My present mobile flips open, lets me talk speakerphone style holding it out in front of me, and I can contact whomever I want by saying their name or saying the phone number... very much like the communicators in the original Star Trek series. (I wish I could reprogram it to chirp like a 'communicator' instead of its "Say a command.")
We've seen those Bluetooth earphone-mic sets. What about a Bluetooth speakerphone badge? The main phone would be somewhere else on your person, but the little badge could be worn closer to your head and have a simple touch-to-activate/hangup interface like in the "Next Generation" Star Trek series.
Does this vigilante think that he can "take down the site" if/when the thieves manage to satisfy his (changing) demands? If he does, then he's a fool.
Has he heard of the Google cache?
Does he know about the Wayback Machine?
Putting up a "public humiliation" web site is an irrevocable action. All it would take would be one post on those boards and there could be a "flash lynch mob" of people angry about having lost their phones and this vigilante "shamer" would have no control of what that mob would do. The people depicted, their families, friends, and neighbors are all going to be affected by this and it isn't going to go away even if the shamer begs people to stop harassing them.
That's what happened in China just a little while ago. A guy got mad at a student whom he suspected was fooling around with his wife. The student and his whole family were harassed to the point where they just hid in their homes. The wife was harassed too. Threats came from people who had read postings about the postings about the shamer's site. The shamer replaced his page, begging that people would just forget about it and leave them all alone... but apparently nobody was even reading his original site any more.
I think that such "shamers" are irresponsible and dangerous. Putting up a site like that is akin to inciting riot.
Does anyone else remember the "Bloom County" comic where Opus (the penguin) is sunbathing with Bill Gates? He was musing about how Bill could extort the whole world with the ability to shut down every Windows computer on the Internet. (Then Bill sits up, grabs his briefcase and says, "Uh, gotta go!" and Opus wonders whether he's started something evil.)
So now every "genuine" copy of Windows calls home to Microsoft every day, to make sure it's still "genuine". Sure. That's all they're checking.
And what if Bill's servers say, "no"?
What if Bill's servers say, "How much would you pay to go anywhere today?"
My first camera had a viewfinder like a door on the top of the box that you looked down into. My grandma let me have it when I found it in her junk closet. Film was impossible to find in that size any more but I was just using it as a toy anyway. My next one had the little hole you look through. Then I got the digital with the screen on the back. All that in just 40 years. Big deal.
I'm it total agreement that this guy missed all the really major things that would shock someone from the 1920s.
Another world war (Duh!)
Communism
Television
Nuclear weapons/energy
Space flight
Computers and the Internet
Or socially...
Modern feminine swimwear. Woohoo!:-)
Everyone drives half an hour to work and hardly knows their neighbors.
Everyone has telephones everywhere.
More telling, I think, would be the developments that people in the 1920s thought were "just around the corner"... but weren't.
Farms in even the most developed nations still use manual labor instead of being fully automated.
The "war to end all wars", didn't.
...and despite practically-cost-free global communication, businesses and governments still waste tons of money making bad translations into multiple languages instead of using an obvious solution like Esperanto.
Once something is published on the web, anyone can store a copy of it. You can never be sure that someone, somewhere hasn't still got it. There is no way to "take it back".
One of the links for this "disease" talked about a woman who was taking her two-year-old son to the doctor because she thought he had it.
Since these fibers are obviously ordinary textile fuzz and lint, that means that the poor kid's delusional mom is inflicting the condition upon him. I hope that their doctor had the sense to contact someone in Social Services.
"Elephants Dream" had wildly complex animation and sound. That much was very impressive. Aside from that though, it was an incoherent mess.
With no background, the viewer is thrown successively into four or five disjointed sequences where the same two characters move through a ludicrously-impossible "machine" which has no apparent purpose.
I thought I must surely have only seen the trailer. No, that was the whole film.
The voice for "Emo" was very wrong somehow, I can't put my finger on it. Might it have been done by several different people? No reference at all to Elephants.
The "description" in the parent to this article is bogus because half of the things it mentions aren't even in the film! There was no "quick-witted dialog" because there was hardly any dialog at all. Emo is a trumpet player? That wasn't in the film. Proog is a loner? In the film he's always with Emo. Proog doesn't "cautiously introduce" anything, but shouts "Follow me!" before dashing along narrow, railless, flipping catwalks with hostile bird-things swooping about. If Emo feels that Proog is pushing his ideas, well, I can't imagine what those ideas are since the guy doesn't say much of anything except that the machine is "beautiful". These characters don't have any conflicts to work out, except where Emo wants to go through a door with calliope music coming from behind it and begs like a three-year-old.
This film doesn't "carry" the viewer at all. It drags the viewer, kicking and screaming, through complex scenes with no coherence. One reaches the credits and says, "What was that about?"
I'm thinking that the tuxedo rule had more to do with getting paid.
Mr. Toscanini knew that he could expect better treatment from the station, and better pay, if he could bring in a roomfull of tuxedo-clad musicians because the people who paid him (and their sponsors) were present to see them.
The more "high-class" the musicians looked, the more one would think that they ought to be paid.
I wonder how long the list would be, if we filled in all the names which could be described by such a headline? How many of the greatest positive influences in human history have died under pitiful circumstances?
Remember the death of Archimedes!
Anyway, the respondant claimed:
Edison "advocated" for all power systems, including longdistance transmission, to be DC - because that's what he was selling. His battle with Tesla for the first big contract, electrifying NYC, is the stuff of legend. Tesla won. And died penniless in the 1940s, while Edison died fat and rich from thousands of patents, most on inventions invented by people working for him. Some of whom no doubt died penniless.
Check your history! Edison died nearly penniless too.
The account which I read described how he ran across some iron-rich sand on a beach, and it gave him the idea to try a new mining technique where the ore would be extracted from non-ore material by dropping the sand past magnets. The idea was a good one (and is still used) but the site he chose to build his iron mine turned out to be almost completely lacking in iron ore. The iron ore in the sand on the beach had apparently washed up from some other source.
Maybe he wouldn't have been desperate enough to try such a risky thing if he had been ALLOWED to sell AC power. I'm sure he could see the advantages of AC for power transmission but Edison didn't have the patents for that, and you can bet that Westinghouse wasn't going to license the technology at a reasonable price to their chief competitor.
So Tesla got ripped off by Westinghouse because he wasn't business savvy and they got ownership of the patents. Then Edison, even though he was somewhat business savvy, got shut out by Westinghouse because they owned the patents. In both cases, patent law helped business-people who didn't invent anything get rich while the real inventors lost out. Shouldn't we remember that the patent system was set up in order to encourage invention?
I think it's good that this pontif of Mozilla code has deigned to allow mere mortals to contribute. The author of the article is likewise to be lauded for his gracious treatment of the average user. Unfortunately, both of them are so far up in their ivory tower that they've lost touch with "the average Joe".
Joe User doesn't even know how to make an Excel Macro.
Joe User thinks computers are "magic".
Joe User and all his buddies laugh beer out their noses after one of them gives the local nerd a wedgie.
Even if you teach Joe User to write code, he will never care whether the code is Good.
Bloggers may or may not be honest. A blog is just a mass-media outlet with a smaller producer.
I'm looking for real people to correspond with.
That's the whole point of Esperanto, really... putting ordinary people in touch with other ordinary people, not just hooking them into an independant media outlet.
I don't know what the situation is in Iraq, for the locals, but I'd like to establish some contact.
I can correspond in Esperanto and/or English. I'm sorry, but I don't know their native language.
Do ordinary people in Iraq have access to the Internet? If not, is there some way of finding someone in Iraq who would like to correspond by mail with a "USonian" who is genuinely interested in their viewpoint?
I can't help but think that if we only had more interpersonal relationships between the US and Iraq that the possibilities for cooperation and understanding would be so much better.
Rick
"I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it." -- President Dwight D. Eisenhower
What if Mobile stations limited you to 5 gallons of gas unless you're driving a Ford?
What if EBay limited your transactions to $100 unless you're paying with MasterCard?
What if Expedia limited your trips to 3 nights unless you rent a car from Hertz?
So Intel made a deal with Skype, to limit your conferences to 5 users unless you're using an Intel processor. I'm wondering what the other side of that deal was. What is Intel giving to Skype?
This sort of harassment can only be effective in monopolized markets. When people have a choice, they will usually choose the options which have fewer restrictions.
Observation of mostly intact galaxies would tend to support the hypothesis that galaxies are stable, but only if you presuppose that the universe is far older than the galaxies themselves.
That's just guesswork.
Can we actually measure whether galaxies are flying apart or not? I'd like to know.
A good example of Patent system abuse is Mark Tilden's patent for "nervous networks". It amounted to duplicating the functionality of a washing-machine control cam using inverters in a ring with resistor-capacitor delays in between. All the values had to be hand-tweaked from what I could gather.
He's got more than a little of the "showman" in him. His whole BEAM robotics competition encouraged kids to beef up their 'bots with lots of BS. One gimmic he used was to include the circuit from a musical greeting card in their periodic-avalanche-style motor driver circuit. It didn't matter what kind of card it was, because electrically it was only performing the role of a diode.
Then he went to work for the national laboratory with a grant to develop and study a "robotic jurassic park". Sounds cool, eh? The reality was that it was his same old little 'bots made out of wire. What about the "park"? It was a table made out of a door. It had a lip of cardboard around the edge to keep the things from hopping off onto the floor and he threw in some balls of wadded up paper for the bots to knock around.
He's a very clever man, no doubt. Some of the stuff he comes up with seems pretty cool, and he's definitely getting more kids interested in electronics and engineering.
Wikipedia works better than it has any right to do. (The English version that is)
That's a very good point, about languages I mean.
Just look at the juxtaposition between the languagesEsperanto and Ido. Esperantists are almost universally altruistic and sentimental about their language and the whole movement it represents. Supporters of Ido on the other hand are striving to popularize their "improved" version of the same language ("Ido" means "child") by hook or by crook. The difference is evident in examining the Wikipedia statistics for the two languages.
The Esperanto Wikipedia has more content and a higher ratio of users per page of content. Its articles tend to be more detailed and they have logged many more edits per article, mostly correction and augmentation, and the Esperanto page view count is high, indicating that their content is being actively used.
The Ido Wikipedia, with half as many content pages, has only a tenth the number of users. Their articles show a striking similarity to those in the Esperanto Wikipedia, probably because Esperanto is easily translated into Ido. (A Perl script could do the bulk of it.) However, the Ido page view count is abysmally low. Apparently, nobody reads the Ido Wikipedia.
"What's wrong with that?" one might ask. The answer is that the Idists are deliberately misrepresenting their language and themselves. They present it as though it were soon to replace Esperanto altogether. Their high page-count was a deliberate effort in this same direction. They have, in the past, published web pages with photos of beautiful young women (models, of course) to promote their pet language.
So for Ido the Wikipedia is only a tool of propaganda and misinformation. "Just look at how many articles there are!" But for Esperanto it's the real thing; articles translated from more than a dozen other languages (and then back into still other languages from the Esperanto) and referenced on a regular basis by a community of thousands (including real beautiful young women) who actively use the language on a daily basis.
I don't know about other languages but yes, the nature of the wiki depends heavily upon the culture and the motives of the people who work on the articles.
Any system which depends upon unrealistic expectations will doom its maintainers to an endless, futile battle.
Wikipedia has some really cool content, but the more generally appealing it becomes, the more it will attract the attention of vandals, propagandists, scammers, spammers, compulsive liars, and other pushers of misinformation.
The article said that this "Propanolol" (normally used to treat high blood pressure) was tested on rape victims. Eight were given the drug while 14 received only a placebo. No difference was seen in the frequency or intensity of flashback episodes.
It's great that they're thinking up ways to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions and producing fuels at the same time... but I didn't see any mention in the article of how much energy it requires to accomplish the process.
Building a set of this sort of processing equipment large enough will take a lot of work using big machines.
(Burn fuel.)
Getting the CO2 from the flue gasses into aqueous solution requires blowers and/or pumps.
(Burn some fuel.)
Tons of fuelstuff means tons of algae, and it's not going to crawl to the processing vats by itself.
(Burn more fuel.)
Heat, press, pump, and scrape the sludge to get biodiesel.
(Burn still more fuel.)
Climate control and more pumping and scraping to get ethanol.
(Yep, burn even more fuel.)
How will a power-plant pay the people who run all this? Hey, I know: sell electric power!
(You guessed it: burn fuel.)
Unless they find some other breakthrough, the whole process is going to cost more than it produces because ultimately the only energy being harvested is what little sunlight the algae manage to soak up and store.
Without knowing the true cost including construction and maintenance, it's not possible to decide whether the effort is worthwhile. Oh, and in order to be accurate about the benefits, you should also factor in the CO2 generated by all that fuel burned in the process.
Wouldn't it be funny if the CO2 produced in the process was more than it would harvest from the flue gasses? Well, we may as well start laughing.
So they toss a kid into jail because he said, "Click here to crash my school's wussy server."
Yes, it's a low-tech sort of DDoS attack but it's not automated. He didn't actually do it himself. It involved the willful cooperation of other individuals. That makes it more like a "grassroots movement".
What if he had said, "Send an info request letter to my school, to swamp the mail-room," hmm?? That's the hardcopy version of what he did. Would he get thrown in jail for that?
I can understand that people wouldn't be pleased by this kid inciting a bit of social disruption, but calling it a felony and throwing him in jail is far too extreme.
Slashdot Mirror
My present mobile flips open, lets me talk speakerphone style holding it out in front of me, and I can contact whomever I want by saying their name or saying the phone number... very much like the communicators in the original Star Trek series. (I wish I could reprogram it to chirp like a 'communicator' instead of its "Say a command.")
We've seen those Bluetooth earphone-mic sets. What about a Bluetooth speakerphone badge? The main phone would be somewhere else on your person, but the little badge could be worn closer to your head and have a simple touch-to-activate/hangup interface like in the "Next Generation" Star Trek series.
Has he heard of the Google cache?
Does he know about the Wayback Machine?
Putting up a "public humiliation" web site is an irrevocable action. All it would take would be one post on those boards and there could be a "flash lynch mob" of people angry about having lost their phones and this vigilante "shamer" would have no control of what that mob would do. The people depicted, their families, friends, and neighbors are all going to be affected by this and it isn't going to go away even if the shamer begs people to stop harassing them.
That's what happened in China just a little while ago. A guy got mad at a student whom he suspected was fooling around with his wife. The student and his whole family were harassed to the point where they just hid in their homes. The wife was harassed too. Threats came from people who had read postings about the postings about the shamer's site. The shamer replaced his page, begging that people would just forget about it and leave them all alone... but apparently nobody was even reading his original site any more.
I think that such "shamers" are irresponsible and dangerous. Putting up a site like that is akin to inciting riot.
So now every "genuine" copy of Windows calls home to Microsoft every day, to make sure it's still "genuine". Sure. That's all they're checking.
And what if Bill's servers say, "no"?
What if Bill's servers say, "How much would you pay to go anywhere today?"
My first camera had a viewfinder like a door on the top of the box that you looked down into. My grandma let me have it when I found it in her junk closet. Film was impossible to find in that size any more but I was just using it as a toy anyway. My next one had the little hole you look through. Then I got the digital with the screen on the back. All that in just 40 years. Big deal.
I'm it total agreement that this guy missed all the really major things that would shock someone from the 1920s.
Or socially...
More telling, I think, would be the developments that people in the 1920s thought were "just around the corner"... but weren't.
Maybe he never heard of the "wayback machine".
Once something is published on the web, anyone can store a copy of it. You can never be sure that someone, somewhere hasn't still got it. There is no way to "take it back".
Since these fibers are obviously ordinary textile fuzz and lint, that means that the poor kid's delusional mom is inflicting the condition upon him. I hope that their doctor had the sense to contact someone in Social Services.
With no background, the viewer is thrown successively into four or five disjointed sequences where the same two characters move through a ludicrously-impossible "machine" which has no apparent purpose.
I thought I must surely have only seen the trailer. No, that was the whole film.
The voice for "Emo" was very wrong somehow, I can't put my finger on it. Might it have been done by several different people? No reference at all to Elephants.
The "description" in the parent to this article is bogus because half of the things it mentions aren't even in the film! There was no "quick-witted dialog" because there was hardly any dialog at all. Emo is a trumpet player? That wasn't in the film. Proog is a loner? In the film he's always with Emo. Proog doesn't "cautiously introduce" anything, but shouts "Follow me!" before dashing along narrow, railless, flipping catwalks with hostile bird-things swooping about. If Emo feels that Proog is pushing his ideas, well, I can't imagine what those ideas are since the guy doesn't say much of anything except that the machine is "beautiful". These characters don't have any conflicts to work out, except where Emo wants to go through a door with calliope music coming from behind it and begs like a three-year-old.
This film doesn't "carry" the viewer at all. It drags the viewer, kicking and screaming, through complex scenes with no coherence. One reaches the credits and says, "What was that about?"
Yah. Must be "art".
So after 50 years, she finally cracked it and turned her brother in.
That is SO choice.
Mod the parent up!
Mr. Toscanini knew that he could expect better treatment from the station, and better pay, if he could bring in a roomfull of tuxedo-clad musicians because the people who paid him (and their sponsors) were present to see them.
The more "high-class" the musicians looked, the more one would think that they ought to be paid.
Remember the death of Archimedes!
Anyway, the respondant claimed:
Check your history!
Edison died nearly penniless too.
The account which I read described how he ran across some iron-rich sand on a beach, and it gave him the idea to try a new mining technique where the ore would be extracted from non-ore material by dropping the sand past magnets. The idea was a good one (and is still used) but the site he chose to build his iron mine turned out to be almost completely lacking in iron ore. The iron ore in the sand on the beach had apparently washed up from some other source.
Maybe he wouldn't have been desperate enough to try such a risky thing if he had been ALLOWED to sell AC power. I'm sure he could see the advantages of AC for power transmission but Edison didn't have the patents for that, and you can bet that Westinghouse wasn't going to license the technology at a reasonable price to their chief competitor.
So Tesla got ripped off by Westinghouse because he wasn't business savvy and they got ownership of the patents. Then Edison, even though he was somewhat business savvy, got shut out by Westinghouse because they owned the patents. In both cases, patent law helped business-people who didn't invent anything get rich while the real inventors lost out. Shouldn't we remember that the patent system was set up in order to encourage invention?
Joe User doesn't even know how to make an Excel Macro.
Joe User thinks computers are "magic".
Joe User and all his buddies laugh beer out their noses after one of them gives the local nerd a wedgie.
Even if you teach Joe User to write code, he will never care whether the code is Good.
(Heheheh. Couldn't resist.)
I'm looking for real people to correspond with.
That's the whole point of Esperanto, really... putting ordinary people in touch with other ordinary people, not just hooking them into an independant media outlet.
I can correspond in Esperanto and/or English. I'm sorry, but I don't know their native language.
Do ordinary people in Iraq have access to the Internet? If not, is there some way of finding someone in Iraq who would like to correspond by mail with a "USonian" who is genuinely interested in their viewpoint?
I can't help but think that if we only had more interpersonal relationships between the US and Iraq that the possibilities for cooperation and understanding would be so much better.
Rick
Well, now it probably is.
Leave it to Slashdot to fan the insignificant into flaming stupidity.
What if EBay limited your transactions to $100 unless you're paying with MasterCard?
What if Expedia limited your trips to 3 nights unless you rent a car from Hertz?
So Intel made a deal with Skype, to limit your conferences to 5 users unless you're using an Intel processor. I'm wondering what the other side of that deal was. What is Intel giving to Skype?
This sort of harassment can only be effective in monopolized markets. When people have a choice, they will usually choose the options which have fewer restrictions.
That's just guesswork.
Can we actually measure whether galaxies are flying apart or not? I'd like to know.
He's got more than a little of the "showman" in him. His whole BEAM robotics competition encouraged kids to beef up their 'bots with lots of BS. One gimmic he used was to include the circuit from a musical greeting card in their periodic-avalanche-style motor driver circuit. It didn't matter what kind of card it was, because electrically it was only performing the role of a diode.
Then he went to work for the national laboratory with a grant to develop and study a "robotic jurassic park". Sounds cool, eh? The reality was that it was his same old little 'bots made out of wire. What about the "park"? It was a table made out of a door. It had a lip of cardboard around the edge to keep the things from hopping off onto the floor and he threw in some balls of wadded up paper for the bots to knock around.
He's a very clever man, no doubt. Some of the stuff he comes up with seems pretty cool, and he's definitely getting more kids interested in electronics and engineering.
But that doesn't make him a robotics expert.
That's a very good point, about languages I mean.
Just look at the juxtaposition between the languagesEsperanto and Ido. Esperantists are almost universally altruistic and sentimental about their language and the whole movement it represents. Supporters of Ido on the other hand are striving to popularize their "improved" version of the same language ("Ido" means "child") by hook or by crook. The difference is evident in examining the Wikipedia statistics for the two languages.
The Esperanto Wikipedia has more content and a higher ratio of users per page of content. Its articles tend to be more detailed and they have logged many more edits per article, mostly correction and augmentation, and the Esperanto page view count is high, indicating that their content is being actively used.
The Ido Wikipedia, with half as many content pages, has only a tenth the number of users. Their articles show a striking similarity to those in the Esperanto Wikipedia, probably because Esperanto is easily translated into Ido. (A Perl script could do the bulk of it.) However, the Ido page view count is abysmally low. Apparently, nobody reads the Ido Wikipedia.
"What's wrong with that?" one might ask. The answer is that the Idists are deliberately misrepresenting their language and themselves. They present it as though it were soon to replace Esperanto altogether. Their high page-count was a deliberate effort in this same direction. They have, in the past, published web pages with photos of beautiful young women (models, of course) to promote their pet language.
So for Ido the Wikipedia is only a tool of propaganda and misinformation. "Just look at how many articles there are!" But for Esperanto it's the real thing; articles translated from more than a dozen other languages (and then back into still other languages from the Esperanto) and referenced on a regular basis by a community of thousands (including real beautiful young women) who actively use the language on a daily basis.
I don't know about other languages but yes, the nature of the wiki depends heavily upon the culture and the motives of the people who work on the articles.
Wikipedia has some really cool content, but the more generally appealing it becomes, the more it will attract the attention of vandals, propagandists, scammers, spammers, compulsive liars, and other pushers of misinformation.
The takers far outnumber the makers.
I'm not sure where to find this information: Do we have any reason to believe that galaxies aren't flying apart?
So why are they reporting that it works?
(Burn fuel.)
(Burn some fuel.)
(Burn more fuel.)
(Burn still more fuel.)
(Yep, burn even more fuel.)
(You guessed it: burn fuel.)
Unless they find some other breakthrough, the whole process is going to cost more than it produces because ultimately the only energy being harvested is what little sunlight the algae manage to soak up and store.
Without knowing the true cost including construction and maintenance, it's not possible to decide whether the effort is worthwhile. Oh, and in order to be accurate about the benefits, you should also factor in the CO2 generated by all that fuel burned in the process.
Wouldn't it be funny if the CO2 produced in the process was more than it would harvest from the flue gasses? Well, we may as well start laughing.
Yes, it's a low-tech sort of DDoS attack but it's not automated. He didn't actually do it himself. It involved the willful cooperation of other individuals. That makes it more like a "grassroots movement".
What if he had said, "Send an info request letter to my school, to swamp the mail-room," hmm?? That's the hardcopy version of what he did. Would he get thrown in jail for that?
I can understand that people wouldn't be pleased by this kid inciting a bit of social disruption, but calling it a felony and throwing him in jail is far too extreme.