was illegal, wrong, and deplorable, but he did it for a reason.
There's another side to this coin. Not everything is black and white, 1 and 0. Give that some thought. What makes a person do this, particularly someone like us in IT who knows what a pain in the ass that can be?
Not really, this is a common concept in economics. Certain industries don't cover the carrying costs of their own activities.
Example - Dow Chemical (not picking on Dow, they just come to mind) makes Paint-X. Paint-X's manufacturing process requires chemicals X,Y, and Z which Dow pays for, as well as a chemical process V.
Dow sells Paint-X for V+X+Y+Z+W(profit for Dow).
Now, Paint-X has other costs too, because process V produces waste U which Dow dumps into a river. It floats down stream and contaminates an underground aquifer, causing evironmental damage to some farmers crops further down stream.
Clearly, the cost of cleaning up that aquifer and the cost of the farmers crops that were destroyed are both costs associated with the production of Paint-X, but those costs are not included in the price of Paint-X and they aren't sholdered by Dow.
That's an example of this concept. It's not circular reasoning, it's the law of unintended consequences applied to economics.
I hate to say it, but given the responce from people here over Kevin Mitnick's conviction, I'd say that a life - or very long sentence - prohibiting the use of certain technologies would be an adequate deterant.
Sure, Kevin got a bum rap - and I don't want to drag up that debate, so if you think I'm full of crap just let it drop on that count - but his sentence gave most of us pause.
I'm not saying that a sentence like that would do a hell of a lot for the kind of white collar crime you see in accounting and other diciples of its ilk, but in the IT industry that kind of sentence could go a long way.
The AIDS Cocktail can run $10,000 - $15,000 per year. Since the research has allready been done, the drug companies are looking at almost pure profit on the manufacture of the pills.
Given the corporate behavior of Enron and Worldcom I'm disinclined to trust Merk or some other pharma corp to do anything altruistic with a one-shot cure/vaccine for AIDS.
This gets a lot of discussion on Slashdot and other sites of similar ilk. We're oft told that the reason we don't see a keyboard and mouse with a console is that both of these things benefit from the desk that they typicaly sit on.
You're right - for a FPS or a strategy game, a mouse and keyboard are, by far, the best interface (yet).
I just wonder how true that bit about the desk being necessary really is. I've played with gyro mice (expensive, yes, but mostly because they're a niche product) and have pretty much always been able to use a keyboard on my lap -- so why don't we see more keyboard/mouse interfaces becoming available for the couch environment?
MSFT is supposed to be playing the XBox 360 as a home media device -- perhaps a keyboard will become standard issue with that.
The article mentions a built in display - configured by the player to show in game information or data from an outside application.
Two questions:
1 - Who really looks at their keyboard that much during a game session?
2 - How are they pulling data from a game engine? Is this assuming that developers will build software for this keyboard system for major releases? That seems presumptive.
You keep infering that there is some kind of double standard being employed here, and -- well -- there's not.
I, for example, am one of those who am for Embryonic Stem Cell Research, but against this kind of testing. It's not a double standard -- to say that there's an ethical component doesn't connect the two at all.
Embryonic Stem Cell research has little ethical complications for me as I do not belive a fetus to be the same thing as a human being. There is a difference, in my mind, between what may be and what is.
Genetic testing in the work place (particularly secret or coerced testing) has ethical complications, primarily privacy concerns.
Now if I saw ethical problems with Stem Cell work and chose to ignore them because human lives can be saved, that might make me guilty of some kind of hipocracy, or at least guilty of making a hard call with reguard to the value of human life.
Showing that two things both have ethical components isn't really that strong of a link. I'm hard pressed to think of any decision from where I buy lunch to who I vote for that doesn't have ethical components. Ethics are pervasive -- that's kind of the point.
Wow -- that was judgemental. My company is doing a lot of development using AJAX and a lot of useability testing with it. Most of what you listed relies on highly sophisticated visual clues to tell the user what's going on -- those cues work well for what Google has done with AJAX, but the thread of discussion here is a more generalized application than just Gmail or Google Maps.
We're encountering many of the problems I've listed. They require good user design and some serious design work to overcome. AJAX can change the way a browser navigates, and, depending on the precentage of the screen it redraws, can very easily fool a user into thinking that a new pageload has occured.
What it really comes down to is this - we rely on space based systems to protect and enhance our military. Without these spaced based force multipliers, the US military is in some pretty serious trouble. GPS, Satellite Communications, Orbital Imaging -- if we don't have our multibillion dollar toys in the sky, we're not the worlds most powerful military anymore.
Now, the deployment of weapons that can take away our space based advantage is something that we should expect other countries to pursue. After all, they become more secure when they can hold the US military at by debilitating our satellites.
In a classical prisoners dilemma, we are thus forced to develop our own anti-satellite weapons to protect our existing infrastructure -- we can't risk being left behind in this matter because the security of our other military capabilities rests upon
If debris is such a big deal, it would seem that we might see some value in cleaning up after ourselves.
Of course, the development of a space elevator changes this whole game. Knocking down satellite systems that aid ground forces is one thing - and not of earth shattering importance. But when one country gains the ability to drop very heavy things from orbit more or less at will -- then priorities shift.
If anyone can point me at some good information on these topics I'd be most appreciative. Particularly, how can I support "back" behavior without double loading content in an iframe?
Well as long as they're tied to a web browser, there are a lot of usage considerations to worry about. Users expect a web browser to behave in a certain way. AJAX breaks that model -- back buttons become non-functional, or function differently than expected. Reload may or may not get you anywhere -- there's a host of problems.
For AJAX to replace the desktop binary, it's going to need a new generation of browsers. Either that, or we're going to have to train a lot of users -- and we all know how that works out.
Ultimately the difference in what should and should not be opened to public scrutiny comes down to where the information originates. Corporate information should be open to the public because corporations exist only through the legal protections of Government, which exists only at the consent of the governed.
There are only two places this line blurs - when a person interacts with a corporation and when a person acts like a corporation.
In the first, while a corporation may choose to collect data on its customers, that data should never be for sale or distribution. Carelessness with or misuse of that data should meet with harsh consequences.
In the second, a person is engaging in public actions (such as the creation of intellectual properties) -- in such a case the information should be opened to public scrutiny.
These are my opinions. They are based around the fundamental assumption that, despite present legal structures, a corporation is not the same thing as an individual. Individuals have natural rights, and the right of a corporation to exist is something granted by a government. The two are not equal and thus the information they produce should also be unequal.
But a big part of that is what kind of connectors are available. I bought a HDTV about a year ago - it wasn't from the bargin bin, but it doesn't have HDMI. DVI, yes, but only one socket.
A friend of mine picked up a Sony Wega last month, glorious system, supports HDMI, but no DVI. So if MSFT is going to sell us both a Xbox 360 what standard do they use? Component -- everything supports component. It may be inferior to a more sophisticated system like HDMI, but it has way more market penetration. If they want the Xbox to have out of the box HD gaming for most of it's audiance, they need component connections.
They can slap HDMI on it too, but I'd have said that bout DVI last year, and look where it would have gotten them with my friend's Wega.
Damn -- this would make my wife's Con Law professor proud. Why the hell was this posted AC?
Are you on crack? Warner's approval rating is at 63% and trending up [source]
Bush, in contrast, as an approval rating below 50% [source], lower according to some sources.
Warner would make an excelent candidate - Virginia has the strongest executive branch in the country, giving him a strong background and good experiance. The GOP lacks an obvious successor, unless Cheney quits/drops dead before January 2007.
Yea, pretty much. But my wife's a poly sci student and I get yelled at a lot about this - so you're going to get it too.
The 1st, 2nd, and 3rd world nomenclature isn't used anymore, at least not in PolySci (historians use it, but then, that's not the present we're talking about is it?)
Today we call them:
Developed Countries
Developing Countries
and Highly Indebted Poor Counties
I maintain that the 1st 2nd 3rd system is easier on everyone involved, but it doesn't get me anywhere.
So, there you are. Technicaly Russia falls into the "Developing Countries" area, but only just.
It's also worth pointing out that Ethanol based fuels rarely if ever come from corn grown specificly for that purpose. Generaly a cattle farmer would harvest feed corn, and stuff it in a silo to ferment. The fermented feed corn would have the Ethanol removed and used for fuel, while the broken down corn and husks is removed and fed to the cattle.
This is one of the reasons that Ethanol energy studies often find Ethanol a net energy loss -- they don't consider that the fuel being used to harvest and grown the corn would be used ANYWAY because the corn is cattle feed.
Take out the enormous cost of farming the corn (which is allready factored into your beef prices) and the Ethanol byproducts are just icing on the cake.
Once again -- where is Truman telling us that this bomb is any different than other bombs? Ok -- it's big. Big bombs are very well and good, but not categoricaly different than a large number of smaller bombs.
If you seek to differentiate the atomic bombing of Japan from the firebombing of Japan (which killed more people by the way) you must do so on the basis of something other than scope - at least if you want to establish the use of nuclear weapons as any more repugnant than another other form of warfare.
So yea -- still waiting for those vaunted documents.
owever, contrary to what you imply not fully understanding the effects doesn't mean that the people weren't aware of the special nature of the atomic bomb.
Please supply
Further about the issue of anachronism, as I didn't judge them that is a moot point anyway, but as I repeatedly pointed out you and others are overlooking that at the time, not now, the issue was hotly debated and there were many people, Eisenhower was just one example, who in the context of the time held the opinion that using the atomic bombs was unjustifiable, unjustified and morally wrong. How is pointing this out anachronistic?
None of the objections raised in the wikipedia article you provide deal with the "special" nature of the bomb, including Eisenhower. If your judgements are tinged by your modern knowledge of nuclear weapons - that's anachronism. Again, please provide these vaunted documents discussing the "special" characteristics of the atomic bomb.