The lack of support in the US is likely due to the unethical bundling agreements with microsoft.
One way to provide a reasonable degree of support without selling machines preinstalled is to publish highly detailed installation instructions. for a few distributions. I
log machine installations
in such a way that
you can practically cut and paste the log into
a shell prompt and duplicate the install. Only the occasional reboot or a $%@#$% interactive install program prevents running the entire log as a shell script. All file edits are recorded using diff/patch, sed, cat, etc so you have
an exact way to reproduce the changes.
That way, you are covered on your first install, reinstalls, and have a good head start on upgrades.
And, this way you don't have to use their configuration. You can partition your hard drive to your specifications, for example. But you don't need to go searching for drivers to download or puzzle out how to install them.
This approach doesn't work very well for grandma
but it will work for power users who may be new to linux as well as those people who normally use linux. And it would be a major selling point to linux people if the installation instructions are on the HP web site and they can view them before they even buy the machine.
The link above includes an example for an older HP notebook.
Given that you say you only have access to five lines of the log data, your assesment of the
situation is suspect. You need a lot more data to determine if wget is being used malevalently.
Oh, and wget retreiving the same page can be caused by a number of things besides being used as a DOS
attack. Suppose, for example, there is a persistent network error (such as ICMP filtering breaking path MTU discovery). That will cause wget to retry the transfer many times. Or perhaps (based on the Konquerer problems reported earlier) wget was getting some sort of "Temporary Error: browser not recognized" from the server.
An error in a script intended to perform some other function such as mirroring can degenerate
into fetching the same page. Someone might have even written a script to download your home page at regular intervals with the intent of seeing exactly what changes were made exactly when.
The wgets might have had the same IP address but not even come from the same machine if the IP address turns out to be a cache on a large network. The cache could even use wget as
its retreival mechanism. Or, more likely, is used by a web to email gateway (of the old fashioned sort that allows email only users to retrieve web pages) or a cell phone gateway. Sometimes wget is also used to get messages into web logs after mail to webmaster bounces.
while/bin/true; do
wget -O/dev/null http://www.example.com/your_site_is_handicapped_in accessable.html ;
sleep 1;
done
Which has the amusing effect that when they look at the weekly/monthly web logs, the #1 ranked page on the site is a criticism. Waste of bandwidth, yes, but hardly a DoS attack - rather a retaliation to the webmaster's denial of service through incomptence.
Also, sometimes manual wget users load the same page more than once when testing commands such as "wget -O - http://www.example.com/ | fgrep -i HREF | sed..." while writing a script to extract urls from a site. Or, it could be that there were a grand total of five uses of wget and that your ignoramous publisher didn't know what wget was, googled on it and DoS and found that some crude DoS scripts use wget and was oblivious to its legitimate uses.
So, 5 lines in the log show a tool that is occasionally used for DoS attacks but usually used for other things and he concludes that is proof of an attack. Kitchen knives are occassionally used to commit murder, therefore existence of kitchen knives is proof of intent to murder.
I also find the eudora=autourl very odd. Looks like the web link was being distributed by email
and got corrupted. Some SPAM filters may filter email by checking the spammyness of any linked-to web sites. wget could be used for the retrieval portion. In that case, the wgets would just indicate that people were bitching about your site by email.
Not to mention the fact that your publisher was a horses ass. After claiming there was a DoS attack (which he described as something like the most massive DoS attack against a publisher in history), he may have been to embarassed to admit otherwise and may have fabricated a few records
as "evidence". If he had given you the complete web log five days earlier, I might be more inclined to believe it. But saying, in essence, "on the basis of five whole lines from a web log provided to me by someone who has just proved he is ethically impaired, I conclude that there is some truth to the claims" just doesn't wash.
Not that it would take much to convince me that someone launched a trivial DoS attack.
Kudo's for resigning, though. Good luck finding a new gig. Maybe even one that pays.
Yea. You can change your mind and vote for the guy who is leading and win big bucks! No wait, there is no reward for voting the winner...guess your analogy doesn't work.
You underestimate the herd instinct and peoples pathetic desires to affiliate themselves with a winning team or brand. How many people do you see wearing shirts with "Abercrombe" or "Tommy" in big bold letters across the breasts? These pathetic people have actually paid money to become a billboard for the brand in the hope that being associated with a successful brand will make them seem like winners. If your candidate wins, you get to take part in celebrations that night - never mind that you chose that candidate because you thought they would win not because they should win. If you vote for the winning candidate, than you get to "fit in" with the majority of the population rather than a minority.
On the flip side, however, people who weren't going to vote because they thought their candidate would get enough votes anyway may turn out if early results show the opponent getting more votes.
I didn't have time to thorougly study the patent but besides looking like it is an invalid patent, it also looks like there may be some gaping holes
allowing other implementations that are better than the pattented version.
It looks like they are describing a version where variables modified during a try block do not retain their new values unless the entire block succeeds. Either that or they are very ineptly including the normal stack arrangement in their patent claim as if it were part of the "invention" rather than the environment where the invention is used.
The patent refers to moving data on and off the stack using push and pop CPU instructions (not merely push and pop mechanisms). There are
other ways to move data on and off the stack.
The stack pointer can be moved by arithmetic and the data can be moved by byte/word/block copy operations. Given the amount of data they are
putting there, push and pop are probably an inefficient way to do that.
A significant portion of the patent seems to deal with storing the state of all local variables on the stack and then restoring them if the __try block fails. This is actually a pretty silly
way to implement this feature unless you DO NOT have the ability to modify the compiler code and
are trying to code around compiler limitations.
But an alternative and more sensible implementation is copy in, copy out. Instead
of saving a copy to be restored later, each __try block has its own private copies of variables
and the compiler copies in only those variables used (and only those written to) in the block when the block is invoked and then only copies them back out to the parent block if the block succeeds. Very similar to an ADA "in out" function parameter. Copy in/copy out vs. save restore appears to be enough to stay clear of the relevant sections of the patent and even copying only those variables which can actually be modified by the sub block appears to be enough to break this section (a patent on saving "all" variables does not affect code saving only those variables that are modified.
Using the existing processor call/return stack to store the data breaks the patent because the patent stipulates that the variables must be stored in a stack allocated specifically for the purpose of saving and restoring variables. The processor return stack was previously allocated for a different purpose, namely storing return addresses and is already being used as storage space for the local variables themselves. The patent says to allocate space for a stack not to allocate space within an already allocated stack.
Again, this is a method you would use if you were trying to retrofit this capability into an unmodified compiler (and even then, you could even declare a variable save_regs) in your own code or with a pre-processing compiler front end.
A typo where "paid" was used instead of "said" could invalidate another section. And, of course, this section has prior art going back decades.
patent claims are rather specific about where in a stack frame certain exception information is to be stored - there is no need to duplciate that order.
Just because the OS has a function call you can invoke in each function to register the location of the exception record doesn't mean you need to call it. You can simply create one function that is registered with the OS that in turn knows to look in a global variable for a pointer to the latest record and does the unwinding itself. The variable can be restored on exit. Or you put the information at a fixed offset from the frame pointer. No need for system call overhead with each function or try block.
there is probably a lot of prior art in early ADA compilers (circa 1982) which had compiler supported exception handling long before C++.
The kid just might be psychic. Kids often are. Perhaps autistic kids are more in touch with that stuff than normal kids. I predicted some scary shit when was a kid, according to my parents.
Neither kids nor adults have psychic abilities.
If you think you can prove otherwise, feel free to embarass yourself by trying to claim the
Million Dollar Prize either for yourself or the neighborhood kid or anyone else with purported psychic abilities.
The ability to predict when a particular public service commercial is going to occur can be explained simply by pattern recognition. There is no need to resort to paranormal bullshit.
Scheduling of TV commercials, whether done manually or by hand, is subject to a variety of
constraints and conventions that will impose
patterns.
Public service commercials, for example, are often shorter than standard commercials so they may be grouped with other non-standard length commercials. A 15 second public service announcement is likely to be combined with another
15 second announcement or an odd length paid advertisement. And they might even be spliced on the same video tape to reduce the work queueing them up. And they are likely to be concentrated during less popular (with advertisers) shows.
Since they are filler material, they may be more likely to come last. Scheduling algorithms may put a particular ad last if it is a lower priority (not paid, already had most of its allocated airings, has fewer restrictions on what shows it can be placed on, etc). An ad with a slightly lower priority could be fairly consistently aired right after an ad with a slightly higher priority. Public service ads may be shown in round-robin fashion which can lead to one ad being shown after another ad each time. In fact, ads of equal priority may, intentionally or otherwise, tend to be shown in a round robin sequence to prevent them from being shown back to back, getting too annoying, or simply because putting the most recently seen commercial at the bottom of the deck minimizes the chances of you being left at the end of the month showing the same commercial 15 times almost back to back because the others used up their quotas.
Patterns may exist beyond just the sequence of consequtive ads during one gap. During the airing of an episode of the show, first you are likely to see the national ads, then the paid local advertisments that have reserved a particular time during
a particular episode of a particular show. Next ones that have reserved a non-specific time withing a particular show. Next, one would expect to see low budget local remnant ads that have paid for a up to a certain number of showings but have little or no constraints on when they air. The lowest budget ads are likely to come last. Then the public service advertisements. So if the last
filler commercial in the previous commercial break was for Honest Al's No-credit used cars (and Al negotiated the lowest rate for his remainder ads), then the filler at the end of the next time slot is likely to be a public service ad.
10% of people with Autism are autistic savants who exhibit unusual skills. And an obsession with routine is very common among people with autism.
I.E. patterns are very important to an autistic.
Consider the following quotes from the movie
Rain Main
"Maple syrup is supposed to be on the table before the pancakes"
"Gotta get my boxer shorts at K-Mart."
(and not just any k-mart, either. Has to be the one at 400 oak street)."
"You said read the telephone book last night. Dibbs Sally. 461-0192. "
"We have pepperoni pizza for dinner Monday nights. "
"'Course I got Jeopardy! at five o'clock. I watch Jeopardy!"
The channel bank is one option for handling many ports on asterisk. However, channel banks are old technology and the last I checked fairly expensive
and are not scalable in a fine grain. Great if
you want hundreds of ports but if you need about 24 lines now, what happens when you need 25? You need to shell out another $2400 for another channel bank plus more for another T1 card.
It looks like the SPA-3000 could be adapted to
support a PBX using a fairly large number of lines using ethernet rather than T1 to connect to the PBX box. First, you probably want to deal with some packaging issues. One approach would be to
cut a strip of aluminum 2 inches longer than the SPA-3000 and glue it using silicone rubber to the side of the plastic case. With a couple mounting holes drilled, you now have a way to easily screw dozens of these verticaly on edge to a sheet of plywood on the wall (which is a typical part of any large phone installation). Density would probably be around 24 lines per square foot.
As an alternative, you may want to discard the case entirely. This can save space and improve cooling but check first if the case has a metalic coating to supress EMI. Power supply is another issue. Dozens of wall cubes are a pain. You may be able to run a bunch of units off a single 5V 30A supply for a couple hundred extra bucks. Requires soldering some cables, however.
The cost per port of the SPA-3000 is under half the cost per port of the talkswitch PBX someone else mentioned and it is scalable in one line increments not 4+8 line increments and you get one
trunk port for every station port with the SPA-3000. Also, you have more flexibility with
the SPA-3000 because you can locate it either in the phone closet or near the phone. And, you can
deploy the same equipment in peoples homes.
However, you need to do a little extra mechanical/ electrical work with the SPA-3000. Also, the talkswitch is heavy on analog station ports and low on trunk ports which is a traditional PBX configuration but could be quite backwards if you
are going to use VoIP phones.
Now the VoIP solution can potentially have a disadvantage over the T1 solution in that it may be even less suitable to plug a modem into than a channel bank port. If you can disable compression entirely, it should be no worse.
But neither configuration will support a 56K modem
unless your trunk lines to the central office are digital because of the extra A/D and D/A conversions to get through the PBX. But, if you have a broadband connection anyway, this isn't the same kind of issue it once was though modems may still be needed for certain applications.
The individual VoIP adapter has another possible advantage in terms of lightning protection (although the arrestor found inside the unit itself is probably not up to snuff). Each port is separate from the hub by two 1500V isolation barriers and from other ports and from the PBX by four 1500V isolation barriers. Not counting the isolation barrier in the phone line
interface itself. You still want at least one good lightning arrester on each external phone line and if you have reason to be really paranoid you will put one on the ethernet as well. For better protection, put one good lightning arrestor on each exteral line where the phone line enters the premises and another at the phone closet (with a separate ground from other equipment) separated by a good length of wire; two arrestors separated by an impedence work better than one by itself.
Of course, if you use VoIP phones, you need a lot fewer phone ports and if you are using VoIP long distance you may need fewer trunk ports. If you
are using a talkswitch PBX primarily for trunk ports, its cost per port doubles to about $450 per port.
The original posting here on slashdot was also about HOME pbx's where scalabity to small systems
and the ability to deploy gradually is more important. But for many small businesses, being able to add 1 line at a time for $100 instead of
4trunk+8station lines for $1800 (talkswitch) or 24 lines (either type, usually predetermined rather than switchable) for around $2400.
This elevator looks too small to accomodate a wheel
chair. So, the only people who can use it are those who don't need it.
For the price of this elevator, you could install a full size elevator. I have used one elevator that I am told cost $30,000 to install and that included boring a vertical shaft and horizontal tunnel through the side of a mountain.
For considerably less cost,
you could build a single person elevator.
They claim that the elevator saves energy because
it uses gravity on the descent. What they don't tell you is that it uses more than twice as much energy on the way up as a similarly sized elevator using the conventional counterweight design. A counterweight elevator only has to raise the weight of the occupants since the weight of the
car is balanced out by the counterweight. Indeed, the counterweight might be as much as the weight of the car plus maximum occupancy load, in which case the elevator needs to use power to lower the car and only needs to release the brakes and overcome friction to raise. Futher, the inefficency of the vacuum pump could be considerable.
A hydraulic elevator of the size shown could also have been constructed using
a cable or chain over a piston that travels half the distance as the elevator car (same design as
used on many forklifts). This would be simpler, more reliable, and avoid the dynamic load problem described below. The design could be as compact and "portable" as the vacuum elevator.
Vacuum induced lift is a constant force rather than constant displacement technology. This is
a very serious problem. When you step off the car, you can expect it to spring upwards. They probably hide this serious problem by making an
elevator that can only serve two floors. At the top floor, you drive into a hard stop. At the bottom floor, you do not allow the door to open until the vacuum cylinder is fully vented. On a multifloor design, you could have a mechanical lock that engages before the door opens but then
when the lock released there would be a sudden jolt if the passenger was not the same weight
as the previous passenger (if any).
The large seals required and the fact that they must operate past doorways (unlike a hydraulic lift) will lead to significant maintenence problems.
This product looks to be pure gimmick. The technology used and other aspects of the design are totally inappropriate to the task.
What concerns me in that picture is what looks like exposed superinsulation material with no aluminum shell covering it around the propulsion stage. Seems
rather susceptible to ice damage. Now that insulation is probably covering a tank that is strong but if you lose the insulation your fuel
could boil off rather quickly.
And if you can afford to have less fuel, you wouldn't be carrying it in the first place.
And what about
all the wires and plumbing on the outside of the
tank that are not as strong as the tank itself.
Also, from what I can see from other pictures, it looks like the crew module is lacking an airlock.
It would appear you have to use the entire back half of the crew module as an airlock. Or,
in airline terms, the cockpit would remain pressurized while the passenger compartment would
be depressurized. There does appear to be a full airlock between the two halves of the crew module.
Also, it looks like the rear hatch is used to couple with the mission module which means that you can't even use back half of the crew module as an airlock when you have a mission module - the mission module itself needs to be used as an airlock if you wan't to go EVA. Or else you need
to depressurize the cockpit when you want to step outside to fix something. Personallly, I would like to be able to step outside to fix something without wasting that much oxegen or having everyone have to change compartments or put their helmets on everytime I came back in for a different size wrench:-)
I agree with most of what you said. But I question your prediction that netflix will find a niche in rural america. I suspect that lackluster video
will probably get most of that market share. But
netflix should still do well. Netflix will appeal,
instead, to the same people it does now - those who
have non-mainstream tastes who will mostly be non-rural (though netflix will be popular with the more educated people in rural areas). And more unusual movies are a growth industry since DVD has made it
feasible for movies to have a market even if they don't have enough mass appeal to get exposure on
big screens. The gradual trend towards installing video projectors in theaters (where the UK is currently leading) and distribing movies digitally (much lower cost per screen) will also help that. Also, with digital projection,
a theater can show a less publicized movie 2 nights a week for 7 weeks instead of 7 nights a week for two weeks and give time for word of mouth to spread. And the greater exposure in theaters
will help boost DVD sales as well. The internet
contributes to this trend by letting you interact with people you have more in common with than zip codes. When legal movie downloads become common the trend will get another boost.
As independent and foreign films grow in popularity, Hollywood may try to cash in on name recognition with a steady stream of low budget sequels to popular movies.
Part of the reason I chose netflix is that not only do they have lots of obscure movies but they
help you find movies you will like but haven't heard about through their system of letting you rate movies and then recommending movies based
on those you liked.
Someone suggested that netflix would lose market
share and have to reduce its selection to more popular movies. Not only do I not think they
will need to do so, it would be a mistake. Popular titles (particularly new releases) are expensive for movie stores because they need to
purchase large numbers of copies to meet peak demands and then the peak subsides and they are stuck with all those copies. Interest in the long-tail movies, however builds gradually. So,
as long as you have a reasonable sized customer base, you may only need one or two copies of
a more obscure movie but demand will be pretty
steady. Also, the long-tail is their reason de etre. And, the long tail doesn't cost that much.
One copy each of 30,000 movies at $25 average price is $750,000. 3 million subscribers at
$18 (or more) a month is $54 million dollars a month. 3 million subscribers (on the 3 at a time plan will have 9 million disks checked out at any one time. Thus, a movie can be 300 times less popular than a popular movie and still be profitable.
Netflix isn't going to lose customers to lackluster. Instead, netflix will continue to
grow while Lackluster may grow at an even faster
rate. But netflix is already profitable so we know they can stay in business with their current
size customer base. Intelligent viewers will continue to use netflix but the ignorant masses will flock to Lackluster.
What netflix might eventually do to boost market share is add porn, hentai, and other more explicit content. Lackluster is a conservative corporate "family" name and isn't likely to add porn. Netflix, however, could do so. But it will probably be an extra price option to offset the higher prices of porn movies. One of the things that keeps local video stores in business in many areas is that Lackluster is too timid to carry porn.
The downside of Netflix is that they need to be more honest about their policies. Unlimited rentals aren't. In practice, if you are on the 3 movies at a time plan you are effectively limited to about 3 movies per week. Netflix throttles
your deliveries based on how many movies you rented in the past month. While they may not explicitly set a quota on individual users, they
give users who have rented fewer movies higher priority and limit the total number of rentals per day at each distri
Google is pleased to announce the beta version of a new data service. The most revolutionary feature of the new service is that it eliminates the need to fill out time consuming questionaires.
What you search for can tell us a lot about you.
google uses cookies to keep track of users of its search engine. Patterns of searches reveal a lot about the demographics and sexual preferences
of google users. With our new googlelocal service, we are able to pinpoint users locations, allowing us to match you up with people in your area.
googlematch automatically chooses potential mates of the appropriate sex and orientation. The most difficult part was differentiated between straight women and gay men and straight men and lesbians.
By analysing google searches versus time, googlematch can identify women by the 28 day cyclical nature of their queries. Whether a user prefers men or women is determined by using a bayesian filter,
similar to that used to differentiate spam from legitimate email, on search queries.
googlematch can also match you up with someone that shares your political affiliation. Republicans are more likely than democrats to search for financial services, offshore asset protection accounts, stock ticker symbols, brooks brothers suits, religious goods, guns, jesus, scripture, tax loopholes, choir boys, kiddie porn, and teen rape. Democrats are more likely to search for recycling, environmentally benign products, bicycles, hiking boots, flax, hemp, organic products, sustanable agriculture, solar energy,
banned books, condoms, cunnilingus, g-spot, erotic art, bondage safety, polyamory, nudist resorts, multiple orgasms, and erotic massage. Even when searching for similar topics, how you word your search can reveal political bias: "gay rights" vs. "homosexual agenda" or "anal sex lubricant" vs. "britney spears ass rape".
google also correlates the
timing of searches with things mentioned on
national TV networks using closed captioning decoders to tell whether users are watching, for example, the Christian Broadcasting Network or PBS.
Because so many people search for porn, google is able to learn a lot about their sexual tastes. For googlematch users who don't search for porn,
google makes educated guesses based on the preferences of other users with otherwise similar search habits.
Because googlematch is based on analysing your past searching habits, it differs from most other services offered by the company in that there is no need to enter a search query. We already know what you want. When you visit the site, you are simply asked to choose a pseudonym and then immediately presented the opportunity to chat anonymously with prospective matches who are currently online.
This sounds a tad ridiculous.... like the article was written by someone who realy expects nanotechnology to erupt into common usage instantaneously. I am aware of the strength of nanotubes and look forward to a space elevator as much as the next guy, but there are some scenarios the writer gives that are extremely unlikely, such as the nanobots landing on mars by just forming an aerodynamic shield, or slithering like a snake. both of those actions would cause immense amounts of stress on the nanobots, and leaves too much room for error. The shuttle has how many million parts? Would we really create something with thousands of times more moving parts and expect it to be fail-safe? I like to dream about a lot of stuff. I want to see people on Mars before I die. But just sending a lump of nanobots into Mars' atmosphere? Not likely
You didn't really read the articles, did you?
They specifically described the nanobots climbing inside a heat sheild capsule for entry but reemerging and forming a parasail for landing.
They specifically mentioned that the systems are
self repairing. The tetrahedrons have the ability to connect and disconnect from adjacent tetrahedrons which allows the "organism" to form more complex shapes. So, if one fails, the "organism" can simply spit it out and walk a new one into its place or have its neighbors take up the slack. You are right that stresses will be considerable but bear in mind that you gain the advantages of the liliputian effect, nanotubes, etc. When I lift a ten pound weight with my arm, the stresses are quite high compared to a single cell but the weight is distributed over thousands of muscle cells. Single layer structures may be weak but multilayer laminated structures are much stronger. You can make rigid structures out of materials that appear quite flimsy. A piece of wood is composed of cells that individually are weak. A sheet of paper is week in compression
(except across its thickness) but if you take 500 sheets of paper and glue them together, you have something that withstands compression and bending in any direction. Also, look at a space truss roof (such as at the national air and space museum). And we are talking about a structure that can reorganize itself to withstand particular stresses or reduce them.
In fact, the fault tolerance of ANTS was cited as an advantage over systems such as the space shuttle. Unlike systems like the shuttle where you try to build three of every system for redundancy (and it often expands more than threefold - it takes six valves to replace one valve), the parts in ANTS are largely interchangable. So, if you have 25% extra cells,
you can lose one fifth of the cells in the organism - anywhere - and it can still function. Lose more than a fifth, and it may still be able to recast itself as a more petite version of the same system.
And since in many cases you don't need all the components of a system simultaneously, the system can reconfigure itself
into those components needed at a given time.
I can image the same swarm functioning as a space blimp to get most of the way out of orbit, as a parabolic antenna or solar sail enroute, as a glider or parachute on re-entry, and as a giant tread while moving around the surface.
There are also some novel possibilities I can imagine (may or may not work) that get around certain other problems by radically changing
the approach. Space shuttle tiles have to deal with horendous temperatures because the energy from reentry is absorbed quickly and converted to heat. But what if the swarm converted itself into a sparse mesh that gradually absorbed the energy over the course of 10 loops around the planet? Yes, the orbit would decay as the energy was lost but by turning into a glider of sorts it could keep itself aloft by aerodynamic rather than centrifical forces.
Perhaps one could even eliminate the need for a separate reentry capsule with heat shield.
Or, heat shields could be made up of large rigid components that can be joined together
The article appears to omit the Morrow Pivot II machine, circa 1985. Back in those days, laptops normally came with 3-1/2" floppy drives which were a major problem because they were virtually non-existant on desktop machines. This means you also needed to carry an external 5-1/4" drive to transfer data thus ruining the portability of your laptop. An example of just how un-portable laptop computers could be at that time was the Data General DG/One. A "usable" configuration of this machine included: the laptop, external AC adapter, external battery charger adapter (battery was charged inside the laptop but not from the AC adapter!), HUGE external 5-1/4 floppy drive, and maybe a separate AC adapter for the floppy drive.
You needed a suitcase to carry all that shit and could use up half a desk in seting it up (which was slow).
The Morrow Pivot II included one or two 5-1/4 floppy drives. Unlike the typical laptop, this machine was in a vertical configuration with a fold down keyboard. The only external component was a single AC adapter. Was a little top heavy for lap top use but worked fine on a desk or airplane tray table. There were two versions, the first of which did not have a full 25 line display. This was also sold as the Zenith Z-171
and the Osborne 3 appears to have a similar design.
While modern laptops don't share its design, it was the most practical machine until desktops embraced 3-1/2" floppies. The vertical configuration is still used by lunchbox computers, however. Lunchbox machines normally have a vertical configuration, tilt out LCD or plasma display, standard motherboard, standard hard drive/floppy/CD/DVD/tape drive bays, built in power supply, no battery, detachable keyboard, and full length ISA or PCI expansion slots and were handy when you needed a portable machine with the full power of a desktop including the ability to use specialized expansion cards. These are modern equivalents of the osborne one or other luggable computers but with flat panel displays
and standard components. Flat panel computers such as the I-opener also resemble the Pivot in some respects.
Sooo.. its ok to commit a crime and 'put down' someone that doesn't even know what is going on?
That's about like shooting out the tires of someone that didn't know the speed limit and went over 5MPH.. "well they had to be stopped"
No, that is a totally inaccurate analogy. Temporarily blocking zombie PCs does no permanent damage to the PCs and driving 5MPH over the speed limit is not the same as having actually caused harm. Another poster already gave a more accurate analogy of police damaging your vehicle if it was used to cause actual harm. Suppose you left your keys in the ignition in that case. The police are not liable to you for damage caused to your vehicle but the thief is liable for damage caused by the police in preventing further harm. You, however, may be liable for damages caused to others because of your negligence, particularly if the thief cannot be located.
If you lock your car and it is stolen, you are not liable but if you leave the keys in the car in an area where theft is likely and someone steals the car and gets in an accident, you could be held liable in some US states. An old study showed that 24% of stolen cars were involved in accidents. Police also have the right to temporarily impound the vehicle. If you
own a business that owns large trucks, you can be held liable for damages caused by those dangerous vehicles by those you allow to operate them.
The ethical principle here is that if you own a dangerous article, you have some responsibility
to prevent misuse of that article.
If you own a gun that you regularly leave around and a kid finds it and there is an accidental discharge but no one is killed, it would not be unreasonable for the police to confiscate the weapon until you presented a receipt for either a trigger-lock or a gun safe and attended a gun safety class.
If you leave your front door unlocked and someone enters your house and starts shooting at my house, I have a right to shoot back and I am not responsible for any resulting damage to your house.
There was the some discussion about blocking machines in the original proposal for identd,
a protocol that was designed to allow blocking with finer granularity (i.e. block individual users rather than machines).
The basic ethical concept is pushing the problem back towards those who have some direct or indirect control over the problem. While it is better to choose a solution that doesn't affect innocent customers of an irresponsible ISP, if no such solution is availible than it is better to penalize the customers of the irresponsible ISP than those of a responsible ISP. Likewise, it is better to penalize users who allow their machines to be used as zombies than innocent users (in this case spam recipients) who secure their machines. This is the basic principle behind things like the usenet death penalty and many DNS based blacklists.
It is also similar to the principle of fining companies who polute. Those who are affected by
the polution are not in a position to install pollution control devices.
Someone has reported that customers of responsible ISPs who are blocked by being zombied have a tendancy to penalize the responsible ISP by taking their business elsewhere. So, it may be necessary to fix this economic problem by having a blacklist of ISPs that do not block zombied PCs.
During phase in, email senders from blacklisted ISPs could have their emails delayed by 24 hours (with notification); eventually, they would be blocked outright. The 24 hour delay would also allow time for spam's to show up in spam databases making it easier to filter out the spams.
This would penalize users who patronize the irresponsible ISPs and create a financial disadvantage for those ISPs that compensates for the financial disadvantage imposed on responsible ISPs by users who are so irresponsible that they not only don't make an effort to secure their machines but then penalize ISPs who hold them accountable for their irresponsibility.
It is good that this study tried to eliminate the bias of independent co-factors but the bias of testing methodology remains.
Perhaps part of the problem is that the tests used are outdated. Perhaps students are learning different skills that the tests aren't testing.
First, they apparently only tested math and reading. So, the tests wouldn't show if the students had more total skills but less in that area. I remember many years ago when i was in school that although I did very well on standardized tests (usually 99th percentile) I still realized that the tests were very biased.
I noticed, for example, that one of my lower scores was on vocabulary in spite of the fact that I probably had a larger vocabulary than the other students who scored better. The reason was that they only appeared to test on the subset of vocabulary that they teach in schools. I had a huge technical vocabulary in computers, electronics, engineering, and scientific areas that were way outside the limited curriculum taught in schools. School tests test against the curriculum taught in schools and the particular way they are taught. This is true
in other areas, as well. They don't teach much philosophy in high school so having read the entire works of more modern philosophers Frederic Nietsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Betrand Russell, and Douglas Hofstadter
may not help you much on tests that focus on Plato and Socrates greatest hits. Tests also focused on your rote memorization of who said what (and then only if they were within the curriculum) rather than your ability to apply the concepts or your breadth of knowledge.
K-12 education is heavily biased towards ancient, deprecated works that do not reflect the progress made in the last few hundred years. School tests are also biased towards European and American culture so knowledge of the history and cultures of China, Nigeria, India, Brazil, and Indonesia counts for little.
Tests in math tested manual methods of solving problems while students may be learning to use a computer to solve the problems. Yes, students may be allowed to use a calculator now but where is the spreadsheet, symbolic math package, or C compiler. The concepts of math are still very important but when I was in school, the tests tested rote memorization of identities and the ability to use them to solve the exact type of problems given in homework assignments rather than your ability to apply them to new types of problems. And there were time penalties that counted against you if instead of memorizing many of the identities you re-derived them as needed (actually demonstrating greater math skill) while taking the test. And, of course, the tests in math and reading don't measure how much high school students have learned about sex:-)
Now, it would not suprise me at all if the use of computers in schools and at home as educational tools failed to user their educational potential effectively. If computers are used as baby-sitting tools by lazy teachers, they aren't going to be effective.
If they are just used for rote memorization drills, for example, they are being used in ways that just exacerbate pre-existing flaws in the educational system. Classes in how to use computers are useful for surviving in the modern world but won't show up in studies that only cover math and reading; however, computers could be used effectively to assist in teaching many subjects.
Many students are highly motivated by human interaction and thus interacting with a machine
may be less motivating than interacting with a teacher or other students. In these cases, using the computer as a tool without taking away the human interaction is likely to improve motivation.
The use of gimmicks to hold the attention of students who are used to tv and video games has some value but can also waste a lot of time on
fluff. Home computers are frequently used to play non-educational games but there are games that are more educational. The game
c-r
Air America Radio
offers progressive talk radio in regressive streaming/file formats so you would need conversion utilities such as
realcap
; specify the show start time via a cron job and the duration as a command line parameter.
Use their
contact form
to ask them to support sensible streaming formats such as shoutcast/icecast/peercast instead of forcing regressive users to use regressive formats and thus support the regressive companies behind them.
However, y'all never tire of telling us how you live in the greatest democracy on earth, so, why do you all vote republicrat? or not vote at all?
The people here who object to these kinds of stupid laws probably aren't the same people who claim the US is the greatest democracy on earth; a substantial number would even point out that we don't live in a democracy at all.
I don't know about the congressional elections but in the last two presidential elections the public has NOT elected the Bush regime. In 2000, Bush lost the popular vote by
543987
votes, not even counting vote tampering, yet won the electoral vote. In the 2004 election, there is considerable evidence of tampering and
exit polls show that kerry was the real winner of the election.
As much as I would prefer to vote for an independent candidate, such votes are unfortunately entirely thrown away except in elections that are not remotely close. In
the 2000 election, Gore would probably have had enough electoral votes to win if those people
who voted for Nader (all of who would have prefered Gore over Bush) had not wasted their votes on Nader or if we had a statistically valid method of voting such as
instant runoff voting
.
Our existing method of counting votes (even when the votes are actually counted in compliance with the law and without the electoral college fiasco) is inherently inaccurate when there are more than two parties.
Before I knew about instant runoff elections, I had a different proposal that was better than the current system but not as good as instant runoff.
Instead of giving each person a single vote for a candidate, give them one vote for or against.
I.E. Instead of voting for Kerry, you could vote against Bush. Which far more accurately reflects what many people are trying to do in the voting booths - we vote against the most evil candidate not for the best one. This system, however, does have the possibility of electing spurious independent candidates. Imagine Dubya getting negative ten million votes, Kerry getting negative 5 million votes, the green party getting negative 1 million votes, and write in candidate Bob Nobody winning the election with positive 3 votes.
The book
Archimedes' Revenge
has an interesting chapter on game theory and voting as well as
the Alabama Paradox
.
What we need in this country for the presidential elections is
Instant runoff elections
It most be provable whether or not votes are counted correctly.
Electronic voting machines that give a receipt for every vote. Each receipt would have a unique (but not sequential or tied to voter identity) serial number. When the election results are tallied, the serial numbers of every vote counted would be listed in a file availible for public download. Watchdog organizations would let people log into their websites and check that their vote was counted. Ideally, the receipt would be printed in triplicate (with the ability to identify which copy was which) in human and machine readable form. The first copy stays on a roll inside the voting machine for recounts.
The voter takes home the second copy. And the voter takes the third copy and drops it anonymously in the box maintained outside the polling place by the Watchdog group of their choice. If voters are worried about being accosted by thugs outside the poling place, they can discard both of their receipts into the trash or watchdog bins.
David Chaum's cryptographically obfuscated receipt system
provides more security against people seeing your receipt but is more confusing overall.
Better yet, let's just throw thousands of these bags in the ocean and create an underwater city instantaneously!
Excess water would probably yield very poor quality concrete and ocean currents would probably wash the concrete away before it set. Also, the baloons would need to be well anchored or they would float to the surface.
Another technique for this (although not as quick)
is to just deploy a metal mesh (think window screen size). Then you apply electricity to the mesh and the minerals in sea water acrete onto the structure. This technique was described in
article in the Mother Earth News
25 years ago although it apparently wasn't pursued enough. More recently,
this technique has been used to
restore coral reefs
and one group plans to use it to
create an underwater habitat
.
There is some
research at Standford
and a
Wikipedia entry
.
Apparently, there is some confusion about how much energy is needed to produce such structures and a structure similar in size to the inflatable one would probably use around $500 worth of electricty.
I have kept virtually all the email I have ever received in the last 25 years. They are almost all stored in unix mbox format. I also keep logs of all IM conversations in gaim or gabber formats.
No email application that uses non-standard formats has been allowed to touch my email for about the last 20 years. Before that, I saved mail in plain text format, writing utilities to
convert proprietary formats (such as novel and corvus) as needed. Online mail systems such as compuserve or MCI mail were downloaded in some flavor of ASCII. Mail much older than ten years ago is disorganized and on floppies. I think I lost some mail about 10 years ago when a backup across the net failed. Mail since then is saved in subdirectories of my mail folder. When I upgrade computers, the old mail tree is brought over as is or relegated to a subdirectory.
mbox and maildirs have been the defacto standard for the last three decades and virtually all decent mail software uses some variation of those. The mbox file format has been used on unix systems since 1975 and was adopted on other operating systems as those gained internet access. Both formats are basically the mail message in industry standard RFC-822 format. In mbox, the messages are concatenated separated by ">From" lines and (since 1995) any line starting with "From", ">From", ">>>From" is changed to ">>From" has a ">" prepended so you can accurately revert to the original. In maildir, each message is stored in a separate numbered file in a subdirectory. There are some variations on mbox. One is to add a bunch of nulls before the ">from" line. Another is to add a Content-length: header.
Some programs add a dummy message at the begining of the mailbox to store application specific data.
Programs may add their own proprietary indexes in separate files. Many programs use standard mbox format including: PC-NFS, unix mail, elm, pine, pc-pine, netscape, mozilla, thunderbird, pegasus, Mac OS X mail, and many others.
The primary problems with mbox format are that it is slow to delete a message in the middle of a large file and that some programs have not handled lines beginning with ">From" properly. Each folder is stored in a separate mbox file or maildir. Mime digests are somewhat similar to
mbox format. However, they have an extra RFC-822 header at the begining and use a separator line defined in the file header which normally starts with some number of dashes instead of ">From" lines.
If you have any programs that use non-standard formats, the most sensible thing is to ditch them and if you are prevented from doing that by a pointy-haired boss then install a gateway or find or write a conversion utility.
There are tools out there such as imap-utils that can save pop3 or imap mail to mbox format (many mail clients can also do this), convert maildirs to mbox format, etc. There are tools availible to convert proprietary formats such as microsoft outbreak, outbreak express, and eudora into mbox files.
Web mail services can be problematic. Choose one that gives you adequate disk space (so you don't need to delete before backing up) and allows you to retreive your mailboxes via IMAP or allows mailbox downloads in a sensible format.
There's a gender difference in teaching though. Men tend to get called on more than women in classes, and also tend to get taken more seriously than women, all the way back into elementary schools, by both male and female teachers.
Many years ago there was an interesting news item about a (male) teacher who won an award for combatting gender bias in teaching. Apparently, the discrimination you mention isn't necessarily the result of gender bias by the teachers. He observed that the girls in the class were called on less because they were slower to raise their hands. It was revealed that they took longer to consider the subject before answering. The solution was trivial and general neutral. He simply waited longer before calling on students
allowing the straglers to raise their hands and then picked students more or less at random rather than first come first served. This not only led to better participation by girls but he also discovered that the comments and questions by both genders were more intelligent. Fast answers are rarely good answers. It is unfortunate that this simple discovery has not had more influence on teachers.
That's why you should have a flat tax with absolutely no deductions at all. Start with 25% and work your way from there.
A 25 percent flat tax rate would break the backs of poorer people. Here is the percentage of adjusted gross income that people pay in federal income taxes (source, IRS, 2003 figures:
AGI TAX/AGI TI/AGI
(dollars) (percent)(precent)
0 to 15000 2.8 19.2
15000 to 30000 4.3 40.6
30000 to 50000 7.3 58.9
50000 to 100000 10 68.2
100000 to 200000 14.7 75
200000 and up 24.2 87.7
AGI = Adjusted gross income
TI = Taxable income
TAX = federal income tax paid
This does not include social security, state tax, sales tax, and property tax. It does not reflect loopholes that allow the reduction of adjusted gross income. These are not marginal tax rates; these numbers are calculated by dividing the total amount of income reported or tax paid in those tax brackets by the number of returns in the same bracket and so they reflect the average incomes and federal income taxes paid by those in those brackets.
Currently, the biggest chunk of money comes from those making over 200K per year. A 25 percent flat rate would move the burden down onto lower income groups with those making 50K to 100K contributing the most absolute dollars and with the poverty level group (
These figures do not include social security which is 7.5% employee contribution or 15% self employed on the first 90K or so of income. The rich pay very little in social security as a percentage but those making less than 50K pay more social security than income tax. If you include social security at 15% (because the employer also pays half and this reduces wages) the federal income tax actualy comes much closer to a flat rate tax with the poor paying about 16 percent and the rich paying about 25 percent of AGI.
The idea of eliminating all deductions and credits has some serious problems. Many deductions exist for a reason. Small businesses that don't file separate returns must be able to credit cost of goods sold and other expenses; otherwise, it would be the equivalent of taxing an employee on their share of their employers gross income rather than on their salaries. Catastrophic health costs need to be deductable. Uncollectable bad debts on which you have already paid taxes need to be deductable; otherwise you are paying taxes on money you never made. Eliminating charitable deductions would have serious repurcussions.
Individual income tax deductions actually favor those making less money.
Deductions and tax credits and taxes levied on particular items can actually be a good way of implementing social policy. In many cases it makes much more sense to tax something rather than ban it outright. Asbestos causes cancer but eliminating it entirely can be a real problem in applications that have no viable substitutes; so instead of banning it, you could tax the hell out of it and let the market work to eliminate it where it can be eliminated. Providing deductions for those who donate to non-profits that provide useful social services costs less than the government providing those services. Deductions and tax credits for alternative energy encourage essential spending in those areas and are offset by reduced need to spend money on environmentmental cleanup, health care, and the military.
So the rich appear to pay more taxes than many believe. I think they should pay even more.
The rich are able to bully others out of their fair share of income. A progressive tax is a way of partially correcting inequities in our economic system. Should everyone make the same amount? No. But do those who make over 200K per year (this tax bracket averages 1.3 million per year)
actually contribute that much more to society than those making less? No. Most of them contribute far less.
One random example of bullying: when you apply for a job, your employer will bully you into r
Furthermore, people have large collections of DVD. Why I want to wait even a few minutes to download something when I can just stick it in my DVD player. More likely, by the time that DVDs take a few minutes to download, I will have my entire DVD collection sitting on a massive harddrive in a media jukebox anyways (provided some corperation doesn't make that illegal, anyways) and I can watch on demand, just like downloading. Except I don't have to pay extra bandwidth fees (if applicable) or anyone else any money who wanted to charge per viewing (since they can).
Nope. DVDs are slower than broadband.
You have to drive down to the store to buy or rent the DVD or order it from amazon, netflix, etc. With broadband, you would be able to get
the bits within about an hour if you want to watch it asap (otherwise, you could select a lower priority download that arrives by the next day). You could even start watching the movie before it finishes downloading.
Then you store the bits
on your hard drive "jukebox" or burn a DVD.
Technically speaking, broadband delivery can work quite nicely once internet capacity grows a bit. It is a question of whether they kill it with obnoxious DRM.
It currently takes me about 1 day to get a movie from netflix and 2-3 to send it back. Add in some throttling and you are limited to about 3 movies per week (on the 3 at a time plan). Broadband delivery could significantly improve that, once broadband speeds are more reasonable.
To make broadband video purchases/rentals appealing would require:
DRM for rentals ONLY. And it must be
inobtrusive, including players for all OSes
and support for all desktop boxes. Needs to work with open source players subject to the restriction that the players can't be distributed with DRM bypassing code.
As an alternative, lower quality versions (DivX) with no DRM at all would be availible for rental.
You must be able to play the movie as many times as you want during the rental period, without downloading it again. I.E. the bits must
be stored on your hard drive.
You must be able to transfer the movie
to as many devices as you want.
Rent to purchase. If you rent a movie and want to buy it, you can recycle the bits you already downloaded. Once you pay, the DRM is
stripped off and the movie is stored unencrypted.
This assumes rental and purchase versions are same quality.
You must be able to easily burn the bits
to a DVD if you want to do so.
You must be able to transfer the bits to as
many devices as you want.
If your copy is lost and you haven't burned it to DVD, you must be able to download it again
without paying to buy the movie again (though a small charge for bandwidth may be reasonable).
You should be able to download your entire collection again in one step. This means there
must be a permanent record of your license on the
server end.
The quality needs to be comparable to DVD for purchased movies
The cost must be less than the cost of a DVD.
Downloads must include all special features.
You must get cover art, inserts, etc. in formats suitable for printing and online viewing.
You must get a cryptographically signed proof of purchase as a separate file or be able to extract it to a separate file that can be easily archived.
You must be able to make fair use copies.
You must be able to transfer your license
Copies of movies may contain individual watermarks to aid tracking pirates. Someone else distributing your copy does not prove they didn't steal your copy but it does help track down repeat offenders.
DRM needs to be breakable by anyone sophisticated enough to patch and recompile an open source player, but players may
That would be like passing a law that makes it illegal for drug dealers to sell without a license.
Actually, that is almost exactly how the federal government
banned marijuana in 1937.
The government required you to purchase tax stamps for marijuana and required doctors to have a special license to prescribe it. Thing was,
they refused to sell the stamps or issue the licenses so you faced stiff penalties (now increased to up to life in prison) for not complying with a law the government would let you comply with.
As of the fall, Mobility was still being worked on. Certainly no hardware available. So I still wonder how they are going to do this. Maybe just don't intend to deploy all that soon.
Built in mobility support would only be needed if peoples laptops were connecting directly to the fixed routers.
I imagine what they will do is have 802.11G to WiMax routers on the train and use MobileIP or NEMO or custom software to allow those routers to switch between fixed routers. The fixed routers and the train itself will probably have directional antennas to maximize the distance between fixed routers although they will need less directional antennas and routers spaced closer together on curved sections of track. The train may have more than one antenna (with its own transciever) with varying directionality so it can acheive maximum distance on straight sections of track and still see the fixed router on curved sections. They probably have fiber running the length of the track (many railroads already have this for signaling and other purposes) which they can use to connect the fixed routers to the internet. It might also be possible to use a continous dipole along the track with a diapole on top of the train transmitting a very week signal over a long distance (though signal strength may not be anywhere close to uniform along the length of the dipole). The router could also have a squid proxy to conserve upstream bandwidth though they may not have enough users on the train for this to be benificial
As an added benifit to the railroad, they could transmit GPS data and telemetry over the connection as well as send signals from dispatch telling the train to modify its speed so it doesn't have to stop at signals.
Slashdot Mirror
The lack of support in the US is likely due to the unethical bundling agreements with microsoft. One way to provide a reasonable degree of support without selling machines preinstalled is to publish highly detailed installation instructions. for a few distributions. I log machine installations in such a way that you can practically cut and paste the log into a shell prompt and duplicate the install. Only the occasional reboot or a $%@#$% interactive install program prevents running the entire log as a shell script. All file edits are recorded using diff/patch, sed, cat, etc so you have an exact way to reproduce the changes.
That way, you are covered on your first install, reinstalls, and have a good head start on upgrades. And, this way you don't have to use their configuration. You can partition your hard drive to your specifications, for example. But you don't need to go searching for drivers to download or puzzle out how to install them.
This approach doesn't work very well for grandma but it will work for power users who may be new to linux as well as those people who normally use linux. And it would be a major selling point to linux people if the installation instructions are on the HP web site and they can view them before they even buy the machine.
The link above includes an example for an older HP notebook.
Given that you say you only have access to five lines of the log data, your assesment of the situation is suspect. You need a lot more data to determine if wget is being used malevalently.
Oh, and wget retreiving the same page can be caused by a number of things besides being used as a DOS attack. Suppose, for example, there is a persistent network error (such as ICMP filtering breaking path MTU discovery). That will cause wget to retry the transfer many times. Or perhaps (based on the Konquerer problems reported earlier) wget was getting some sort of "Temporary Error: browser not recognized" from the server. An error in a script intended to perform some other function such as mirroring can degenerate into fetching the same page. Someone might have even written a script to download your home page at regular intervals with the intent of seeing exactly what changes were made exactly when. The wgets might have had the same IP address but not even come from the same machine if the IP address turns out to be a cache on a large network. The cache could even use wget as its retreival mechanism. Or, more likely, is used by a web to email gateway (of the old fashioned sort that allows email only users to retrieve web pages) or a cell phone gateway. Sometimes wget is also used to get messages into web logs after mail to webmaster bounces. while /bin/true; do
wget -O /dev/null http://www.example.com/your_site_is_handicapped_in accessable.html ;
sleep 1;
done
Which has the amusing effect that when they look at the weekly/monthly web logs, the #1 ranked page on the site is a criticism. Waste of bandwidth, yes, but hardly a DoS attack - rather a retaliation to the webmaster's denial of service through incomptence.
Also, sometimes manual wget users load the same page more than once when testing commands such as "wget -O - http://www.example.com/ | fgrep -i HREF | sed ..." while writing a script to extract urls from a site. Or, it could be that there were a grand total of five uses of wget and that your ignoramous publisher didn't know what wget was, googled on it and DoS and found that some crude DoS scripts use wget and was oblivious to its legitimate uses.
So, 5 lines in the log show a tool that is occasionally used for DoS attacks but usually used for other things and he concludes that is proof of an attack. Kitchen knives are occassionally used to commit murder, therefore existence of kitchen knives is proof of intent to murder.
I also find the eudora=autourl very odd. Looks like the web link was being distributed by email and got corrupted. Some SPAM filters may filter email by checking the spammyness of any linked-to web sites. wget could be used for the retrieval portion. In that case, the wgets would just indicate that people were bitching about your site by email.
Not to mention the fact that your publisher was a horses ass. After claiming there was a DoS attack (which he described as something like the most massive DoS attack against a publisher in history), he may have been to embarassed to admit otherwise and may have fabricated a few records as "evidence". If he had given you the complete web log five days earlier, I might be more inclined to believe it. But saying, in essence, "on the basis of five whole lines from a web log provided to me by someone who has just proved he is ethically impaired, I conclude that there is some truth to the claims" just doesn't wash. Not that it would take much to convince me that someone launched a trivial DoS attack.
Kudo's for resigning, though. Good luck finding a new gig. Maybe even one that pays.
Earth to Raisins: Conservatives don't talk to exit pollsters as often as liberals do.
Actually, participation in exit polls is higher in republican districts than democratic ones.
Yea. You can change your mind and vote for the guy who is leading and win big bucks! No wait, there is no reward for voting the winner...guess your analogy doesn't work.
You underestimate the herd instinct and peoples pathetic desires to affiliate themselves with a winning team or brand. How many people do you see wearing shirts with "Abercrombe" or "Tommy" in big bold letters across the breasts? These pathetic people have actually paid money to become a billboard for the brand in the hope that being associated with a successful brand will make them seem like winners. If your candidate wins, you get to take part in celebrations that night - never mind that you chose that candidate because you thought they would win not because they should win. If you vote for the winning candidate, than you get to "fit in" with the majority of the population rather than a minority.
On the flip side, however, people who weren't going to vote because they thought their candidate would get enough votes anyway may turn out if early results show the opponent getting more votes.
I think this does a pretty good job of explaining why exit polls resulted in such a poor estimate of election results.
That report has been discredited.
I didn't have time to thorougly study the patent but besides looking like it is an invalid patent, it also looks like there may be some gaping holes allowing other implementations that are better than the pattented version.
It looks like they are describing a version where variables modified during a try block do not retain their new values unless the entire block succeeds. Either that or they are very ineptly including the normal stack arrangement in their patent claim as if it were part of the "invention" rather than the environment where the invention is used.
The patent refers to moving data on and off the stack using push and pop CPU instructions (not merely push and pop mechanisms). There are other ways to move data on and off the stack. The stack pointer can be moved by arithmetic and the data can be moved by byte/word/block copy operations. Given the amount of data they are putting there, push and pop are probably an inefficient way to do that.
A significant portion of the patent seems to deal with storing the state of all local variables on the stack and then restoring them if the __try block fails. This is actually a pretty silly way to implement this feature unless you DO NOT have the ability to modify the compiler code and are trying to code around compiler limitations. But an alternative and more sensible implementation is copy in, copy out. Instead of saving a copy to be restored later, each __try block has its own private copies of variables and the compiler copies in only those variables used (and only those written to) in the block when the block is invoked and then only copies them back out to the parent block if the block succeeds. Very similar to an ADA "in out" function parameter. Copy in/copy out vs. save restore appears to be enough to stay clear of the relevant sections of the patent and even copying only those variables which can actually be modified by the sub block appears to be enough to break this section (a patent on saving "all" variables does not affect code saving only those variables that are modified.
Using the existing processor call/return stack to store the data breaks the patent because the patent stipulates that the variables must be stored in a stack allocated specifically for the purpose of saving and restoring variables. The processor return stack was previously allocated for a different purpose, namely storing return addresses and is already being used as storage space for the local variables themselves. The patent says to allocate space for a stack not to allocate space within an already allocated stack. Again, this is a method you would use if you were trying to retrofit this capability into an unmodified compiler (and even then, you could even declare a variable save_regs) in your own code or with a pre-processing compiler front end.
A typo where "paid" was used instead of "said" could invalidate another section. And, of course, this section has prior art going back decades.
patent claims are rather specific about where in a stack frame certain exception information is to be stored - there is no need to duplciate that order.
Just because the OS has a function call you can invoke in each function to register the location of the exception record doesn't mean you need to call it. You can simply create one function that is registered with the OS that in turn knows to look in a global variable for a pointer to the latest record and does the unwinding itself. The variable can be restored on exit. Or you put the information at a fixed offset from the frame pointer. No need for system call overhead with each function or try block.
there is probably a lot of prior art in early ADA compilers (circa 1982) which had compiler supported exception handling long before C++.
The kid just might be psychic. Kids often are. Perhaps autistic kids are more in touch with that stuff than normal kids. I predicted some scary shit when was a kid, according to my parents.
Neither kids nor adults have psychic abilities. If you think you can prove otherwise, feel free to embarass yourself by trying to claim the Million Dollar Prize either for yourself or the neighborhood kid or anyone else with purported psychic abilities.
The ability to predict when a particular public service commercial is going to occur can be explained simply by pattern recognition. There is no need to resort to paranormal bullshit. Scheduling of TV commercials, whether done manually or by hand, is subject to a variety of constraints and conventions that will impose patterns. Public service commercials, for example, are often shorter than standard commercials so they may be grouped with other non-standard length commercials. A 15 second public service announcement is likely to be combined with another 15 second announcement or an odd length paid advertisement. And they might even be spliced on the same video tape to reduce the work queueing them up. And they are likely to be concentrated during less popular (with advertisers) shows. Since they are filler material, they may be more likely to come last. Scheduling algorithms may put a particular ad last if it is a lower priority (not paid, already had most of its allocated airings, has fewer restrictions on what shows it can be placed on, etc). An ad with a slightly lower priority could be fairly consistently aired right after an ad with a slightly higher priority. Public service ads may be shown in round-robin fashion which can lead to one ad being shown after another ad each time. In fact, ads of equal priority may, intentionally or otherwise, tend to be shown in a round robin sequence to prevent them from being shown back to back, getting too annoying, or simply because putting the most recently seen commercial at the bottom of the deck minimizes the chances of you being left at the end of the month showing the same commercial 15 times almost back to back because the others used up their quotas. Patterns may exist beyond just the sequence of consequtive ads during one gap. During the airing of an episode of the show, first you are likely to see the national ads, then the paid local advertisments that have reserved a particular time during a particular episode of a particular show. Next ones that have reserved a non-specific time withing a particular show. Next, one would expect to see low budget local remnant ads that have paid for a up to a certain number of showings but have little or no constraints on when they air. The lowest budget ads are likely to come last. Then the public service advertisements. So if the last filler commercial in the previous commercial break was for Honest Al's No-credit used cars (and Al negotiated the lowest rate for his remainder ads), then the filler at the end of the next time slot is likely to be a public service ad.
10% of people with Autism are autistic savants who exhibit unusual skills. And an obsession with routine is very common among people with autism. I.E. patterns are very important to an autistic. Consider the following quotes from the movie Rain Main
The channel bank is one option for handling many ports on asterisk. However, channel banks are old technology and the last I checked fairly expensive and are not scalable in a fine grain. Great if you want hundreds of ports but if you need about 24 lines now, what happens when you need 25? You need to shell out another $2400 for another channel bank plus more for another T1 card.
It looks like the SPA-3000 could be adapted to support a PBX using a fairly large number of lines using ethernet rather than T1 to connect to the PBX box. First, you probably want to deal with some packaging issues. One approach would be to cut a strip of aluminum 2 inches longer than the SPA-3000 and glue it using silicone rubber to the side of the plastic case. With a couple mounting holes drilled, you now have a way to easily screw dozens of these verticaly on edge to a sheet of plywood on the wall (which is a typical part of any large phone installation). Density would probably be around 24 lines per square foot. As an alternative, you may want to discard the case entirely. This can save space and improve cooling but check first if the case has a metalic coating to supress EMI. Power supply is another issue. Dozens of wall cubes are a pain. You may be able to run a bunch of units off a single 5V 30A supply for a couple hundred extra bucks. Requires soldering some cables, however.
The cost per port of the SPA-3000 is under half the cost per port of the talkswitch PBX someone else mentioned and it is scalable in one line increments not 4+8 line increments and you get one trunk port for every station port with the SPA-3000. Also, you have more flexibility with the SPA-3000 because you can locate it either in the phone closet or near the phone. And, you can deploy the same equipment in peoples homes. However, you need to do a little extra mechanical/ electrical work with the SPA-3000. Also, the talkswitch is heavy on analog station ports and low on trunk ports which is a traditional PBX configuration but could be quite backwards if you are going to use VoIP phones.
Now the VoIP solution can potentially have a disadvantage over the T1 solution in that it may be even less suitable to plug a modem into than a channel bank port. If you can disable compression entirely, it should be no worse. But neither configuration will support a 56K modem unless your trunk lines to the central office are digital because of the extra A/D and D/A conversions to get through the PBX. But, if you have a broadband connection anyway, this isn't the same kind of issue it once was though modems may still be needed for certain applications.
The individual VoIP adapter has another possible advantage in terms of lightning protection (although the arrestor found inside the unit itself is probably not up to snuff). Each port is separate from the hub by two 1500V isolation barriers and from other ports and from the PBX by four 1500V isolation barriers. Not counting the isolation barrier in the phone line interface itself. You still want at least one good lightning arrester on each external phone line and if you have reason to be really paranoid you will put one on the ethernet as well. For better protection, put one good lightning arrestor on each exteral line where the phone line enters the premises and another at the phone closet (with a separate ground from other equipment) separated by a good length of wire; two arrestors separated by an impedence work better than one by itself.
Of course, if you use VoIP phones, you need a lot fewer phone ports and if you are using VoIP long distance you may need fewer trunk ports. If you are using a talkswitch PBX primarily for trunk ports, its cost per port doubles to about $450 per port.
The original posting here on slashdot was also about HOME pbx's where scalabity to small systems and the ability to deploy gradually is more important. But for many small businesses, being able to add 1 line at a time for $100 instead of 4trunk+8station lines for $1800 (talkswitch) or 24 lines (either type, usually predetermined rather than switchable) for around $2400.
This elevator looks too small to accomodate a wheel chair. So, the only people who can use it are those who don't need it.
For the price of this elevator, you could install a full size elevator. I have used one elevator that I am told cost $30,000 to install and that included boring a vertical shaft and horizontal tunnel through the side of a mountain. For considerably less cost, you could build a single person elevator.
They claim that the elevator saves energy because it uses gravity on the descent. What they don't tell you is that it uses more than twice as much energy on the way up as a similarly sized elevator using the conventional counterweight design. A counterweight elevator only has to raise the weight of the occupants since the weight of the car is balanced out by the counterweight. Indeed, the counterweight might be as much as the weight of the car plus maximum occupancy load, in which case the elevator needs to use power to lower the car and only needs to release the brakes and overcome friction to raise. Futher, the inefficency of the vacuum pump could be considerable.
A hydraulic elevator of the size shown could also have been constructed using a cable or chain over a piston that travels half the distance as the elevator car (same design as used on many forklifts). This would be simpler, more reliable, and avoid the dynamic load problem described below. The design could be as compact and "portable" as the vacuum elevator.
Vacuum induced lift is a constant force rather than constant displacement technology. This is a very serious problem. When you step off the car, you can expect it to spring upwards. They probably hide this serious problem by making an elevator that can only serve two floors. At the top floor, you drive into a hard stop. At the bottom floor, you do not allow the door to open until the vacuum cylinder is fully vented. On a multifloor design, you could have a mechanical lock that engages before the door opens but then when the lock released there would be a sudden jolt if the passenger was not the same weight as the previous passenger (if any).
The large seals required and the fact that they must operate past doorways (unlike a hydraulic lift) will lead to significant maintenence problems.
This product looks to be pure gimmick. The technology used and other aspects of the design are totally inappropriate to the task.
What concerns me in that picture is what looks like exposed superinsulation material with no aluminum shell covering it around the propulsion stage. Seems rather susceptible to ice damage. Now that insulation is probably covering a tank that is strong but if you lose the insulation your fuel could boil off rather quickly. And if you can afford to have less fuel, you wouldn't be carrying it in the first place. And what about all the wires and plumbing on the outside of the tank that are not as strong as the tank itself.
Also, from what I can see from other pictures, it looks like the crew module is lacking an airlock. It would appear you have to use the entire back half of the crew module as an airlock. Or, in airline terms, the cockpit would remain pressurized while the passenger compartment would be depressurized. There does appear to be a full airlock between the two halves of the crew module. Also, it looks like the rear hatch is used to couple with the mission module which means that you can't even use back half of the crew module as an airlock when you have a mission module - the mission module itself needs to be used as an airlock if you wan't to go EVA. Or else you need to depressurize the cockpit when you want to step outside to fix something. Personallly, I would like to be able to step outside to fix something without wasting that much oxegen or having everyone have to change compartments or put their helmets on everytime I came back in for a different size wrench :-)
I agree with most of what you said. But I question your prediction that netflix will find a niche in rural america. I suspect that lackluster video will probably get most of that market share. But netflix should still do well. Netflix will appeal, instead, to the same people it does now - those who have non-mainstream tastes who will mostly be non-rural (though netflix will be popular with the more educated people in rural areas). And more unusual movies are a growth industry since DVD has made it feasible for movies to have a market even if they don't have enough mass appeal to get exposure on big screens. The gradual trend towards installing video projectors in theaters (where the UK is currently leading) and distribing movies digitally (much lower cost per screen) will also help that. Also, with digital projection, a theater can show a less publicized movie 2 nights a week for 7 weeks instead of 7 nights a week for two weeks and give time for word of mouth to spread. And the greater exposure in theaters will help boost DVD sales as well. The internet contributes to this trend by letting you interact with people you have more in common with than zip codes. When legal movie downloads become common the trend will get another boost. As independent and foreign films grow in popularity, Hollywood may try to cash in on name recognition with a steady stream of low budget sequels to popular movies.
Part of the reason I chose netflix is that not only do they have lots of obscure movies but they help you find movies you will like but haven't heard about through their system of letting you rate movies and then recommending movies based on those you liked.
Someone suggested that netflix would lose market share and have to reduce its selection to more popular movies. Not only do I not think they will need to do so, it would be a mistake. Popular titles (particularly new releases) are expensive for movie stores because they need to purchase large numbers of copies to meet peak demands and then the peak subsides and they are stuck with all those copies. Interest in the long-tail movies, however builds gradually. So, as long as you have a reasonable sized customer base, you may only need one or two copies of a more obscure movie but demand will be pretty steady. Also, the long-tail is their reason de etre. And, the long tail doesn't cost that much. One copy each of 30,000 movies at $25 average price is $750,000. 3 million subscribers at $18 (or more) a month is $54 million dollars a month. 3 million subscribers (on the 3 at a time plan will have 9 million disks checked out at any one time. Thus, a movie can be 300 times less popular than a popular movie and still be profitable.
Netflix isn't going to lose customers to lackluster. Instead, netflix will continue to grow while Lackluster may grow at an even faster rate. But netflix is already profitable so we know they can stay in business with their current size customer base. Intelligent viewers will continue to use netflix but the ignorant masses will flock to Lackluster.
What netflix might eventually do to boost market share is add porn, hentai, and other more explicit content. Lackluster is a conservative corporate "family" name and isn't likely to add porn. Netflix, however, could do so. But it will probably be an extra price option to offset the higher prices of porn movies. One of the things that keeps local video stores in business in many areas is that Lackluster is too timid to carry porn.
The downside of Netflix is that they need to be more honest about their policies. Unlimited rentals aren't. In practice, if you are on the 3 movies at a time plan you are effectively limited to about 3 movies per week. Netflix throttles your deliveries based on how many movies you rented in the past month. While they may not explicitly set a quota on individual users, they give users who have rented fewer movies higher priority and limit the total number of rentals per day at each distri
Google is pleased to announce the beta version of a new data service. The most revolutionary feature of the new service is that it eliminates the need to fill out time consuming questionaires.
What you search for can tell us a lot about you. google uses cookies to keep track of users of its search engine. Patterns of searches reveal a lot about the demographics and sexual preferences of google users. With our new googlelocal service, we are able to pinpoint users locations, allowing us to match you up with people in your area.
googlematch automatically chooses potential mates of the appropriate sex and orientation. The most difficult part was differentiated between straight women and gay men and straight men and lesbians. By analysing google searches versus time, googlematch can identify women by the 28 day cyclical nature of their queries. Whether a user prefers men or women is determined by using a bayesian filter, similar to that used to differentiate spam from legitimate email, on search queries.
googlematch can also match you up with someone that shares your political affiliation. Republicans are more likely than democrats to search for financial services, offshore asset protection accounts, stock ticker symbols, brooks brothers suits, religious goods, guns, jesus, scripture, tax loopholes, choir boys, kiddie porn, and teen rape. Democrats are more likely to search for recycling, environmentally benign products, bicycles, hiking boots, flax, hemp, organic products, sustanable agriculture, solar energy, banned books, condoms, cunnilingus, g-spot, erotic art, bondage safety, polyamory, nudist resorts, multiple orgasms, and erotic massage. Even when searching for similar topics, how you word your search can reveal political bias: "gay rights" vs. "homosexual agenda" or "anal sex lubricant" vs. "britney spears ass rape". google also correlates the timing of searches with things mentioned on national TV networks using closed captioning decoders to tell whether users are watching, for example, the Christian Broadcasting Network or PBS.
Because so many people search for porn, google is able to learn a lot about their sexual tastes. For googlematch users who don't search for porn, google makes educated guesses based on the preferences of other users with otherwise similar search habits.
Because googlematch is based on analysing your past searching habits, it differs from most other services offered by the company in that there is no need to enter a search query. We already know what you want. When you visit the site, you are simply asked to choose a pseudonym and then immediately presented the opportunity to chat anonymously with prospective matches who are currently online.
This sounds a tad ridiculous.... like the article was written by someone who realy expects nanotechnology to erupt into common usage instantaneously. I am aware of the strength of nanotubes and look forward to a space elevator as much as the next guy, but there are some scenarios the writer gives that are extremely unlikely, such as the nanobots landing on mars by just forming an aerodynamic shield, or slithering like a snake. both of those actions would cause immense amounts of stress on the nanobots, and leaves too much room for error. The shuttle has how many million parts? Would we really create something with thousands of times more moving parts and expect it to be fail-safe? I like to dream about a lot of stuff. I want to see people on Mars before I die. But just sending a lump of nanobots into Mars' atmosphere? Not likely
You didn't really read the articles, did you? They specifically described the nanobots climbing inside a heat sheild capsule for entry but reemerging and forming a parasail for landing. They specifically mentioned that the systems are self repairing. The tetrahedrons have the ability to connect and disconnect from adjacent tetrahedrons which allows the "organism" to form more complex shapes. So, if one fails, the "organism" can simply spit it out and walk a new one into its place or have its neighbors take up the slack. You are right that stresses will be considerable but bear in mind that you gain the advantages of the liliputian effect, nanotubes, etc. When I lift a ten pound weight with my arm, the stresses are quite high compared to a single cell but the weight is distributed over thousands of muscle cells. Single layer structures may be weak but multilayer laminated structures are much stronger. You can make rigid structures out of materials that appear quite flimsy. A piece of wood is composed of cells that individually are weak. A sheet of paper is week in compression (except across its thickness) but if you take 500 sheets of paper and glue them together, you have something that withstands compression and bending in any direction. Also, look at a space truss roof (such as at the national air and space museum). And we are talking about a structure that can reorganize itself to withstand particular stresses or reduce them.
In fact, the fault tolerance of ANTS was cited as an advantage over systems such as the space shuttle. Unlike systems like the shuttle where you try to build three of every system for redundancy (and it often expands more than threefold - it takes six valves to replace one valve), the parts in ANTS are largely interchangable. So, if you have 25% extra cells, you can lose one fifth of the cells in the organism - anywhere - and it can still function. Lose more than a fifth, and it may still be able to recast itself as a more petite version of the same system.
And since in many cases you don't need all the components of a system simultaneously, the system can reconfigure itself into those components needed at a given time. I can image the same swarm functioning as a space blimp to get most of the way out of orbit, as a parabolic antenna or solar sail enroute, as a glider or parachute on re-entry, and as a giant tread while moving around the surface. There are also some novel possibilities I can imagine (may or may not work) that get around certain other problems by radically changing the approach. Space shuttle tiles have to deal with horendous temperatures because the energy from reentry is absorbed quickly and converted to heat. But what if the swarm converted itself into a sparse mesh that gradually absorbed the energy over the course of 10 loops around the planet? Yes, the orbit would decay as the energy was lost but by turning into a glider of sorts it could keep itself aloft by aerodynamic rather than centrifical forces. Perhaps one could even eliminate the need for a separate reentry capsule with heat shield. Or, heat shields could be made up of large rigid components that can be joined together
The article appears to omit the Morrow Pivot II machine, circa 1985. Back in those days, laptops normally came with 3-1/2" floppy drives which were a major problem because they were virtually non-existant on desktop machines. This means you also needed to carry an external 5-1/4" drive to transfer data thus ruining the portability of your laptop. An example of just how un-portable laptop computers could be at that time was the Data General DG/One. A "usable" configuration of this machine included: the laptop, external AC adapter, external battery charger adapter (battery was charged inside the laptop but not from the AC adapter!), HUGE external 5-1/4 floppy drive, and maybe a separate AC adapter for the floppy drive. You needed a suitcase to carry all that shit and could use up half a desk in seting it up (which was slow). The Morrow Pivot II included one or two 5-1/4 floppy drives. Unlike the typical laptop, this machine was in a vertical configuration with a fold down keyboard. The only external component was a single AC adapter. Was a little top heavy for lap top use but worked fine on a desk or airplane tray table. There were two versions, the first of which did not have a full 25 line display. This was also sold as the Zenith Z-171 and the Osborne 3 appears to have a similar design. While modern laptops don't share its design, it was the most practical machine until desktops embraced 3-1/2" floppies. The vertical configuration is still used by lunchbox computers, however. Lunchbox machines normally have a vertical configuration, tilt out LCD or plasma display, standard motherboard, standard hard drive/floppy/CD/DVD/tape drive bays, built in power supply, no battery, detachable keyboard, and full length ISA or PCI expansion slots and were handy when you needed a portable machine with the full power of a desktop including the ability to use specialized expansion cards. These are modern equivalents of the osborne one or other luggable computers but with flat panel displays and standard components. Flat panel computers such as the I-opener also resemble the Pivot in some respects.
This comment has been cross-posted to wikipedia
Sooo.. its ok to commit a crime and 'put down' someone that doesn't even know what is going on? That's about like shooting out the tires of someone that didn't know the speed limit and went over 5MPH.. "well they had to be stopped"
No, that is a totally inaccurate analogy. Temporarily blocking zombie PCs does no permanent damage to the PCs and driving 5MPH over the speed limit is not the same as having actually caused harm. Another poster already gave a more accurate analogy of police damaging your vehicle if it was used to cause actual harm. Suppose you left your keys in the ignition in that case. The police are not liable to you for damage caused to your vehicle but the thief is liable for damage caused by the police in preventing further harm. You, however, may be liable for damages caused to others because of your negligence, particularly if the thief cannot be located.
If you lock your car and it is stolen, you are not liable but if you leave the keys in the car in an area where theft is likely and someone steals the car and gets in an accident, you could be held liable in some US states. An old study showed that 24% of stolen cars were involved in accidents. Police also have the right to temporarily impound the vehicle. If you own a business that owns large trucks, you can be held liable for damages caused by those dangerous vehicles by those you allow to operate them. The ethical principle here is that if you own a dangerous article, you have some responsibility to prevent misuse of that article.
If you own a gun that you regularly leave around and a kid finds it and there is an accidental discharge but no one is killed, it would not be unreasonable for the police to confiscate the weapon until you presented a receipt for either a trigger-lock or a gun safe and attended a gun safety class.
If you leave your front door unlocked and someone enters your house and starts shooting at my house, I have a right to shoot back and I am not responsible for any resulting damage to your house.
There was the some discussion about blocking machines in the original proposal for identd, a protocol that was designed to allow blocking with finer granularity (i.e. block individual users rather than machines). The basic ethical concept is pushing the problem back towards those who have some direct or indirect control over the problem. While it is better to choose a solution that doesn't affect innocent customers of an irresponsible ISP, if no such solution is availible than it is better to penalize the customers of the irresponsible ISP than those of a responsible ISP. Likewise, it is better to penalize users who allow their machines to be used as zombies than innocent users (in this case spam recipients) who secure their machines. This is the basic principle behind things like the usenet death penalty and many DNS based blacklists. It is also similar to the principle of fining companies who polute. Those who are affected by the polution are not in a position to install pollution control devices.
Someone has reported that customers of responsible ISPs who are blocked by being zombied have a tendancy to penalize the responsible ISP by taking their business elsewhere. So, it may be necessary to fix this economic problem by having a blacklist of ISPs that do not block zombied PCs. During phase in, email senders from blacklisted ISPs could have their emails delayed by 24 hours (with notification); eventually, they would be blocked outright. The 24 hour delay would also allow time for spam's to show up in spam databases making it easier to filter out the spams. This would penalize users who patronize the irresponsible ISPs and create a financial disadvantage for those ISPs that compensates for the financial disadvantage imposed on responsible ISPs by users who are so irresponsible that they not only don't make an effort to secure their machines but then penalize ISPs who hold them accountable for their irresponsibility.
Companies with unsec
It is good that this study tried to eliminate the bias of independent co-factors but the bias of testing methodology remains.
Perhaps part of the problem is that the tests used are outdated. Perhaps students are learning different skills that the tests aren't testing. First, they apparently only tested math and reading. So, the tests wouldn't show if the students had more total skills but less in that area. I remember many years ago when i was in school that although I did very well on standardized tests (usually 99th percentile) I still realized that the tests were very biased. I noticed, for example, that one of my lower scores was on vocabulary in spite of the fact that I probably had a larger vocabulary than the other students who scored better. The reason was that they only appeared to test on the subset of vocabulary that they teach in schools. I had a huge technical vocabulary in computers, electronics, engineering, and scientific areas that were way outside the limited curriculum taught in schools. School tests test against the curriculum taught in schools and the particular way they are taught. This is true in other areas, as well. They don't teach much philosophy in high school so having read the entire works of more modern philosophers Frederic Nietsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Betrand Russell, and Douglas Hofstadter may not help you much on tests that focus on Plato and Socrates greatest hits. Tests also focused on your rote memorization of who said what (and then only if they were within the curriculum) rather than your ability to apply the concepts or your breadth of knowledge. K-12 education is heavily biased towards ancient, deprecated works that do not reflect the progress made in the last few hundred years. School tests are also biased towards European and American culture so knowledge of the history and cultures of China, Nigeria, India, Brazil, and Indonesia counts for little. Tests in math tested manual methods of solving problems while students may be learning to use a computer to solve the problems. Yes, students may be allowed to use a calculator now but where is the spreadsheet, symbolic math package, or C compiler. The concepts of math are still very important but when I was in school, the tests tested rote memorization of identities and the ability to use them to solve the exact type of problems given in homework assignments rather than your ability to apply them to new types of problems. And there were time penalties that counted against you if instead of memorizing many of the identities you re-derived them as needed (actually demonstrating greater math skill) while taking the test. And, of course, the tests in math and reading don't measure how much high school students have learned about sex :-)
Now, it would not suprise me at all if the use of computers in schools and at home as educational tools failed to user their educational potential effectively. If computers are used as baby-sitting tools by lazy teachers, they aren't going to be effective. If they are just used for rote memorization drills, for example, they are being used in ways that just exacerbate pre-existing flaws in the educational system. Classes in how to use computers are useful for surviving in the modern world but won't show up in studies that only cover math and reading; however, computers could be used effectively to assist in teaching many subjects. Many students are highly motivated by human interaction and thus interacting with a machine may be less motivating than interacting with a teacher or other students. In these cases, using the computer as a tool without taking away the human interaction is likely to improve motivation. The use of gimmicks to hold the attention of students who are used to tv and video games has some value but can also waste a lot of time on fluff. Home computers are frequently used to play non-educational games but there are games that are more educational. The game c-r
Air America Radio offers progressive talk radio in regressive streaming/file formats so you would need conversion utilities such as realcap ; specify the show start time via a cron job and the duration as a command line parameter. Use their contact form to ask them to support sensible streaming formats such as shoutcast/icecast/peercast instead of forcing regressive users to use regressive formats and thus support the regressive companies behind them.
However, y'all never tire of telling us how you live in the greatest democracy on earth, so, why do you all vote republicrat? or not vote at all?
The people here who object to these kinds of stupid laws probably aren't the same people who claim the US is the greatest democracy on earth; a substantial number would even point out that we don't live in a democracy at all.
I don't know about the congressional elections but in the last two presidential elections the public has NOT elected the Bush regime. In 2000, Bush lost the popular vote by 543987 votes, not even counting vote tampering, yet won the electoral vote. In the 2004 election, there is considerable evidence of tampering and exit polls show that kerry was the real winner of the election.
As much as I would prefer to vote for an independent candidate, such votes are unfortunately entirely thrown away except in elections that are not remotely close. In the 2000 election, Gore would probably have had enough electoral votes to win if those people who voted for Nader (all of who would have prefered Gore over Bush) had not wasted their votes on Nader or if we had a statistically valid method of voting such as instant runoff voting . Our existing method of counting votes (even when the votes are actually counted in compliance with the law and without the electoral college fiasco) is inherently inaccurate when there are more than two parties.
Before I knew about instant runoff elections, I had a different proposal that was better than the current system but not as good as instant runoff. Instead of giving each person a single vote for a candidate, give them one vote for or against. I.E. Instead of voting for Kerry, you could vote against Bush. Which far more accurately reflects what many people are trying to do in the voting booths - we vote against the most evil candidate not for the best one. This system, however, does have the possibility of electing spurious independent candidates. Imagine Dubya getting negative ten million votes, Kerry getting negative 5 million votes, the green party getting negative 1 million votes, and write in candidate Bob Nobody winning the election with positive 3 votes. The book Archimedes' Revenge has an interesting chapter on game theory and voting as well as the Alabama Paradox .
What we need in this country for the presidential elections is
As for co
Better yet, let's just throw thousands of these bags in the ocean and create an underwater city instantaneously!
Excess water would probably yield very poor quality concrete and ocean currents would probably wash the concrete away before it set. Also, the baloons would need to be well anchored or they would float to the surface.
Another technique for this (although not as quick) is to just deploy a metal mesh (think window screen size). Then you apply electricity to the mesh and the minerals in sea water acrete onto the structure. This technique was described in article in the Mother Earth News 25 years ago although it apparently wasn't pursued enough. More recently, this technique has been used to restore coral reefs and one group plans to use it to create an underwater habitat .
There is some research at Standford and a Wikipedia entry . Apparently, there is some confusion about how much energy is needed to produce such structures and a structure similar in size to the inflatable one would probably use around $500 worth of electricty.
I have kept virtually all the email I have ever received in the last 25 years. They are almost all stored in unix mbox format. I also keep logs of all IM conversations in gaim or gabber formats.
No email application that uses non-standard formats has been allowed to touch my email for about the last 20 years. Before that, I saved mail in plain text format, writing utilities to convert proprietary formats (such as novel and corvus) as needed. Online mail systems such as compuserve or MCI mail were downloaded in some flavor of ASCII. Mail much older than ten years ago is disorganized and on floppies. I think I lost some mail about 10 years ago when a backup across the net failed. Mail since then is saved in subdirectories of my mail folder. When I upgrade computers, the old mail tree is brought over as is or relegated to a subdirectory.
mbox and maildirs have been the defacto standard for the last three decades and virtually all decent mail software uses some variation of those. The mbox file format has been used on unix systems since 1975 and was adopted on other operating systems as those gained internet access. Both formats are basically the mail message in industry standard RFC-822 format. In mbox, the messages are concatenated separated by ">From" lines and (since 1995) any line starting with "From", ">From", ">>>From" is changed to ">>From" has a ">" prepended so you can accurately revert to the original. In maildir, each message is stored in a separate numbered file in a subdirectory. There are some variations on mbox. One is to add a bunch of nulls before the ">from" line. Another is to add a Content-length: header. Some programs add a dummy message at the begining of the mailbox to store application specific data. Programs may add their own proprietary indexes in separate files. Many programs use standard mbox format including: PC-NFS, unix mail, elm, pine, pc-pine, netscape, mozilla, thunderbird, pegasus, Mac OS X mail, and many others. The primary problems with mbox format are that it is slow to delete a message in the middle of a large file and that some programs have not handled lines beginning with ">From" properly. Each folder is stored in a separate mbox file or maildir. Mime digests are somewhat similar to mbox format. However, they have an extra RFC-822 header at the begining and use a separator line defined in the file header which normally starts with some number of dashes instead of ">From" lines.
If you have any programs that use non-standard formats, the most sensible thing is to ditch them and if you are prevented from doing that by a pointy-haired boss then install a gateway or find or write a conversion utility.
There are tools out there such as imap-utils that can save pop3 or imap mail to mbox format (many mail clients can also do this), convert maildirs to mbox format, etc. There are tools availible to convert proprietary formats such as microsoft outbreak, outbreak express, and eudora into mbox files.
Web mail services can be problematic. Choose one that gives you adequate disk space (so you don't need to delete before backing up) and allows you to retreive your mailboxes via IMAP or allows mailbox downloads in a sensible format.
There's a gender difference in teaching though. Men tend to get called on more than women in classes, and also tend to get taken more seriously than women, all the way back into elementary schools, by both male and female teachers.
Many years ago there was an interesting news item about a (male) teacher who won an award for combatting gender bias in teaching. Apparently, the discrimination you mention isn't necessarily the result of gender bias by the teachers. He observed that the girls in the class were called on less because they were slower to raise their hands. It was revealed that they took longer to consider the subject before answering. The solution was trivial and general neutral. He simply waited longer before calling on students allowing the straglers to raise their hands and then picked students more or less at random rather than first come first served. This not only led to better participation by girls but he also discovered that the comments and questions by both genders were more intelligent. Fast answers are rarely good answers. It is unfortunate that this simple discovery has not had more influence on teachers.
That's why you should have a flat tax with absolutely no deductions at all. Start with 25% and work your way from there.
A 25 percent flat tax rate would break the backs of poorer people. Here is the percentage of adjusted gross income that people pay in federal income taxes (source, IRS, 2003 figures:
AGI TAX/AGI TI/AGI
(dollars) (percent)(precent)
0 to 15000 2.8 19.2
15000 to 30000 4.3 40.6
30000 to 50000 7.3 58.9
50000 to 100000 10 68.2
100000 to 200000 14.7 75
200000 and up 24.2 87.7
AGI = Adjusted gross income
TI = Taxable income
TAX = federal income tax paid This does not include social security, state tax, sales tax, and property tax. It does not reflect loopholes that allow the reduction of adjusted gross income. These are not marginal tax rates; these numbers are calculated by dividing the total amount of income reported or tax paid in those tax brackets by the number of returns in the same bracket and so they reflect the average incomes and federal income taxes paid by those in those brackets.
Currently, the biggest chunk of money comes from those making over 200K per year. A 25 percent flat rate would move the burden down onto lower income groups with those making 50K to 100K contributing the most absolute dollars and with the poverty level group (
These figures do not include social security which is 7.5% employee contribution or 15% self employed on the first 90K or so of income. The rich pay very little in social security as a percentage but those making less than 50K pay more social security than income tax. If you include social security at 15% (because the employer also pays half and this reduces wages) the federal income tax actualy comes much closer to a flat rate tax with the poor paying about 16 percent and the rich paying about 25 percent of AGI.
The idea of eliminating all deductions and credits has some serious problems. Many deductions exist for a reason. Small businesses that don't file separate returns must be able to credit cost of goods sold and other expenses; otherwise, it would be the equivalent of taxing an employee on their share of their employers gross income rather than on their salaries. Catastrophic health costs need to be deductable. Uncollectable bad debts on which you have already paid taxes need to be deductable; otherwise you are paying taxes on money you never made. Eliminating charitable deductions would have serious repurcussions. Individual income tax deductions actually favor those making less money.
Deductions and tax credits and taxes levied on particular items can actually be a good way of implementing social policy. In many cases it makes much more sense to tax something rather than ban it outright. Asbestos causes cancer but eliminating it entirely can be a real problem in applications that have no viable substitutes; so instead of banning it, you could tax the hell out of it and let the market work to eliminate it where it can be eliminated. Providing deductions for those who donate to non-profits that provide useful social services costs less than the government providing those services. Deductions and tax credits for alternative energy encourage essential spending in those areas and are offset by reduced need to spend money on environmentmental cleanup, health care, and the military.
So the rich appear to pay more taxes than many believe. I think they should pay even more. The rich are able to bully others out of their fair share of income. A progressive tax is a way of partially correcting inequities in our economic system. Should everyone make the same amount? No. But do those who make over 200K per year (this tax bracket averages 1.3 million per year) actually contribute that much more to society than those making less? No. Most of them contribute far less.
One random example of bullying: when you apply for a job, your employer will bully you into r
Furthermore, people have large collections of DVD. Why I want to wait even a few minutes to download something when I can just stick it in my DVD player. More likely, by the time that DVDs take a few minutes to download, I will have my entire DVD collection sitting on a massive harddrive in a media jukebox anyways (provided some corperation doesn't make that illegal, anyways) and I can watch on demand, just like downloading. Except I don't have to pay extra bandwidth fees (if applicable) or anyone else any money who wanted to charge per viewing (since they can).
Nope. DVDs are slower than broadband. You have to drive down to the store to buy or rent the DVD or order it from amazon, netflix, etc. With broadband, you would be able to get the bits within about an hour if you want to watch it asap (otherwise, you could select a lower priority download that arrives by the next day). You could even start watching the movie before it finishes downloading. Then you store the bits on your hard drive "jukebox" or burn a DVD. Technically speaking, broadband delivery can work quite nicely once internet capacity grows a bit. It is a question of whether they kill it with obnoxious DRM.
It currently takes me about 1 day to get a movie from netflix and 2-3 to send it back. Add in some throttling and you are limited to about 3 movies per week (on the 3 at a time plan). Broadband delivery could significantly improve that, once broadband speeds are more reasonable.
To make broadband video purchases/rentals appealing would require:
That would be like passing a law that makes it illegal for drug dealers to sell without a license.
Actually, that is almost exactly how the federal government banned marijuana in 1937. The government required you to purchase tax stamps for marijuana and required doctors to have a special license to prescribe it. Thing was, they refused to sell the stamps or issue the licenses so you faced stiff penalties (now increased to up to life in prison) for not complying with a law the government would let you comply with.
The best article I have found on the history of US drug laws is The History of the Non-Medical Use of Drugs in the United States .
Now in this case, I don't think Ohio is trying to outlaw ebay.
While this post directly pertains to its parent post, it is off the original topic so please use some discretion in replying.
As of the fall, Mobility was still being worked on. Certainly no hardware available. So I still wonder how they are going to do this. Maybe just don't intend to deploy all that soon.
Built in mobility support would only be needed if peoples laptops were connecting directly to the fixed routers. I imagine what they will do is have 802.11G to WiMax routers on the train and use MobileIP or NEMO or custom software to allow those routers to switch between fixed routers. The fixed routers and the train itself will probably have directional antennas to maximize the distance between fixed routers although they will need less directional antennas and routers spaced closer together on curved sections of track. The train may have more than one antenna (with its own transciever) with varying directionality so it can acheive maximum distance on straight sections of track and still see the fixed router on curved sections. They probably have fiber running the length of the track (many railroads already have this for signaling and other purposes) which they can use to connect the fixed routers to the internet. It might also be possible to use a continous dipole along the track with a diapole on top of the train transmitting a very week signal over a long distance (though signal strength may not be anywhere close to uniform along the length of the dipole). The router could also have a squid proxy to conserve upstream bandwidth though they may not have enough users on the train for this to be benificial
As an added benifit to the railroad, they could transmit GPS data and telemetry over the connection as well as send signals from dispatch telling the train to modify its speed so it doesn't have to stop at signals.