Not that I'm advocating this (I'd rather he continue living in shame), but wouldn't it be delightfully ironic if someone shot Jack Thompson because GTA IV convinced him to do so? In his death he'd be proving the very thing he spent his life trying to convince people of.
If you read the first article (which is now slashdotted), it seems to indicate that the new TLDs aren't actually.com,.net, etc, but rather are the CHINESE EQUIVALENTS of them - in other words, they're adding a couple of new TLDs that will only be accessible in China, using the Chinese characters for company / network instead of the English abbreviations we use. So yahoo.com will still link to Yahoo, but yahoo.(chinese word for company) might go somewhere else if Yahoo doesn't promptly snap it up. This seems like it's not a censorship issue but rather simply a desire on the part of the Chinese to have a legitimately Chinese-character-friendly set of TLDs.
On A), as I suggested in my original post, it doesn't matter whether or not the school is "good" - the mere fact that it requires a greater amount of effort to get in will ensure that it's better than a typical public school. I don't think there'll be any "dilution", either, I simply think there'll be more private schools, just as charter schools have sprung up recently based on demand for those. And I don't buy your argument that private schools should be held to the same standard as public schools just because they receive public funding - plenty of students at private universities receive publicly-funded scholarships and nobody's arguing that they should have to be run like public universities. This also covers your point B), if they're private then they should be free of any government-imposed standards - that way, parents can choose whether or not to send their children to a school with rigorous testing.
On point C), I personally don't have any problem with parents choosing to send their children to religious schools. Parents have a much greater role in determining their students' religious views than schools do - witness the kids who come into their public-school science classes with prepared arguments for creationism. And as someone who was raised in a religious family but became an atheist shortly after leaving it, I don't think this would have the negative impact on society that a lot of liberals fear it would - if the parochial schools are providing even a halfway-decent education then their graduates will be equipped to make their own decisions about religion.
Holding back and failing the free riders isn't going to solve anything - they'll simply drag down next year's class instead of this year's one. Greater performance standards might help a little, but the problem goes a lot deeper than that - if smart and motivated kids aren't learning anything then no amount of testing is going to fix that.
We do seem to agree on a need for greater specialization between schools - I suppose a compromise between our two approaches would be to greatly increase the number of "magnet" and other narrowly-focused schools and don't obsess about putting everyone on a college track. But I still think an increase in private schooling would help.
I spent a lot of time this past school year tutoring 11th-grade New York City public school students on the SAT. These were bright kids who were genuinely interested in learning and very much wanted to attend college, and they attend the school system with the highest per-student expense in the entire USA, but their vocabulary was terrible, their writing was at about the level I'd expect to find from a middle-schooler, and they didn't even know how to use fractions. You can try to attribute this to low teacher salaries, bungled administration, or lack of funding, but when a smart kid can take a decade's worth of math classes and still not know how to work with fractions, I think the problem goes well beyond any of that.
The fundamental problem as I see it is free riders. Compulsory public education means that a sizable percentage of students in any public school will be uninterested in learning, with parents who are equally uninterested in their children's educations. These kids will contribute to a culture of disinterest and a lack of respect for education which can pervade the entire school. I'm sure a lot of Slashdotters can remember sitting through math classes where most of the time was wasted trying to get a few disagreeable kids to sit down, shut up and try to learn something.
Private schools work better because they cater to a self-selecting group: most of the parents who send their children to private schools are at least a little bit interested in making sure that their children get a good education and go to college, and will provide the reinforcement at home to make sure that they actually do study hard. Well-funded suburban private schools work similarly, because families move to areas with higher property taxes in large part because of their superior schools, and because (unfortunate but true) people with the money to live in those rich suburbs tend to have college degrees themselves and are more likely to appreciate the importance of getting their children well educated.
So in spite of being a Democrat, I think school vouchers are a good idea, not because private schools are intrinsically "better" (they're not) but because the extra effort and expense of sending children to a (voucher-subsidized) private school will weed out a lot of the less-devoted students and parents, while keeping private education within the means of moderate-income families. And even for bright but lower-income students, vouchers can help bridge the gap between merit scholarships and tuition fees.
At the same time, by shunting off a lot of the college-bound students to private schools, vouchers allow public schools to focus more on the needs of the remaining students. It may seem a bit radical in the face of American schools' constant focus on college prep, but there are some strong arguments to be made for adding more of a trade-school focus to public high schools; there are certain professions, nursing for example, that are badly in need of workers, and providing some of the training for those jobs in high school can fill the gaps and provide a much better career alternative than Wal-Mart.
This isn't about "giving up" on public education, it's about appreciating the reality that not everybody is going to college, and doing the best we can for them based on that.
When I worked in the Pocket PC division, my boss carried around a Palm Vx. (as did many other people there, actually) They eventually started handing out free XDA's, which I believe won them a few converts...
But isn't it possible that there's some biological cause for the older generation's resistance to change? The brain slows down, there are fewer new connections and fewer new cells, and as a consequence of this it may become more difficult to accept or adapt to a new belief. If everyone's brain worked like a 20-year-old's, the changes of the 50's could have been accomplished in a matter of weeks.
Take a look at PADict - open-source Palm OS Japanese dictionary with built-in Japanese fonts and handwriting recognizer.
(shameless plug) My company, Pleco Software makes a similar product for Chinese, and we've found that for a lot of people ready access to a character dictionary can greatly assist with their studies and their later word recall.
So you genetically engineer a clone of yourself with no higher brain functions, grow it in a tank until its skull reaches full size, and do a brain transplant (impossible now, but it seems reasonable to assume nanotech will make this possible within a few decades). As long as you can keep the brain alive you're all set.
Of course this raises all sorts of moral issues, but as long as the clone's brain never starts working one can make a pretty good argument that this is not really a separate individual from yourself. (not enough to satisfy some religious leaders, but in an age of 1000-year lifespans their days are pretty well numbered anyway)
They already announced a year ago that they'd be breaking MemSemaphoreReserve() in Palm OS Cobalt, so most developers have been aware of the problem for a while now and the good ones have likely already managed to write around it. Which isn't really all that difficult on a fast device - most of the slowness in DmWrite() is not in the copy operation (which is really just an inter-heap memcpy()) but in the bounds-checking that comes before it, so if you need to make a lot of little changes you can simply read out the entire record into a buffer, make your changes and then write the record back.
But this is all moot since I'm pretty sure MemSemaphoreReserve() still works on the Treo 650 anyway. The way the flash filesystem is implemented is that whenever you query a database record, the record is loaded from flash into a portion of RAM (I believe something like 10 MB) sset aside for caching database records. So as long as you aren't accessing 10 MB worth of records at the same time (which would be a pretty dumb idea anyway for any number of reasons) you're OK - some things may be a lot slower but the software should basically still work and you can write around those slowdowns. Remember that even with the memory semaphore you're still limited to editing records that you've locked down, so the OS doesn't have to worry about making the entire database accessible in RAM, just the portion of it that you're currently using.
I too got to have dinner with Bill a few years ago. (though they didn't hire me full-time, so I can now spill corporate secrets with impunity:-) The basic format was pretty much as Metanoya describes, but here are some more notes:
The event actually took place over the course of four different nights - they opened it to all Microsoft interns who were graduating the following year, and as Bill's backyard is not all that enormous it would have been difficult to squeeze us all in there at once.
I didn't get a tour of the insides, but from the outside and the staircase/walkway the house looks like a big expensive log cabin - a very sleek and polished-looking one, but nevertheless burdened by the fact that the overall theme the architect was given was "log cabin". Which I suppose makes it a very good metaphor by Microsoft's products:-) I give it high marks for blending in with the overall surroundings/style of the area, but there are dozens of other much less monstrous houses around there that blend in just as well.
The backyard was exquisitely landscaped - there was a little path on one side through some trees and over a little bridge with a waterfall, an impressive-looking (and fenced-off) private playground for the kids, and the sand on his private beach was raked like a Zen garden.
One other interesting house detail: through one of the glass windows you could see an exercise room, but the equipment was so piled up and crowded together that it was pretty clear that no one actually uses it. The indoor/outdoor swimming pool had a couple of pieces of pool equipment floating in it, though, so it appears someone is making use of that at least.
Security was indeed very tight - one intern managed to sneak a camera in past the security guards, but all of us got a pissed-off e-mail about it the next day and that particular intern was never seen or heard from again:-)
Bill and his toroidal structure actually weren't the only attractions - most of the Microsoft brass seems to have made it a point to show up to at least one of these, and I got to have an interesting conversation with Microsoft speech recognition guru and former Apple VP Kai-Fu Lee. I don't think Ballmer showed up to any of them, but if I remember the schedule sheet correctly most of the other VP's like Allchin, Ayala, et al did come to one of them. (plus all the XBox people, in spite of the appalling difficulty of getting a job with that group)
The food was quite good - I was disappointed that it was caterers and not Bill himself out there with a spatula and a "hail to the chef" apron, but still one of the best hamburgers I've had that wasn't cooked on a 30-year-old grill.
I didn't spend much time with Bill but here's one little throwaway comment: some wag asked him where the bathroom was and he said he didn't know. I don't know whether he was reacting to the guy being a smartass or genuinely didn't know where the guest bathroom was, but it seemed funny either way.
Also, according to Bill there are fifty-some copies of Windows running at various locations in his house. (though bear in mind that they use it for eHome demo's too)
That's about all I can think of at the moment, it was an interesting experience but I didn't come away as impressed as some people have. If I had that much money to spend on a house I'd have hired a better architect and told him to do something genuinely innovative.
Who cares if Microsoft goes after OSS in the US? They can really only sue American companies in American courts. They'll have an uphill battle in Europe and god help them if they even attempt it in China. They'll have a tough time suing individual developers (not that it's impossible, but it certainly won't be easy, and unlike the RIAA they're likely to find a lot of the defndands won't settle quickly), so most of the US based OSS contributors can continue their work and Linus et al can simply move back to Europe if need be. And even Microsoft can't afford to start suing every company that uses Linux or Apache - they might be able to afford the lawyers but even the most MS-friendly IT department is going to have a tough time convincing a CEO to buy millions of dollars worth of software from a company that's presently suing them.
So essentially Red Hat and a few other companies go out of business and the OSS community otherwise goes on unhindered. At worst, public adoption of Linux slows a bit and already market-dominating products like Apache and sendmail continue on unabated. Microsoft's lawsuits would do very little damge and utterly destroy their public image.
They're hoarding patents to protect themselves against other patent-hoarding companies; they're not dumb enough to try to use them against OSS. This is just plain and simple FUD.
The cost reduction is possible, he said, because of a patent-pending method of lumping together individual transactions into one transaction to reduce the cost to the merchant.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't iTunes Music Store already do this? I've sometimes bought a song and then bought another one a day later and had them show up on the same invoice (and the same resulting credit card charge). Doesn't seem like a big innovation... and doesn't Amazon do the same thing with 1-Click also? (which Apple licensed) So now we could have two companies with silly useless patents for pretty much the same thing - with any luck they'll spend millions in litigation and end up appropriately punished for their patent-mongering.
I don't see how useful this would be in arcades anyway - most of the newer ones (Jillian's, Gameworks, et al) already have their own micropayment systems in the form of stored-value cards. Maybe in free-standing video games, but those are getting less and less common these days, and your neighborhood pizza parlor isn't going to have room for a cockpit-sized racing simulator anyway (or even a DDR game for that matter) - nobody's paying $1 to play a round of retro Pac-Man these days.
It can't be 100% compatible without a hard drive, since many current Xbox games depend on having one (some don't, but try playing an online game without one). And it's not going to have a hard drive, because the hard drive is the main reason Microsoft's losing so much money on the Xbox 1 and it's unlikely even they would be dumb enough to do that again. So there's pretty much no way they'll be able to achieve complete compatibility.
Has anyone ever experimented with the idea of using a page's "originality" to help determine its place in search results? Maybe comparing text on a page with text on other pages in the results and moving any very similar pages down on the rankings. You'd have to add some sort of garbage filter to prevent people from stacking their pages with randomly-generated nonsense, but that's certainly doable. It wouldn't eliminate all of this SEO crap, but it would at least get rid of the fifty zillion nearly identical Amazon or BizRate or other pages that come up on a lot of searches, and would severely handicap some types of SEO techniques as well.
Admittedly this is a lot more computationally intensive than most current search algorithms (as you'd pretty much have to do this in real time) but I can't imagine it's beyond the abilities of a Google or a Microsoft.
I have two, they seem quite fast (significantly faster than my Lexar JumpDrive 2.0 anyway, though this is very unscientific) and have been very reliable so far. Plus you can get a little USB drive holder for them that gives you a belt clip and a more standard USB connector (though I haven't encountered a computer yet that won't work with the built-in one) - even in the holder they're still smaller than most other USB drives.
The one problem I've found is that they can be kind of difficult to carry around safely - you'd think that the small size would be an advantage, but without any good way to put them on a keychain it's really not. And they're sufficiently thin (and the plastic casing sufficiently weak) that I'd be a little worried about carrying them around without a sturdy plastic case, which sort of defeats the whole purpose of having a drive that small. Oh, and they're very very easy to lose.
Still, if you're willing to treat them like you'd treat SD cards or other such devices, they can be a great way to carry around a lot of data in a really tiny package. It's just that for everyday tasks of backing up and shuttling data around you might be better off with something larger and more durable.
Well actually, since FreshDirect acts as its own distribution center the trucks they send out are really just substitutes for the trucks delivering stuff to your neighborhood market. And as far as laziness goes, while some people may be lucky enough live near Union Square or on the UWS or somewhere else with a good market, a lot of New Yorkers (myself included) don't; for those of us for whom the only grocer within walking distance is a Gristedes, FreshDirect is a godsend.
Re:www.dieoff.org - depressing news for you
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 1
Some may still call it barbaric, but in a few decades the architects of China's "one child per family" policy are going to start looking like geniuses. (though actually it's been watered down somewhat lately, couples containing two only children are now allowed to have two children of their own)
Well no, because if nanomedicine can do this much for real problems, imagine what it'll do for plastic surgery. Artificial skin isn't even that difficult to grow compared to bona fide organs. People will look pretty much whatever age they want to be.
Admittedly it's designed for playing games, but it's actually perfect for eBook reading - comfortable to grip for a long time, big landscape-oriented screen which is better than portrait for document reading (other devices can do landscape but very few of them are designed to be held in that orientation for a long time), dual SD card slots so you can store a large library on the cheap, long battery life... And if you feel like taking a break you can always whip out a free SNES/NES/GB/GBC/Genesis/TG16/MAME emulator:-) Some Linux-based PDA's do have widescreens, but unfortunately they don't have the DRM format support of Palm and PPC and if you really want to do some serious eBook reading that's pretty much essential.
DeepReader (http://www.rzanerutledge.com/deepreader/) hasn't been updated in a while but has *great* anti-aliasing - not sure how well it'll work on your T3 but it's worth a shot for unprotected eBooks at least.
Here's a new anti-virus idea I came up with just now, I'm not sure if anybody else has thought of this before or not but here goes:
Network admins and ISP's would basically add a "poison e-mail address" to a user's address book (and possibly spoof a few old/sent messages with this address as the sender/recipient). Every user's poison address would be unique, and it would only be used for this virus-prevention system. The name/address/other fields would be populated with random data and the user would be told not to delete this entry from their address book for any reason.
Whenever an e-mail was sent to that poison address, the network administrator (and possibly the user as well) would receive a plaintext, PGP-signed e-mail (with a plaintext URL that they could visit to further authenticate it) informing them that they had a virus; better yet, they could temporarily be disconnected from the network altogether.
Implementing this system would be very easy, a little bit of extra code on an e-mail server and automatically-generated.vcf files for the initial distribution to users. It would protect even against new and undetected viruses, would work *immediately* to prevent an outbreak from spreading, and would be next to impossible for virus writers to circumvent; a dictionary-based algorithm for generating random addresses/names could make it nearly impossible for a virus to skip the poison address, and no amount of clever social engineering or code morphing or hacking around a corporate e-mail filter would do any good.
Am I missing something or would this make a major dent in the e-mail virus problem?
Slashdot Mirror
Not that I'm advocating this (I'd rather he continue living in shame), but wouldn't it be delightfully ironic if someone shot Jack Thompson because GTA IV convinced him to do so? In his death he'd be proving the very thing he spent his life trying to convince people of.
If you read the first article (which is now slashdotted), it seems to indicate that the new TLDs aren't actually .com, .net, etc, but rather are the CHINESE EQUIVALENTS of them - in other words, they're adding a couple of new TLDs that will only be accessible in China, using the Chinese characters for company / network instead of the English abbreviations we use. So yahoo.com will still link to Yahoo, but yahoo.(chinese word for company) might go somewhere else if Yahoo doesn't promptly snap it up. This seems like it's not a censorship issue but rather simply a desire on the part of the Chinese to have a legitimately Chinese-character-friendly set of TLDs.
Definitely WMV, yeah - without the music interfering, you can actually hear Microsoft's subliminal messages.
On A), as I suggested in my original post, it doesn't matter whether or not the school is "good" - the mere fact that it requires a greater amount of effort to get in will ensure that it's better than a typical public school. I don't think there'll be any "dilution", either, I simply think there'll be more private schools, just as charter schools have sprung up recently based on demand for those. And I don't buy your argument that private schools should be held to the same standard as public schools just because they receive public funding - plenty of students at private universities receive publicly-funded scholarships and nobody's arguing that they should have to be run like public universities. This also covers your point B), if they're private then they should be free of any government-imposed standards - that way, parents can choose whether or not to send their children to a school with rigorous testing.
On point C), I personally don't have any problem with parents choosing to send their children to religious schools. Parents have a much greater role in determining their students' religious views than schools do - witness the kids who come into their public-school science classes with prepared arguments for creationism. And as someone who was raised in a religious family but became an atheist shortly after leaving it, I don't think this would have the negative impact on society that a lot of liberals fear it would - if the parochial schools are providing even a halfway-decent education then their graduates will be equipped to make their own decisions about religion.
Holding back and failing the free riders isn't going to solve anything - they'll simply drag down next year's class instead of this year's one. Greater performance standards might help a little, but the problem goes a lot deeper than that - if smart and motivated kids aren't learning anything then no amount of testing is going to fix that.
We do seem to agree on a need for greater specialization between schools - I suppose a compromise between our two approaches would be to greatly increase the number of "magnet" and other narrowly-focused schools and don't obsess about putting everyone on a college track. But I still think an increase in private schooling would help.
I spent a lot of time this past school year tutoring 11th-grade New York City public school students on the SAT. These were bright kids who were genuinely interested in learning and very much wanted to attend college, and they attend the school system with the highest per-student expense in the entire USA, but their vocabulary was terrible, their writing was at about the level I'd expect to find from a middle-schooler, and they didn't even know how to use fractions. You can try to attribute this to low teacher salaries, bungled administration, or lack of funding, but when a smart kid can take a decade's worth of math classes and still not know how to work with fractions, I think the problem goes well beyond any of that.
The fundamental problem as I see it is free riders. Compulsory public education means that a sizable percentage of students in any public school will be uninterested in learning, with parents who are equally uninterested in their children's educations. These kids will contribute to a culture of disinterest and a lack of respect for education which can pervade the entire school. I'm sure a lot of Slashdotters can remember sitting through math classes where most of the time was wasted trying to get a few disagreeable kids to sit down, shut up and try to learn something.
Private schools work better because they cater to a self-selecting group: most of the parents who send their children to private schools are at least a little bit interested in making sure that their children get a good education and go to college, and will provide the reinforcement at home to make sure that they actually do study hard. Well-funded suburban private schools work similarly, because families move to areas with higher property taxes in large part because of their superior schools, and because (unfortunate but true) people with the money to live in those rich suburbs tend to have college degrees themselves and are more likely to appreciate the importance of getting their children well educated.
So in spite of being a Democrat, I think school vouchers are a good idea, not because private schools are intrinsically "better" (they're not) but because the extra effort and expense of sending children to a (voucher-subsidized) private school will weed out a lot of the less-devoted students and parents, while keeping private education within the means of moderate-income families. And even for bright but lower-income students, vouchers can help bridge the gap between merit scholarships and tuition fees.
At the same time, by shunting off a lot of the college-bound students to private schools, vouchers allow public schools to focus more on the needs of the remaining students. It may seem a bit radical in the face of American schools' constant focus on college prep, but there are some strong arguments to be made for adding more of a trade-school focus to public high schools; there are certain professions, nursing for example, that are badly in need of workers, and providing some of the training for those jobs in high school can fill the gaps and provide a much better career alternative than Wal-Mart.
This isn't about "giving up" on public education, it's about appreciating the reality that not everybody is going to college, and doing the best we can for them based on that.
Yes, that's because they were Photoshopped.
When I worked in the Pocket PC division, my boss carried around a Palm Vx. (as did many other people there, actually) They eventually started handing out free XDA's, which I believe won them a few converts...
But isn't it possible that there's some biological cause for the older generation's resistance to change? The brain slows down, there are fewer new connections and fewer new cells, and as a consequence of this it may become more difficult to accept or adapt to a new belief. If everyone's brain worked like a 20-year-old's, the changes of the 50's could have been accomplished in a matter of weeks.
Take a look at PADict - open-source Palm OS Japanese dictionary with built-in Japanese fonts and handwriting recognizer.
(shameless plug) My company, Pleco Software makes a similar product for Chinese, and we've found that for a lot of people ready access to a character dictionary can greatly assist with their studies and their later word recall.
Funny story, but untrue - the movie was actually shot in Germany, see IMDB. In fact many of the Oompa Loompa's didn't even speak English.
So you genetically engineer a clone of yourself with no higher brain functions, grow it in a tank until its skull reaches full size, and do a brain transplant (impossible now, but it seems reasonable to assume nanotech will make this possible within a few decades). As long as you can keep the brain alive you're all set.
Of course this raises all sorts of moral issues, but as long as the clone's brain never starts working one can make a pretty good argument that this is not really a separate individual from yourself. (not enough to satisfy some religious leaders, but in an age of 1000-year lifespans their days are pretty well numbered anyway)
Oh, and I don't know where you got that 256K figure but most current Palm OS devices (including the 650) ship with several MB of heap memory.
They already announced a year ago that they'd be breaking MemSemaphoreReserve() in Palm OS Cobalt, so most developers have been aware of the problem for a while now and the good ones have likely already managed to write around it. Which isn't really all that difficult on a fast device - most of the slowness in DmWrite() is not in the copy operation (which is really just an inter-heap memcpy()) but in the bounds-checking that comes before it, so if you need to make a lot of little changes you can simply read out the entire record into a buffer, make your changes and then write the record back.
But this is all moot since I'm pretty sure MemSemaphoreReserve() still works on the Treo 650 anyway. The way the flash filesystem is implemented is that whenever you query a database record, the record is loaded from flash into a portion of RAM (I believe something like 10 MB) sset aside for caching database records. So as long as you aren't accessing 10 MB worth of records at the same time (which would be a pretty dumb idea anyway for any number of reasons) you're OK - some things may be a lot slower but the software should basically still work and you can write around those slowdowns. Remember that even with the memory semaphore you're still limited to editing records that you've locked down, so the OS doesn't have to worry about making the entire database accessible in RAM, just the portion of it that you're currently using.
That's about all I can think of at the moment, it was an interesting experience but I didn't come away as impressed as some people have. If I had that much money to spend on a house I'd have hired a better architect and told him to do something genuinely innovative.
Who cares if Microsoft goes after OSS in the US? They can really only sue American companies in American courts. They'll have an uphill battle in Europe and god help them if they even attempt it in China. They'll have a tough time suing individual developers (not that it's impossible, but it certainly won't be easy, and unlike the RIAA they're likely to find a lot of the defndands won't settle quickly), so most of the US based OSS contributors can continue their work and Linus et al can simply move back to Europe if need be. And even Microsoft can't afford to start suing every company that uses Linux or Apache - they might be able to afford the lawyers but even the most MS-friendly IT department is going to have a tough time convincing a CEO to buy millions of dollars worth of software from a company that's presently suing them.
So essentially Red Hat and a few other companies go out of business and the OSS community otherwise goes on unhindered. At worst, public adoption of Linux slows a bit and already market-dominating products like Apache and sendmail continue on unabated. Microsoft's lawsuits would do very little damge and utterly destroy their public image.
They're hoarding patents to protect themselves against other patent-hoarding companies; they're not dumb enough to try to use them against OSS. This is just plain and simple FUD.
The cost reduction is possible, he said, because of a patent-pending method of lumping together individual transactions into one transaction to reduce the cost to the merchant.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't iTunes Music Store already do this? I've sometimes bought a song and then bought another one a day later and had them show up on the same invoice (and the same resulting credit card charge). Doesn't seem like a big innovation... and doesn't Amazon do the same thing with 1-Click also? (which Apple licensed) So now we could have two companies with silly useless patents for pretty much the same thing - with any luck they'll spend millions in litigation and end up appropriately punished for their patent-mongering.
I don't see how useful this would be in arcades anyway - most of the newer ones (Jillian's, Gameworks, et al) already have their own micropayment systems in the form of stored-value cards. Maybe in free-standing video games, but those are getting less and less common these days, and your neighborhood pizza parlor isn't going to have room for a cockpit-sized racing simulator anyway (or even a DDR game for that matter) - nobody's paying $1 to play a round of retro Pac-Man these days.
It can't be 100% compatible without a hard drive, since many current Xbox games depend on having one (some don't, but try playing an online game without one). And it's not going to have a hard drive, because the hard drive is the main reason Microsoft's losing so much money on the Xbox 1 and it's unlikely even they would be dumb enough to do that again. So there's pretty much no way they'll be able to achieve complete compatibility.
Has anyone ever experimented with the idea of using a page's "originality" to help determine its place in search results? Maybe comparing text on a page with text on other pages in the results and moving any very similar pages down on the rankings. You'd have to add some sort of garbage filter to prevent people from stacking their pages with randomly-generated nonsense, but that's certainly doable. It wouldn't eliminate all of this SEO crap, but it would at least get rid of the fifty zillion nearly identical Amazon or BizRate or other pages that come up on a lot of searches, and would severely handicap some types of SEO techniques as well.
Admittedly this is a lot more computationally intensive than most current search algorithms (as you'd pretty much have to do this in real time) but I can't imagine it's beyond the abilities of a Google or a Microsoft.
The one problem I've found is that they can be kind of difficult to carry around safely - you'd think that the small size would be an advantage, but without any good way to put them on a keychain it's really not. And they're sufficiently thin (and the plastic casing sufficiently weak) that I'd be a little worried about carrying them around without a sturdy plastic case, which sort of defeats the whole purpose of having a drive that small. Oh, and they're very very easy to lose.
Still, if you're willing to treat them like you'd treat SD cards or other such devices, they can be a great way to carry around a lot of data in a really tiny package. It's just that for everyday tasks of backing up and shuttling data around you might be better off with something larger and more durable.
Well actually, since FreshDirect acts as its own distribution center the trucks they send out are really just substitutes for the trucks delivering stuff to your neighborhood market. And as far as laziness goes, while some people may be lucky enough live near Union Square or on the UWS or somewhere else with a good market, a lot of New Yorkers (myself included) don't; for those of us for whom the only grocer within walking distance is a Gristedes, FreshDirect is a godsend.
Some may still call it barbaric, but in a few decades the architects of China's "one child per family" policy are going to start looking like geniuses. (though actually it's been watered down somewhat lately, couples containing two only children are now allowed to have two children of their own)
Well no, because if nanomedicine can do this much for real problems, imagine what it'll do for plastic surgery. Artificial skin isn't even that difficult to grow compared to bona fide organs. People will look pretty much whatever age they want to be.
Admittedly it's designed for playing games, but it's actually perfect for eBook reading - comfortable to grip for a long time, big landscape-oriented screen which is better than portrait for document reading (other devices can do landscape but very few of them are designed to be held in that orientation for a long time), dual SD card slots so you can store a large library on the cheap, long battery life... And if you feel like taking a break you can always whip out a free SNES/NES/GB/GBC/Genesis/TG16/MAME emulator :-) Some Linux-based PDA's do have widescreens, but unfortunately they don't have the DRM format support of Palm and PPC and if you really want to do some serious eBook reading that's pretty much essential.
DeepReader (http://www.rzanerutledge.com/deepreader/) hasn't been updated in a while but has *great* anti-aliasing - not sure how well it'll work on your T3 but it's worth a shot for unprotected eBooks at least.
Here's a new anti-virus idea I came up with just now, I'm not sure if anybody else has thought of this before or not but here goes:
.vcf files for the initial distribution to users. It would protect even against new and undetected viruses, would work *immediately* to prevent an outbreak from spreading, and would be next to impossible for virus writers to circumvent; a dictionary-based algorithm for generating random addresses/names could make it nearly impossible for a virus to skip the poison address, and no amount of clever social engineering or code morphing or hacking around a corporate e-mail filter would do any good.
Network admins and ISP's would basically add a "poison e-mail address" to a user's address book (and possibly spoof a few old/sent messages with this address as the sender/recipient). Every user's poison address would be unique, and it would only be used for this virus-prevention system. The name/address/other fields would be populated with random data and the user would be told not to delete this entry from their address book for any reason.
Whenever an e-mail was sent to that poison address, the network administrator (and possibly the user as well) would receive a plaintext, PGP-signed e-mail (with a plaintext URL that they could visit to further authenticate it) informing them that they had a virus; better yet, they could temporarily be disconnected from the network altogether.
Implementing this system would be very easy, a little bit of extra code on an e-mail server and automatically-generated
Am I missing something or would this make a major dent in the e-mail virus problem?