I'd love to see a retailer go into business specializing in synthetic gems. It's just a matter of marketing to convince the consumers that synthetic gems are superior in terms of beauty, quality, and morality (and price). Certainly, there's more than enough ammunition manifested in corrupt practices of De Beers.
Remember, you don't buy expensive natural diamonds for your fiance because you love her - you buy them because a De Beers marketing campaign convinced your fiance that if you didn't give her a 2-months-salary-expensive natural diamond, you DON'T love her.
Besides, even if you buy into that, imagine the size of the synthetic rock you could buy with 2-months salary. (Another business opportunity - expensive but enormous synthetics). Or if you just have to have your diamonds be unique, then how about custom diamond manufacture with introduced flaws, unique structure, colors or patterns including novel ones not seen in nature, even optical art.
If people don't like it, they don't have to use it. It can be opt-in. I'm not proposing stopping the old system (that would be a public-relations nightmare), just augmenting it with a newer, more powerful and efficient one. If they really can do this then why don't they?
I had figured an extension to the ZIP+4 would be the most straightforward if not the most extensible solution for a pure location-based approach. Sending to a person would require a separate number/code though. Personally I am not bothered by having a number - I would be perfectly happy to use my SS# as a mail code, email code, phone number (using 10 digits for those already anyway), all my ids, store cards, bank account #, etc. I certainly wouldn't mind carrying around one smart card instead of a wallet full of crap. I'm not worried about privacy. They only thing I care about would be requirement that anyone who uses your number is legally obliged to get your permission before they use direct marketing (so you can say no). But I guess I'm just funny that way.
The system would be such that the post office is automatically tracking the routing of mail. Cost; nothing they wouldn't have to spend anyway. But if you allow people to check on it via a website that will cost money to maintain the system. Solution: a special stamp that when affixed to the mail allows the sender and recipient to track the mail. This could be either an additional stamp or a combined stamp. It charges at the source and gives UPS (the most vile service to ever be inflicted on residential addresses ever) and FedEx some competition.
Now why the hell doesn't the post office offer a way to send a letter/package to a specific person/business rather than an address? I'm sick of 1) losing half my mail every time I move 2) having to tell strangers my residence 3) having addresses screwed up because of misunderstood words. If the postal service would just offer the equivalent of a phone number or email address, which is routed via a database and can therefore travel with me, it would solve all those problems. Combine it with a precise geopositioning code system like this to allow mail to be sent to any given location in the world and we'd be set.
I for one would like to see apple increase speed and decrease size on OS X. It would be nice to be able to produce small, compatible binaries for the regular os x and a stripped-down-and-streamlined version for less powerful devices. I think I heard an unreliable rumor about that once.
Well, if you dumped all the legacy supporting stuff, cut out the (many) unnecessary functions, turned bundles into tarballs to cut back on the wasted space and/or compressed them (didn't I hear something about built in zip compression?) and severely scaled back the graphics, it could be doable.
Though it's not essential, it would be handy to have an elvish keyboard layout/text behavior script too. Not to mention it probably already has its own block in the unicode private use area too. (http://www.evertype.com/standards/csur/)
But that's probably overkill, since all you really want to do is fiddle around with it, not produce anything useful.
I just read a short story about this in David G. Hartwell's "Year's best SF 6", by Greg Egan, called "Oracle". Someone obviously based on Turing takes on someone obviously based on C.S. Lewis in a debate. Belief in god/privileged status of human thought loses.
Don't forget, the social attitude towards the augmented has everything to do with both their own manner and the individual opinions of others towards tehm taken as a whole. Consider those individuals who have already chosen to have their chests augmented. In the case of females, they experience a mixture of superficial attraction and discriminatory repulsion from males, and are often envied and shunned by those of their own gender. In the case of males, attitudes are largely negative except for a certain underground segment of the population, and they must hide their status.
In any case these mighty bosoms, these bastard twins of technology and humanity, rarely fail to provoke a reaction. Future augmentation will no doubt follow much the same pattern.
7.1 channel audio on a handheld device does not make sense. You only need two channels - one for each headphone. Something is awfully inconsistent about this spec, and in fact many of the specs quoted are inconsistent with the fundamental limitations of a handheld device. If true, it implies that it is meant more as a replacement for the PS2, and is designed to be portable in the sense that it can be carried around and hooked up to various A/V systems, or at least is dual use. The only mention about the screen is that it is a 16:9 widescreen tft lcd.
I predict a large market for WozNet Tag detectors amongst thieves, the unjustifiedly paranoid, and the justifiedly paranoid (why won't that creepy guy/girl leave me alone?)
Of course if you should happen to find an unrequested WozTag, you get the fun of calling the cops to help you trap your tracker.
Is there any way to tell whose tag it is, and to find the intended reciever built into the system?
Actually, they had a very good solar array that performs much better than most of the others out there. They had unresolvable problems with their steering. They used a 4-wheel steering system, with the rear wheels controlled by a servo, which was not responsive enough to perform adequately on the figure-eight steering test.
A hairless, eyeless, black and white image of a body? Even a good one? Unless you get turned on by naked department store mannequins I fail to see how this can be used for sexual purposes. Although, there's still plenty to be embarrassed about.
Oddly enough, NAT's natural firewall characteristics generally make life hard for filetraders behind them, or for any other program that needs to allow people outside the NAT to connect to the people inside, especially on unusual ports. Sure, you can always forward ports - provided you have access to the NAT configuration and you don't have multiple people behind them needing the same ports.
Actually it would be difficult for the small stores to implement, as they often only have one copy of a particular movie. This thing works best if you have at least some redundancy, otherwise you run the risk of someone checking out your movies permanently when they let their membership lapse. then again, maybe it's not as big a problem as I initially thought.
Frankly I think this would be a good model for real video stores. They don't have to worry about the shipping overhead.
Am I the only one who thought, immediately after hearing about the high quality firewire based iSight (not to mention that new video codec), that there ought to be able to connect that sucker to your iPod to record on the road? So your webcam can double as a REAL cam?
Of course it would be much easier if you could display color video on your iPod... and generate it on the fly...
The simplified view of BitTorrent that the author proposes supposes that everyone has a DSL line with identical properties. This is a false and misleading assumption. Some lucky users have bad-ass university broadband, other poor bastards are trapped on modems. The randomized, dynamic, slowest uploader dropping behavior of BitTorrent sees to it that fast clients will eventually find each other, while slow clients will be pushed down to others more appropriate to their level, even as speeds change. As far as I can tell, k2b does not appear to have any way to do that, and T1s can end up trapped behind DSL while cable modems end up squandering their speed on phone modems.
Another point I should make is that as BT makes files easy to distribute not only because it spreads the load, but because it virtually eliminates all of the difficulties of setting up and maintaining a server. In many of these swarms, a large percentage of people actually WANT to help spread the file and are willing to serve much more than just their part. Some of them distributed through other more complex means before (irc bots, hotline servers, etc.) but others never went through the trouble. In any case, it makes it easy (and obligatory) to serve, and so these channels have much more serving power than they ever did before.
They're just pissed that nobody cares and they'll be out of a job. Good riddance to cursive, it was always too individualized and too sloppy to read anyway.
Trepia is built around informing a server where you are at all times. So naturally it's intrusive. iChat (which uses Rendezvous) requires no server and locates people on the local subnet, and if they are configured properly neighboring subnets. Completely different principle - also rendezvous is designed for much more than just this (automatic networking with little or no assistance of devices).
That is a good point. However, more than 7 digits is unavoidable now. With alphanumerics (10 numerals + 26 roman letters - 4 confusable letters = 32):
32^7=3.4e10, aka 34 billion codes. And there are already 6 billion PEOPLE on the globe, and growing. Never mind locations. It just won't cut it.
10^10= 1e10, aka 10 billion, aka phone w/area code. Also won't cut it.
32^10=1.1e15. Plenty.
The trick is that the digits at the front will be easy to remember because they are more likely to be be repeated amongst the addresses you want to know, since you'll be conducting business locally for the most part.
Also, having more numerals than the regular 10 is unlikely to cause problems. Humans are much better at pattern matching and remembering than with sequences.
It ain't five numbers. It's one or more lines of street address, plus city and state.
In my opinion, something like this is long overdue. It is a great complement to the OTHER obvious improvement to the mail system - which is to allow people to register codes for specific people, companies, and offices, so that even if the person moves the "address" remains the same. Simple, doesn't say where you live, and so forth. In an ideal world you could use it for phone and email too. Just link that code to the street address, or in this case the universal location code, or any other denominator, and you're set.
Send it to a person, or send it to a location. Two great tastes that taste great together.
Evil Dead 1 and 2: the musical also
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I'd love to see a retailer go into business specializing in synthetic gems. It's just a matter of marketing to convince the consumers that synthetic gems are superior in terms of beauty, quality, and morality (and price). Certainly, there's more than enough ammunition manifested in corrupt practices of De Beers.
Remember, you don't buy expensive natural diamonds for your fiance because you love her - you buy them because a De Beers marketing campaign convinced your fiance that if you didn't give her a 2-months-salary-expensive natural diamond, you DON'T love her.
Besides, even if you buy into that, imagine the size of the synthetic rock you could buy with 2-months salary. (Another business opportunity - expensive but enormous synthetics). Or if you just have to have your diamonds be unique, then how about custom diamond manufacture with introduced flaws, unique structure, colors or patterns including novel ones not seen in nature, even optical art.
If people don't like it, they don't have to use it. It can be opt-in. I'm not proposing stopping the old system (that would be a public-relations nightmare), just augmenting it with a newer, more powerful and efficient one. If they really can do this then why don't they?
I had figured an extension to the ZIP+4 would be the most straightforward if not the most extensible solution for a pure location-based approach. Sending to a person would require a separate number/code though. Personally I am not bothered by having a number - I would be perfectly happy to use my SS# as a mail code, email code, phone number (using 10 digits for those already anyway), all my ids, store cards, bank account #, etc. I certainly wouldn't mind carrying around one smart card instead of a wallet full of crap. I'm not worried about privacy. They only thing I care about would be requirement that anyone who uses your number is legally obliged to get your permission before they use direct marketing (so you can say no). But I guess I'm just funny that way.
The system would be such that the post office is automatically tracking the routing of mail. Cost; nothing they wouldn't have to spend anyway. But if you allow people to check on it via a website that will cost money to maintain the system. Solution: a special stamp that when affixed to the mail allows the sender and recipient to track the mail. This could be either an additional stamp or a combined stamp. It charges at the source and gives UPS (the most vile service to ever be inflicted on residential addresses ever) and FedEx some competition.
That sucks. And here I was wanting sunday delivery.
IMHO, I'd rather they mix it up - maybe a "no wednesday" system so I wouldn't go 2 days without getting mail. But then again, I Am Not A Business.
Now why the hell doesn't the post office offer a way to send a letter/package to a specific person/business rather than an address? I'm sick of 1) losing half my mail every time I move 2) having to tell strangers my residence 3) having addresses screwed up because of misunderstood words. If the postal service would just offer the equivalent of a phone number or email address, which is routed via a database and can therefore travel with me, it would solve all those problems. Combine it with a precise geopositioning code system like this to allow mail to be sent to any given location in the world and we'd be set.
I for one would like to see apple increase speed and decrease size on OS X. It would be nice to be able to produce small, compatible binaries for the regular os x and a stripped-down-and-streamlined version for less powerful devices. I think I heard an unreliable rumor about that once.
Well, if you dumped all the legacy supporting stuff, cut out the (many) unnecessary functions, turned bundles into tarballs to cut back on the wasted space and/or compressed them (didn't I hear something about built in zip compression?) and severely scaled back the graphics, it could be doable.
Though it's not essential, it would be handy to have an elvish keyboard layout/text behavior script too. Not to mention it probably already has its own block in the unicode private use area too. (http://www.evertype.com/standards/csur/)
But that's probably overkill, since all you really want to do is fiddle around with it, not produce anything useful.
I just read a short story about this in David G. Hartwell's "Year's best SF 6", by Greg Egan, called "Oracle". Someone obviously based on Turing takes on someone obviously based on C.S. Lewis in a debate. Belief in god/privileged status of human thought loses.
Don't forget, the social attitude towards the augmented has everything to do with both their own manner and the individual opinions of others towards tehm taken as a whole. Consider those individuals who have already chosen to have their chests augmented. In the case of females, they experience a mixture of superficial attraction and discriminatory repulsion from males, and are often envied and shunned by those of their own gender. In the case of males, attitudes are largely negative except for a certain underground segment of the population, and they must hide their status.
In any case these mighty bosoms, these bastard twins of technology and humanity, rarely fail to provoke a reaction. Future augmentation will no doubt follow much the same pattern.
7.1 channel audio on a handheld device does not make sense. You only need two channels - one for each headphone. Something is awfully inconsistent about this spec, and in fact many of the specs quoted are inconsistent with the fundamental limitations of a handheld device. If true, it implies that it is meant more as a replacement for the PS2, and is designed to be portable in the sense that it can be carried around and hooked up to various A/V systems, or at least is dual use. The only mention about the screen is that it is a 16:9 widescreen tft lcd.
Picture yourself... on a Boat... On A River... with... Tangerine Trees, and Marmalade SKIES...
Funniest.
Cover.
Ever.
You have to hear it to believe it.
I predict a large market for WozNet Tag detectors amongst thieves, the unjustifiedly paranoid, and the justifiedly paranoid (why won't that creepy guy/girl leave me alone?)
Of course if you should happen to find an unrequested WozTag, you get the fun of calling the cops to help you trap your tracker.
Is there any way to tell whose tag it is, and to find the intended reciever built into the system?
Actually, they had a very good solar array that performs much better than most of the others out there. They had unresolvable problems with their steering. They used a 4-wheel steering system, with the rear wheels controlled by a servo, which was not responsive enough to perform adequately on the figure-eight steering test.
A hairless, eyeless, black and white image of a body? Even a good one? Unless you get turned on by naked department store mannequins I fail to see how this can be used for sexual purposes. Although, there's still plenty to be embarrassed about.
Oddly enough, NAT's natural firewall characteristics generally make life hard for filetraders behind them, or for any other program that needs to allow people outside the NAT to connect to the people inside, especially on unusual ports. Sure, you can always forward ports - provided you have access to the NAT configuration and you don't have multiple people behind them needing the same ports.
"Freddy vs. Jason" is coming soon to a theater near you.
Actually it would be difficult for the small stores to implement, as they often only have one copy of a particular movie. This thing works best if you have at least some redundancy, otherwise you run the risk of someone checking out your movies permanently when they let their membership lapse. then again, maybe it's not as big a problem as I initially thought.
Frankly I think this would be a good model for real video stores. They don't have to worry about the shipping overhead.
Am I the only one who thought, immediately after hearing about the high quality firewire based iSight (not to mention that new video codec), that there ought to be able to connect that sucker to your iPod to record on the road? So your webcam can double as a REAL cam?
Of course it would be much easier if you could display color video on your iPod... and generate it on the fly...
The simplified view of BitTorrent that the author proposes supposes that everyone has a DSL line with identical properties. This is a false and misleading assumption. Some lucky users have bad-ass university broadband, other poor bastards are trapped on modems. The randomized, dynamic, slowest uploader dropping behavior of BitTorrent sees to it that fast clients will eventually find each other, while slow clients will be pushed down to others more appropriate to their level, even as speeds change. As far as I can tell, k2b does not appear to have any way to do that, and T1s can end up trapped behind DSL while cable modems end up squandering their speed on phone modems.
Another point I should make is that as BT makes files easy to distribute not only because it spreads the load, but because it virtually eliminates all of the difficulties of setting up and maintaining a server. In many of these swarms, a large percentage of people actually WANT to help spread the file and are willing to serve much more than just their part. Some of them distributed through other more complex means before (irc bots, hotline servers, etc.) but others never went through the trouble. In any case, it makes it easy (and obligatory) to serve, and so these channels have much more serving power than they ever did before.
They're just pissed that nobody cares and they'll be out of a job. Good riddance to cursive, it was always too individualized and too sloppy to read anyway.
Trepia is built around informing a server where you are at all times. So naturally it's intrusive. iChat (which uses Rendezvous) requires no server and locates people on the local subnet, and if they are configured properly neighboring subnets. Completely different principle - also rendezvous is designed for much more than just this (automatic networking with little or no assistance of devices).
O, Q (confused with 0 and each other), Z (confused with 2), and S (confused with 5)
Shit. Now that I think about it, "I" is also bad. Make that 5.
That is a good point. However, more than 7 digits is unavoidable now. With alphanumerics (10 numerals + 26 roman letters - 4 confusable letters = 32):
32^7=3.4e10, aka 34 billion codes. And there are already 6 billion PEOPLE on the globe, and growing. Never mind locations. It just won't cut it.
10^10= 1e10, aka 10 billion, aka phone w/area code. Also won't cut it.
32^10=1.1e15. Plenty.
The trick is that the digits at the front will be easy to remember because they are more likely to be be repeated amongst the addresses you want to know, since you'll be conducting business locally for the most part.
Also, having more numerals than the regular 10 is unlikely to cause problems. Humans are much better at pattern matching and remembering than with sequences.
It ain't five numbers. It's one or more lines of street address, plus city and state.
In my opinion, something like this is long overdue. It is a great complement to the OTHER obvious improvement to the mail system - which is to allow people to register codes for specific people, companies, and offices, so that even if the person moves the "address" remains the same. Simple, doesn't say where you live, and so forth. In an ideal world you could use it for phone and email too. Just link that code to the street address, or in this case the universal location code, or any other denominator, and you're set.
Send it to a person, or send it to a location. Two great tastes that taste great together.
If you had been reading this article in Ain't It Cool News you would have known that.