I live in Ithaca, NY, and there are a bunch of _really hyper_ environmentalists here (it's a university town attatched to an apparent mecca for old hippies turned yuppie). In any case, there used to be a gun factory here (Ithaca Gun... more than 30% of the surving guns made here are still in use by the CIA. They made damn good sniper rifles. Made a Springfield look mundane.) They also made shotguns (even pump-action repeaters. Hold down the trigger and just pump through all 9 rounds. Makes even a Mossberg 590 pale in comparison...) In any case, there is a piece of land next to one of the gorges that is immediately adjacent to the gun factory that was at one point (almost 100 years ago) used for a test-firing range. There is a shitload of buckshot and rifle bullets sitting around in the woods there.
The city of Ithaca just recently decided to buy that little chunk of land from Cornell, or some thing like that, but in the process the EPA came in and took a look at it, and it said in their report that some of the surface soil samples contained upwards of 250,000 PPM of lead! This set all the environmentalists off. That's 25% lead, 75% soil. The trick is that the creek that runs through that spot, when sampled downstream of this shocking and dangerous environmental hazard, has the same lead concentration as it does upsteam. The lead is in the form of very non-water-soluble slugs of metallic lead. No powdered oxides like in paint. It's not going anywhere. Now there are a bunch of environmental nuts going apeshit about this, but it's really a minor problem. It's sat there for over 100 years and isn't even getting into the fucking water.
If they dig up that spot to get rid of all this contaminated siol, i may go and shoot them myself. It would be ruining the _best_ laser-tag obstacle course in the world...
All i've got stockpiled for Y2K is about a dozen packs of ramen, 2 cases of homebrewed hard cider (which won't actually be fully aged until spring), and some odds and ends. I would be drinking Bushmills (or maybe Black Label) this newyears, 'cept an old friend is back in town, and there is a tradition of Tanqueray to be upheld...
Hehehhehe =:-) We usta have that in middle school on the school computers. I remember i would take one of those disks so i could get access to the computer room, and then i'd play my pirate copy of Conan The Barbiarian instead =:-)
Recently it seems there has been a trend towards eliminating anonymity in the computer world. It comes in the form of programs that "phone home" without the user's knowledge, or even some that won't run unless they get the okay from the central server. It comes in the form of universal unique identifiers in hardware, operating systems, and software. With IPv6 on the horizon, and with a larger variety of software phoning home, this may soon become a large privacy issue. Most of the advances being made here are for the purpose of security (read "inspiring fear of being watched")and anti-piracy ("squeeze 'em for their last cent"). What immediate and/or long term effects do you see coming out of this?
This is really neat for several reasons. It's neat because it represents an expansion in scalability. I think it's very cool that one OS can be so modular, scalable, and configurable that it can run on an embedded controller to run some day to day device, or it can be build into clusters of thousands of nodes to predict weather or prospect for oil. It is also neat because it is a good foothold. The embedded market is very rough, and even with QNX, WinCE, etc... out there a lot of embedded systems still run _dos_ just because it at least doesn't _interfere_ with the task at hand, although it doesn't offer many OS features. It is nice that there is a new option coming in, that can hopefully use it's adaptability to at least replace all those old messy dos implementations, even if it doesn't displace the other modern embedded systems. One more thing: embedded systems are not a far shot from wearables. I've been working on building a Linux wearable for a couple years. Right now i'm close (i need a battery pack (in progress), i need to fight the on-board video on my current SBC, and i need to make a cool case, then it should work...), but what i've seen is that every advance in embedded systems (smaller, lower power, etc...) immediately pays off in availability/price of those components, which are pretty much the same for wearables. It's all coming together =:-)
I remember a couple years ago he was running around blue in the face shouting about wanting to annex alaska. I think he's just a loonie, but then when you look at the kind of dingbats that the people will vote into office (Sunny Bono, Ronald Reagan, [insert your favorite brain dead pretty boy politician here],...) you never know. My feeling is that if he gets elected he'll not actually get any of this stuff done, but it's probably a good idea to keep an eye on him anyway.
Yeah, i seem to remember he botched the code that limited it to only a couple instances per machine. I guess it was the world's first distributed denial of service attack.
My dad once wrote a letter to General Mills about cheerios. He was reading the box, and he got to the part that said "if you are not satisfied with the performance of this general mills product, or if you have any comments or suggenstions, feel free to write us a letter...bla bla bla"
So he wrote them a letter citing the text on the box, and stating that he bought a box of cheerios, but he wasn't satisfied by their performance. Infact he poured them out on the table, and they didn't do a damn thing.
The company wrote back saying that it brightened their day to get that letter, and they send him a coupon for a dicount on cheerios =:-)
Jeez, this all is getting out of hand. I just finished reading "Player Piano" by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., which deals to an extent with this. The third industrial revolution he calls it...
Yet another geek bullied by lawyers... Luckily many people got down copies of the source when the ruckus started so that it'll live on... Reminds me of ultraHLE... Maybe somebody should fly an airplane over lots of major cities and airdrop CD's with the code on them to all the geeks of the world =:-) Hmm... Seriously though, does anybody know of a good country with no laws or at least no extradition treaty to host this site? Maybe Cuba? Russia? Hmm....
Now does anybody remember the World's Smallest Webserver article that appeared here on slashdot a while back, about using a PIC16C84 or some similar 8 bit el-cheapo (around $2) microcontroller with a little bit of e2prom to run as a web server. Some crazy motherfucker put a simple flash filesystem, httpd, tcp/ip stack, and SLIP protocol into less than 4k words of code space (Yikes! That beats the hell out of 4k basic...) for use in wired household devices. It wouldn't cost more than $5-$10 in a production situation (most of that would be some sort of a serial connecter) to put a toaster on a network. I am not sure i could see a use for a toaster, but some other things (if i could have a machine make my morning tea about half an hour before i get up so it's cooled enough to drink, that'd be nice...) The thing i see as most potentially useful for this technology is home security sort of things, if you were to have a low-res web-cam sort of thing, but have a lot of them posted around your place, along with motion sensors, etc... and timer lights... Have all this accessable only to a non conencted network, and then have a terminal to get at it by your bed, and one in your workshop... WHen the terminal bell starts going ape, you look and see what's up, and a nice web front end from the master program could provide links to individual devices and sensors to give you more detailed info... It'd be pretty neat =:-)
Props to the guys who put the server on a PIC chip. I've programmed for PIC chips (i was part of a project working on a 7 extension (16 mailbox) KSU/VoiceMail system on one, and i know how tedious it is and how evil the optimization is...
rant: I will personally hold down any engineer who works on a wardware-crippling project and cut his (or her) fucking eyeballs out! That aside, you can probably gather my opinion on crippleware.
I think that the market in general doesn't like crippleware very much when it comes to hardware. Remember the outrage when people discovered that you could plug an 80487 into a motherboard without the 80486 and have a 486 dx? Remember the outrage when the movie industry tried to release tapes that self destructed after a certain number of plays (i knew a guy working in one of the video stores that was a beta-tester before the idea was dropped (because nobody would buy them)). Remember how older IDE CDROM drives ripped fine, and then after various smoke-filled-room style discussions, the newer ones started needing software like paranoia to defeat a cripple-feature...
I see a couple problems with this whole situation. Firstly, the movie intustry is trying to muscle the marketplace. They are saying "Our product is worth this: YOu will buy it". That's not how a free market should or will work... Pirating movies, CD's, etc... is a big pain in the ass. Most people don't do it at the current prices ($15 for a CD of music or a VHS cassette of video). I tend not even to do that when i have a CD burner and video toaster and the worx, because it's a pain, and i want to support the stuff i buy... The thing that pisses me off is that these companies are trying to push the market around...
It's like Intel wanting to cripple the celeron to make it not compatable with SMP setups... It's a company trying to scheme a way to charge more by reducing value not adding it.... Normally, you'd have somebody with a product and they'd improve it, and charge more for the improved version. This is the opposite, they have a product, they cripple it, and then if you wanted the old one, you have to pay more. /rant
They should hook up with the guys at HP who are working on molecular logic gates and carbon nanotube interconnects... I think that would be ultra-spiffy =:-)
They make it silly and overly dramatic, because otherwise, non-geeks would get bored... It's the same when they make movies about cops... I know a couple guys who are cops and they spend most of their time driving around in circles, and the rest is spent on paperwork, very little is spent chasing robbers or whatever else... I think that it's just a fact of life that peopel don't go to movies to see mundane details of life (with some exceptions... mostly not mainstream films), people go to movies to see dramatized and crazy stuff... It's always been that way, and i think it'll probably stay that way for ever more, with computers, cops, etc...
Wasn't that the plot of a james bond movie, where some jerk was trying to create a chip shortage by setting off bombs in some fault line in california, breaking open an aquifer, and flooding silicon valley, all to make his chip business more profitable?
Any surprise? I live in Ithaca, NY (about a 10 min. walk from where Carl Sagan lived). In any case, he was enough of a character that it does not surprise me at all (he built his house on the edge of a cliff, and incorporated an old Mausoleum into it)... Now we have a wacky set of monuments in our town which together comprise a scale model of the solar system. In the middle the sun it this thing on a tower about the size of a softball, and then half a block away there is a pin-head sized speck in a glass thingee that's supposed to represent venus, and they go all across town, and pluto is way the hell out in the boonies, and then for the hell of it evidentalyl they built another one in Hawaii for the nearest star....
At first i thought the AIBO was a silly idea, but now it is starting to grow on me. I think the reason i thought it was so silly is because my apartment was too small to possibly house one, so i just imagined it bumping into stuff and getting roblock trying to navigate my bedroom/workshop around piles of machine parts, wires, tools, laundry, etc... Now having moved to a more spacious (>800 sq ft) flat, and with a strict no pets rule, the idea of a pet that doesn't shed, piss, or chew is appealing, because it might be a possibility of something to keep me company in my new place. I think that i'd have to wait for a second version though, just because i don't trust 1.x or x.0 releases of anything... Just too jaded by years of software releases... =:-)
My friend Sean in high school did that with the oil pump from an old oild furnace, but with a new and improved motor attatched to the pump. That worked well because that had a dodad to keep it from burning back, wheras a super soaker does not. I think that would probably be a good way to burn the hell out of your hand. Sort of like charging a butane lighter with a mix of butane and nitrous oxide (a pretty good oxidizing agent...)
Does anybody else remember when they were going to ban super-soakers because various young hooligans (mostly kids in poor neighborhoods) were filling them with bleach and blinding rich kids? I used to love playing with supersoakers, although i never sprayed anything _that_ evil out of them...
It is not as easy as one would suspect to go and lay fiber. The problem is the following: To do so you have to either bury the cable (how many localities are going help out with that one, and how many property owners are going to fight that when it comes to digging up _their_ backyard. They yeilded for gas, then the railroads, then electric, then the telephone, then highways, but will they consider AOL an important enough service to not fight the disruption of their lives and property?) The other option is to lay them along phone poles, which the phone company owns, and i'm sure they'd want a big piece of the pie, or to lay them on the roads, which means that each city, county, etc... would have to okay that, and it's hard to get a municipality to okay something that involves a lot of traffic-causing construction. The big advantage of the cable modem is that it works over an _existing_ infrastructure, already belonging to and operated by companies who put the system together when they were still government regulated/protected monopolies. It is unreasonable to expect others (even AOL) to compete unless they are given the same assistance and protection to lay their lines and build their network. Is that what we really want to spend our taxpayer dollars on? Building a new network for everybody who wants to communicate? I would also like to point out that when the pone system was new, every phone company had their own incompatable system set up, and if you wanted to call anybody not in your phone system, it was a big deal with lots of patches and kludges and negotiations and such. Shall we learn from our previous mistakes, or shall we do it all again?
Well, when i was 6 years old, i already knew how to cuss and yell, and i told many stuck up adults with condescending additudes to shut up. It didn't matter if what they were saying had any merit, because the way in which they said it was so blatently offensive that they deserved what they got. According to my mother, once this well-intending 80 something year old man made a stupid condescending remark (you know the sort of dumb stuff people say to kids in funny voices) and i replied with "what kind of a f**king remark was that?!?". Luckily he was a little hard of hearing. I guess my point is that if the person that pulled him over had possibly asked him where he was going, or offered help, or even just been polite about it, she probably wouldn't have gotten snapped at, and might have actually been able to help the kid, or at least engage him in conversation until the parents/cops/whoever could get there. In any case, that is just the sort of bunghole thing i used to do when i was a kid... I mastered the art of electric stuff, firecrackers, etc... at an early age, and i can sympathize with the kid because he was probably as bored (or more so) than i was when i was that age, and he needed to go and seek something stimulating, and more importantly something under _his_ control. It's frustrating being a kid when adults assume you can't make plans on your own, so they force theirs on you. My parents were good about not doing that (that's probably why i never ran away, or blew anything important up, or whatever else) but i can't say as my various schools were as good.
I seem to remember the thing that made the amiga so neat for it's time was the intelligent file assosciations, loadable drivers, tasking OS, _NICE SHELL_, decent process management, and good expandability... Honestly, i even like the Amiga OS better than Linux as a desktop OS, mainly because of the good compromise between GUI and CLI, and the good scriptability. I seem to remember some mem leaks and other problems made it a little tough. I don't know if there is any real future for the OS, but i miss it...
Re:sounds good for robots/JumpTec DimmPC
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You might also try taking a look at the JumpTec DIMM pc which is an amd core 486 dx2 66, 16 M ram, 16 M IDE flash disk, ide controller, serial, paralell, floopy, and an ISA bus on pins, isn't much bigger than this, but it is a little more expensive, but it would give you an MMU and a more mature Linux option... The stanford wearable people are using them...
I think people need to take another look at this whole thing... I don't know about you all, but i knew all the offensive four letter words there were to know by the time i was 8 years old. So did all my friends... When there are no adults around, most little boys have a good sailor's mouth. The thing that is funny to me is the social comentary, and the nothing is sacred type of satire... I personally think that anybody who can't laugh at themselves should be shot, or at least castrated/spayed. I think the cursing and such all is just an excuse for all the uptight brainwashed homorless masses trying hard to maintain their false dignity and their stiff uppper lip to try to keep a lid on something that makes fun of them (and everybody else).
P.S. I don't even have a TV but i will probably go and see the movie...
For a more detailed article, take a look at the september 1998 Scientific American in the "Technology in Business" section. They mention the resolution (which i seem to remember as 220dpi but don't quote me on that. I remeber reading about this when the article was in scientific american, and it's neat to see that they are actually going to try to produce this (i'm so sick of seeing cool geek technology shelved by companies). Hopefully they won't sell it with a restrictive OEM only contract, so i can actually get my hands on some (unlike the very small hard drives made by another technology giant who shall remain nameless) An unrelated question for you all: Remeber the flexible, plastic, non-metallic batteries that were mentioned in scientific american a while ago? The ones that were not being produced because they might be useful for terrorists or some other stupid brain-dead technophobe reason... Do you know if they ever came into existance?
Slashdot Mirror
I live in Ithaca, NY, and there are a bunch of _really hyper_ environmentalists here (it's a university town attatched to an apparent mecca for old hippies turned yuppie). In any case, there used to be a gun factory here (Ithaca Gun... more than 30% of the surving guns made here are still in use by the CIA. They made damn good sniper rifles. Made a Springfield look mundane.) They also made shotguns (even pump-action repeaters. Hold down the trigger and just pump through all 9 rounds. Makes even a Mossberg 590 pale in comparison...) In any case, there is a piece of land next to one of the gorges that is immediately adjacent to the gun factory that was at one point (almost 100 years ago) used for a test-firing range. There is a shitload of buckshot and rifle bullets sitting around in the woods there.
The city of Ithaca just recently decided to buy that little chunk of land from Cornell, or some thing like that, but in the process the EPA came in and took a look at it, and it said in their report that some of the surface soil samples contained upwards of 250,000 PPM of lead! This set all the environmentalists off. That's 25% lead, 75% soil. The trick is that the creek that runs through that spot, when sampled downstream of this shocking and dangerous environmental hazard, has the same lead concentration as it does upsteam. The lead is in the form of very non-water-soluble slugs of metallic lead. No powdered oxides like in paint. It's not going anywhere. Now there are a bunch of environmental nuts going apeshit about this, but it's really a minor problem. It's sat there for over 100 years and isn't even getting into the fucking water.
If they dig up that spot to get rid of all this contaminated siol, i may go and shoot them myself. It would be ruining the _best_ laser-tag obstacle course in the world...
All i've got stockpiled for Y2K is about a dozen packs of ramen, 2 cases of homebrewed hard cider (which won't actually be fully aged until spring), and some odds and ends.
I would be drinking Bushmills (or maybe Black Label) this newyears, 'cept an old friend is back in town, and there is a tradition of Tanqueray to be upheld...
Hehehhehe =:-) We usta have that in middle school on the school computers. I remember i would take one of those disks so i could get access to the computer room, and then i'd play my pirate copy of Conan The Barbiarian instead =:-)
Recently it seems there has been a trend towards eliminating anonymity in the computer world. It comes in the form of programs that "phone home" without the user's knowledge, or even some that won't run unless they get the okay from the central server. It comes in the form of universal unique identifiers in hardware, operating systems, and software.
With IPv6 on the horizon, and with a larger variety of software phoning home, this may soon become a large privacy issue. Most of the advances being made here are for the purpose of security (read "inspiring fear of being watched")and anti-piracy ("squeeze 'em for their last cent"). What immediate and/or long term effects do you see coming out of this?
This is really neat for several reasons. It's neat because it represents an expansion in scalability. I think it's very cool that one OS can be so modular, scalable, and configurable that it can run on an embedded controller to run some day to day device, or it can be build into clusters of thousands of nodes to predict weather or prospect for oil.
It is also neat because it is a good foothold. The embedded market is very rough, and even with QNX, WinCE, etc... out there a lot of embedded systems still run _dos_ just because it at least doesn't _interfere_ with the task at hand, although it doesn't offer many OS features. It is nice that there is a new option coming in, that can hopefully use it's adaptability to at least replace all those old messy dos implementations, even if it doesn't displace the other modern embedded systems.
One more thing: embedded systems are not a far shot from wearables. I've been working on building a Linux wearable for a couple years. Right now i'm close (i need a battery pack (in progress), i need to fight the on-board video on my current SBC, and i need to make a cool case, then it should work...), but what i've seen is that every advance in embedded systems (smaller, lower power, etc...) immediately pays off in availability/price of those components, which are pretty much the same for wearables. It's all coming together =:-)
I remember a couple years ago he was running around blue in the face shouting about wanting to annex alaska. I think he's just a loonie, but then when you look at the kind of dingbats that the people will vote into office (Sunny Bono, Ronald Reagan, [insert your favorite brain dead pretty boy politician here], ...) you never know.
My feeling is that if he gets elected he'll not actually get any of this stuff done, but it's probably a good idea to keep an eye on him anyway.
Yeah, i seem to remember he botched the code that limited it to only a couple instances per machine. I guess it was the world's first distributed denial of service attack.
My dad once wrote a letter to General Mills about cheerios. He was reading the box, and he got to the part that said "if you are not satisfied with the performance of this general mills product, or if you have any comments or suggenstions, feel free to write us a letter ...bla bla bla"
So he wrote them a letter citing the text on the box, and stating that he bought a box of cheerios, but he wasn't satisfied by their performance. Infact he poured them out on the table, and they didn't do a damn thing.
The company wrote back saying that it brightened their day to get that letter, and they send him a coupon for a dicount on cheerios =:-)
Jeez, this all is getting out of hand. I just finished reading "Player Piano" by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., which deals to an extent with this. The third industrial revolution he calls it...
Yet another geek bullied by lawyers... Luckily many people got down copies of the source when the ruckus started so that it'll live on... Reminds me of ultraHLE... Maybe somebody should fly an airplane over lots of major cities and airdrop CD's with the code on them to all the geeks of the world =:-) Hmm... Seriously though, does anybody know of a good country with no laws or at least no extradition treaty to host this site? Maybe Cuba? Russia? Hmm....
World's Smallest Webserver
article that appeared here on slashdot a while back, about using a PIC16C84 or some similar 8 bit el-cheapo (around $2) microcontroller with a little bit of e2prom to run as a web server. Some crazy motherfucker put a simple flash filesystem, httpd, tcp/ip stack, and SLIP protocol into less than 4k words of code space (Yikes! That beats the hell out of 4k basic...) for use in wired household devices. It wouldn't cost more than $5-$10 in a production situation (most of that would be some sort of a serial connecter) to put a toaster on a network. I am not sure i could see a use for a toaster, but some other things (if i could have a machine make my morning tea about half an hour before i get up so it's cooled enough to drink, that'd be nice...) The thing i see as most potentially useful for this technology is home security sort of things, if you were to have a low-res web-cam sort of thing, but have a lot of them posted around your place, along with motion sensors, etc... and timer lights... Have all this accessable only to a non conencted network, and then have a terminal to get at it by your bed, and one in your workshop... WHen the terminal bell starts going ape, you look and see what's up, and a nice web front end from the master program could provide links to individual devices and sensors to give you more detailed info... It'd be pretty neat =:-)
Props to the guys who put the server on a PIC chip. I've programmed for PIC chips (i was part of a project working on a 7 extension (16 mailbox) KSU/VoiceMail system on one, and i know how tedious it is and how evil the optimization is...
cheers...
I will personally hold down any engineer who works on a wardware-crippling project and cut his (or her) fucking eyeballs out! That aside, you can probably gather my opinion on crippleware.
I think that the market in general doesn't like crippleware very much when it comes to hardware. Remember the outrage when people discovered that you could plug an 80487 into a motherboard without the 80486 and have a 486 dx? Remember the outrage when the movie industry tried to release tapes that self destructed after a certain number of plays (i knew a guy working in one of the video stores that was a beta-tester before the idea was dropped (because nobody would buy them)). Remember how older IDE CDROM drives ripped fine, and then after various smoke-filled-room style discussions, the newer ones started needing software like paranoia to defeat a cripple-feature...
I see a couple problems with this whole situation. Firstly, the movie intustry is trying to muscle the marketplace. They are saying "Our product is worth this: YOu will buy it". That's not how a free market should or will work... Pirating movies, CD's, etc... is a big pain in the ass. Most people don't do it at the current prices ($15 for a CD of music or a VHS cassette of video). I tend not even to do that when i have a CD burner and video toaster and the worx, because it's a pain, and i want to support the stuff i buy... The thing that pisses me off is that these companies are trying to push the market around...
It's like Intel wanting to cripple the celeron to make it not compatable with SMP setups... It's a company trying to scheme a way to charge more by reducing value not adding it.... Normally, you'd have somebody with a product and they'd improve it, and charge more for the improved version. This is the opposite, they have a product, they cripple it, and then if you wanted the old one, you have to pay more.
/rant
They should hook up with the guys at HP who are working on molecular logic gates and carbon nanotube interconnects... I think that would be ultra-spiffy =:-)
They make it silly and overly dramatic, because otherwise, non-geeks would get bored... It's the same when they make movies about cops... I know a couple guys who are cops and they spend most of their time driving around in circles, and the rest is spent on paperwork, very little is spent chasing robbers or whatever else...
I think that it's just a fact of life that peopel don't go to movies to see mundane details of life (with some exceptions... mostly not mainstream films), people go to movies to see dramatized and crazy stuff... It's always been that way, and i think it'll probably stay that way for ever more, with computers, cops, etc...
Wasn't that the plot of a james bond movie, where some jerk was trying to create a chip shortage by setting off bombs in some fault line in california, breaking open an aquifer, and flooding silicon valley, all to make his chip business more profitable?
Any surprise? I live in Ithaca, NY (about a 10 min. walk from where Carl Sagan lived). In any case, he was enough of a character that it does not surprise me at all (he built his house on the edge of a cliff, and incorporated an old Mausoleum into it)...
Now we have a wacky set of monuments in our town which together comprise a scale model of the solar system. In the middle the sun it this thing on a tower about the size of a softball, and then half a block away there is a pin-head sized speck in a glass thingee that's supposed to represent venus, and they go all across town, and pluto is way the hell out in the boonies, and then for the hell of it evidentalyl they built another one in Hawaii for the nearest star....
At first i thought the AIBO was a silly idea, but now it is starting to grow on me. I think the reason i thought it was so silly is because my apartment was too small to possibly house one, so i just imagined it bumping into stuff and getting roblock trying to navigate my bedroom/workshop around piles of machine parts, wires, tools, laundry, etc...
Now having moved to a more spacious (>800 sq ft) flat, and with a strict no pets rule, the idea of a pet that doesn't shed, piss, or chew is appealing, because it might be a possibility of something to keep me company in my new place. I think that i'd have to wait for a second version though, just because i don't trust 1.x or x.0 releases of anything... Just too jaded by years of software releases... =:-)
My friend Sean in high school did that with the oil pump from an old oild furnace, but with a new and improved motor attatched to the pump. That worked well because that had a dodad to keep it from burning back, wheras a super soaker does not. I think that would probably be a good way to burn the hell out of your hand. Sort of like charging a butane lighter with a mix of butane and nitrous oxide (a pretty good oxidizing agent...)
Does anybody else remember when they were going to ban super-soakers because various young hooligans (mostly kids in poor neighborhoods) were filling them with bleach and blinding rich kids?
I used to love playing with supersoakers, although i never sprayed anything _that_ evil out of them...
It is not as easy as one would suspect to go and lay fiber. The problem is the following:
To do so you have to either bury the cable (how many localities are going help out with that one, and how many property owners are going to fight that when it comes to digging up _their_ backyard. They yeilded for gas, then the railroads, then electric, then the telephone, then highways, but will they consider AOL an important enough service to not fight the disruption of their lives and property?)
The other option is to lay them along phone poles, which the phone company owns, and i'm sure they'd want a big piece of the pie, or to lay them on the roads, which means that each city, county, etc... would have to okay that, and it's hard to get a municipality to okay something that involves a lot of traffic-causing construction.
The big advantage of the cable modem is that it works over an _existing_ infrastructure, already belonging to and operated by companies who put the system together when they were still government regulated/protected monopolies.
It is unreasonable to expect others (even AOL) to compete unless they are given the same assistance and protection to lay their lines and build their network. Is that what we really want to spend our taxpayer dollars on? Building a new network for everybody who wants to communicate?
I would also like to point out that when the pone system was new, every phone company had their own incompatable system set up, and if you wanted to call anybody not in your phone system, it was a big deal with lots of patches and kludges and negotiations and such. Shall we learn from our previous mistakes, or shall we do it all again?
Well, when i was 6 years old, i already knew how to cuss and yell, and i told many stuck up adults with condescending additudes to shut up. It didn't matter if what they were saying had any merit, because the way in which they said it was so blatently offensive that they deserved what they got. According to my mother, once this well-intending 80 something year old man made a stupid condescending remark (you know the sort of dumb stuff people say to kids in funny voices) and i replied with "what kind of a f**king remark was that?!?". Luckily he was a little hard of hearing.
I guess my point is that if the person that pulled him over had possibly asked him where he was going, or offered help, or even just been polite about it, she probably wouldn't have gotten snapped at, and might have actually been able to help the kid, or at least engage him in conversation until the parents/cops/whoever could get there.
In any case, that is just the sort of bunghole thing i used to do when i was a kid... I mastered the art of electric stuff, firecrackers, etc... at an early age, and i can sympathize with the kid because he was probably as bored (or more so) than i was when i was that age, and he needed to go and seek something stimulating, and more importantly something under _his_ control. It's frustrating being a kid when adults assume you can't make plans on your own, so they force theirs on you. My parents were good about not doing that (that's probably why i never ran away, or blew anything important up, or whatever else) but i can't say as my various schools were as good.
I seem to remember the thing that made the amiga so neat for it's time was the intelligent file assosciations, loadable drivers, tasking OS, _NICE SHELL_, decent process management, and good expandability... Honestly, i even like the Amiga OS better than Linux as a desktop OS, mainly because of the good compromise between GUI and CLI, and the good scriptability. I seem to remember some mem leaks and other problems made it a little tough. I don't know if there is any real future for the OS, but i miss it...
You might also try taking a look at the JumpTec DIMM pc which is an amd core 486 dx2 66, 16 M ram, 16 M IDE flash disk, ide controller, serial, paralell, floopy, and an ISA bus on pins, isn't much bigger than this, but it is a little more expensive, but it would give you an MMU and a more mature Linux option... The stanford wearable people are using them...
I think people need to take another look at this whole thing... I don't know about you all, but i knew all the offensive four letter words there were to know by the time i was 8 years old. So did all my friends... When there are no adults around, most little boys have a good sailor's mouth.
The thing that is funny to me is the social comentary, and the nothing is sacred type of satire... I personally think that anybody who can't laugh at themselves should be shot, or at least castrated/spayed.
I think the cursing and such all is just an excuse for all the uptight brainwashed homorless masses trying hard to maintain their false dignity and their stiff uppper lip to try to keep a lid on something that makes fun of them (and everybody else).
P.S. I don't even have a TV but i will probably go and see the movie...
For a more detailed article, take a look at the september 1998 Scientific American in the "Technology in Business" section. They mention the resolution (which i seem to remember as 220dpi but don't quote me on that.
I remeber reading about this when the article was in scientific american, and it's neat to see that they are actually going to try to produce this (i'm so sick of seeing cool geek technology shelved by companies). Hopefully they won't sell it with a restrictive OEM only contract, so i can actually get my hands on some (unlike the very small hard drives made by another technology giant who shall remain nameless)
An unrelated question for you all: Remeber the flexible, plastic, non-metallic batteries that were mentioned in scientific american a while ago? The ones that were not being produced because they might be useful for terrorists or some other stupid brain-dead technophobe reason... Do you know if they ever came into existance?