Until Google provides an option to turn off conversations, I'll still just forward all gmail to another account so I can make sure I don't miss something. I suppose with this new option old conversations will get pulled up to the top if you tell Google that the topic or person is important, but I can't say that most important e-mails can be identified beforehand like Google hopes.
It is a good thing to give the public access to these materials. Your average citizen is not going to sign up for Lexis or Westlaw just to do some heavy legal reading. I know that depending on the size of the firm we are easily talking about five figures PER MONTH for those services.
But when I looked at the website it is obvious that this is not user friendly at all. From what I could tell, the files are either image pdf files or compressed in a tar.bz2 file. I doubt if more than 5% (I am being real generous here) of lawyers have any idea how to unpack that. (windows BZip2 for those who want a graphic interface)
I presume that somebody will OCR it and load it onto a Google-searchable website so the content can be found. Otherwise, this is just an exercise.
Getting that "rental fee" is a lot more complicated than it sounds. The U.S. actually tried this with the Telecommunications Act of 1996. See, Section 251(3)(2)(B)of that Act. All sorts of economists get involved in coming up with a reasonable fee. As you might imagine, the incumbant companies try to make the fee cover their internal costs and put totally unreasonable values on the lines. The newcomers hire economists that try to put a minimal value on it. Couple this with the fact that here in the U.S. we have fifty different jurisdictions that this get litigated in and it is no wonder that this effort failed. The costs of litigation and the delay pretty much killed the effort.
I read the original article and I gather that the problem with maintaining digital copies is as much the choice of format as anything else. My newest PC can no longer render avi movies that my 2001 era digital camera took. I am sure that if I invested the time to find the right codec, I could read it, but the point is that even after you manage to find an archive medium that will last for decades without any deterioration, you next need to find a format that will survive. This includes the technology and software necessary to read the medium. It is becoming increasingly likely that all optical-based disks will become obsolete within the next ten years. Will the readers still work after that period of time? Or will some of the components fail over time? The problem of the movie industry is the same problem we face for our own digital archives, whether for business or personal use. If anybody wants to be able to read the current digital data you have to be prepared to constantly reformat and convert material or you will have to hire engineers and programmers to figure out how to extract the data.
This whole news item, which I first saw reported elsewhere, just seems too much to be true. Nothing really adds up. I think that this is some sort of hoax, joke, or that something like this happened, but it is being blown way out of proportion to what actually happened.
Actually, the in-house attorneys for AT&T undoubtedly issued a stop shred order as soon as the case was filed. Technically, a judge does not have to issue such an order as a verified threat that litigation is imminent is sufficient to allow a federal court to sanction a company for deleting or destroying files. Penalties can be very high for destruction of evidence.
The fact that he Judge in this case issued the order (at the request of the plaintiffs) indicates that the Judge was likely worried that the normal procedure would not be followed. Orders like this are usually not issued in the typical case. The Judge may have shared some of the concerns given in the speculations in these comments.
But given the confidential nature of the program and the contents of any data mining, it will be extraordinarily expensive to get access to any such information and to process it even if it is not shredded. It is not like this information can be handed over to plaintiffs' counsel and their experts. Good luck, though to those working on the case. I hope you find out the full extent of this program and whether it has been abused.
Anybody who thinks that Congress will stand up to the Administration on Telecom snooping is crazy. Here is the dialogue that I see:
W.H. Staffer: "Lord Cheney, House Judiciary Committee Chair Conyers is trying to block the Telecoms are real Patriots Immunity Bill
Cheney: "Oh ya? Hold on . . . Here it is. Let me make a call.
Cheney: "Mr. Black? this is Lord Cheney. Mr. Black: "We know it is you. How can we do your bidding? Cheney: "Conyers is getting in the way of the TARP bill. What can you give me? I need that NARUS STA-6400 data crunched right now! Mr. Black: "Conyers . . . Conyers, OK here we go, House ISP routers and home routers . . . OK do you want his home e-mail? office e-mail? You want it summarized or verbatim?
Mr. Black: "Oh, I know, how about web page browsing history for the last two years?
Cheney: "I don't care. Just get me something good!
Mr. Black: "Ah, yes. Here is what you want. oooh. Nasty. Shall I send it to you or do you want me to send it to Mr. Conyers directly? Anonymously, of course.
Well, I beg to differ. I get very nice astrophotography shots of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars WITHOUT using the tracker. I just do it manually, use a remote to fire off the camera (to keep vibration down) and then recompile the shots together using free software. I'd love to have the tracker, but my ETX telescope does not have one.
Don't try to build your own telescope before you even own one. That is like saying you should build your own car before you drive. You have listed a budget ($1,000) and a scope of work (astrophotography).
At that budget you will really only be able to take photographs of planets and the moon. Those nice photos of nebula take a lot more money. I'd say that a budget of $3,000 might start to get you there. There is a very steep price to quality curve for good star photos. If you want the cheapest way to really see nebula, get a very large set of binoculars. You will be stunned. Otherwise, here is what worked for me:
Equipment:
Meade Astro ETX-90AT (325 x 96mm) Telescope $600
Tripod: $100
Good Used Compact Digital Camera with a screw filter attachment: $150
Eyepiece Converter for camera: $70
Extra eyepiece for planetary observation: $80.
This adds up to $1,000. Few posting on this page will like it because every part listed here has significant drawbacks, but it will indeed get you photographs of planets.
Wake me up when a single player emerges that plays both formats and costs about $250. Until then, this is just so irrelevant. Except for the fact that this lack of a standard will delay my purchase of products in either format another year.
In situations like this it is not always correct to blame the lawyers and to give the company that hired the lawyers a free pass on the blame. These companies have in house intellectual property divisions charged with protecting the company's assets. Those corporate minions hire the lawyers and give them a job to do. The lawyers are more than happy to do what they have been asked to do, and generally there is not a whole lot of leeway on the implementation of that job. If the company wants to avoid bad press, then it ought to reconsider its options, legal and otherwise, available to it and change its strategy.
You may have a point. All my failed spiral bulbs faced down and were in enclosed glass. They had the brown spots you mention. Of course the reason I used them in that application was because those are not lights used for reading and they are harder to replace--I thought the longer life would be a boon. Those bulbs typically face up. So, even though these bulbs generate comparatively little heat, they must be many times more sensitive to heat than regular incandescent bulbs.
I did the math and bought several packs of swirl bulbs for all of the light fixtures that were not the main source of light for reading. It cost me quite a bit of dough, but as several posters say, the match works out. However, within six months they had all failed. Most had burn marks on the base. I sent a letter to the manufacturer notifying it that their bulbs not only lasted but a few months but posed a fire hazard as well. No reply.
So, I screwed regular bulbs back in. I'll let the technology mature before trying it again.
1. These numbers are standard for most of the 40 mil plants being built in Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Kansas, and Nebraska during the last two years. That would account for at least 5 plants in operation and about a dozen coming on line. These numbers come from an existing plant and to be safe, I got them off the SEC filing that is publicly available. I'm not going to name the individual plant.
2. I take issue with pundits that say all energy has to be accounted for in a simple-minded but direct approach. That approach ignores the economics involved. As an example, the corn will be grown and shipped regardless of whether there is an ethanol plant nearby. In fact, it will be shipped several thousand miles more if it has to go to China, Africa or Europe. Partly because of the high transportation costs, the cost paid for grain in the US is depressed. Now with an ethanol plant nearby, Farmer Brown hauls it 2-20 miles in his semi (they use mostly semis and straight trucks now) and that is it. There is some energy gain by hauling the corn a shorter distance. The cost of hauling the ethanol is lower in comparison to the corn given that it is product with a much higher density of value, pound for pound. I would liken that to the cost of hauling gold ore to carrying a gold coin in your pocket. What the economic reviews sometimes forget (when they focus solely on energy) is that the price of corn goes up to redirect the corn to the plant instead of overseas buyers.
You know, it isn't that hard to find the real numbers behind these studies. Here are the production and cost figures for a real live plant:
For a small 40 million gallon ethanol/year plant, the BTU inputs are 2 trillion BTUs per year for natural gas, electricity, and corn. The output in BTUs is 3 trillion BTUs. In order to push the numbers into negative territory, the ethanol critics have to generate more than 1 trillion BTUs of additional energy costs. I have not read the Berkeley study, but I bet it includes the food that the employees eat, the cost of generating the paper in the books they read, and all sorts of other absurd numbers. Here is the actual data for a brand-new (2005) 40 million gallon ethanol plant that uses 15 million bushels of corn per year:
Inputs:
Natural Gas: 4,000 Mcf per day of gas at a cost of $3.95 per Mcf
Natural gas: 1,028,000 BTU/MCF = 1,496,768,000,000 BTU inputs for natural gas
Electricity: 30,000,000 kilowatt hours per year for an estimated price of $.040 per kilowatt- hour
High estimate: 8,962 Btu per KWH
Low estimate: 3,416 BTU per KWH
Taking the low estimate, 102,480,000,000 BTU
Corn: 339,196,122,625 BTU for fertilizer (122 bushels per acre, 15 million bushels, 124 pounds of nitrogen per acre, 22,159 BTU/lb for fertilizer)
Total inputs: Input BTU: 1,998,444,122,625 Input total Outputs: 40 million gallons of ethanol, 128,000 tons of distillers grains and 115,500 tons of raw carbon dioxide gas. LHV: Low heat value--76,000 Btu per gallon of ethanol. HHV: High heat value--83,961 Btu per gallon of ethanol. Low: 76,000 x 40,000,000 = 3,040,000,000,000 BTU Surplus: 1,041,555,877,375 BTU
The original cost to design, build, and launch the Hubble was 1.5 billion. I say we either take our chances on how long it lasts until the new telescope goes up in several years or rebuild it with (this time) better optics and digital sensors. Say we fix it for 2 billion. Who is to say that something other than the gyroscopes will go out soon thereafter? This is a complicated piece of equipment that is getting very old and is past its design life. And the engineers working on the repair project don't even think it has an especially high chance of success. Sure, I like the pictures as much as anyone else, but 2 billion dollars for a shot at a repair?
Maybe I missed seeing this in the other comments, but massive arrays here on earth are approaching and surpassing Hubble's abilities. So it is not true that we will be plunged into an eternal darkness until the new scope goes up.
The filter does not create light, it reflects light. The posters you are thinking about are treated with UV pigments, a totally different end of the spectrum. Our eyes erroneously translate UV into white. It therefore "glows" to our eyes because it is transmitting a wavelength that our eyes have a hard time seeing. Hence the reason that a lot of flowers are white. They are actually UV and they rely upon that wavelength to attract night moths and butterflies. The coating on the lens for IR filtering reflects the IR wavelength. That is why it is called a filter. --Takes another hit off the bong.
The anti-pirate camera is filming the reflection off of the IR filter on the camcorder. Most modern camcorders use chips that are ultra-sensitive to IR wavelengths. In order to block it, filters are installed behind the lens. By beaming an IR lightsource into the theater, you can pick up any filter in the audience-- it will glow light a flame.
Remember the Sony "nightvision" cameras that caused the uproar over filming through clothes? The camera had the ability to shunt the IR filter to the side and film in near-infrared.
Not true. The filter will only increase the transmission of IR lightwaves. The more the filter blocks the wavelength, the more successful the anti-pirate camera will be. Keep in mind that the anti-pirate camera is filming the reflection off of the filter. Most modern camcorders use chips that are ultra-sensitive to IR wavelengths. In order to block it, filters are installed behind the lens. By beaming an IR lightsource into the theater, you can pick up any filter in the audience-- it will glow light a flame.
First, I find it humerous that a number of the first people to post comments all mentioned that they had watched pirated movies.
Second, I have not seen a single post that adequately states how this technology really works. Given the level of technical ability/.'s readership is known for, I find that interesting.
My guess? CCD cameras almost always use an infrared filter. They have to or the color gets screwed up. This technology bathes the theater in infrared light and the camera simply picks up the reflection off of the filter. Take off the filter and you mess up the image. Keep it on, and your camera glows.
The sheer volume of messages must mean that most spammers are out for only one thing: credit card information. And the best way to get those is to run some scripts to strip out the necessary information. I cannot believe that they can take the time to actually parse out the information by hand, figure out which non-existent product they are selling, and sell anything. 6,000 per day would be 8 seconds per message in a 12-hour day, more or less. I have heard that 40-60 percent of spammers never ship any product, just take a bite out of your credit card and move on. This goes a long way toward confirming that suspicion.
When he turned 13, I gave him an old 486, a manual on BASIC, and told him how to find it on the windows directory. Didn't do anything else other than type up a few lines of simple code. Natural curiosity took over. Soon he was writing complicated and lengthy RPGs, similar to what came out in the '80s. Next summer I gave him an old C++ book some visual basic stuff, and some disks. The next summer Java. And now he is going to be applying to a college that offers computer science in the fall. He codes in his sleep now. Oh, this summer's project is to take some boxes, some Linux disks, and make a web server, firewall, and Linux server.
My thought is that if the kid has the normal curiosity then just give them the tools and they will figure it out. There are plenty of old books and software available on Ebay and used book stores.
Slashdot Mirror
Until Google provides an option to turn off conversations, I'll still just forward all gmail to another account so I can make sure I don't miss something. I suppose with this new option old conversations will get pulled up to the top if you tell Google that the topic or person is important, but I can't say that most important e-mails can be identified beforehand like Google hopes.
It is a good thing to give the public access to these materials. Your average citizen is not going to sign up for Lexis or Westlaw just to do some heavy legal reading. I know that depending on the size of the firm we are easily talking about five figures PER MONTH for those services.
But when I looked at the website it is obvious that this is not user friendly at all. From what I could tell, the files are either image pdf files or compressed in a tar.bz2 file. I doubt if more than 5% (I am being real generous here) of lawyers have any idea how to unpack that. (windows BZip2 for those who want a graphic interface)
I presume that somebody will OCR it and load it onto a Google-searchable website so the content can be found. Otherwise, this is just an exercise.
Getting that "rental fee" is a lot more complicated than it sounds. The U.S. actually tried this with the Telecommunications Act of 1996. See, Section 251(3)(2)(B)of that Act. All sorts of economists get involved in coming up with a reasonable fee. As you might imagine, the incumbant companies try to make the fee cover their internal costs and put totally unreasonable values on the lines. The newcomers hire economists that try to put a minimal value on it. Couple this with the fact that here in the U.S. we have fifty different jurisdictions that this get litigated in and it is no wonder that this effort failed. The costs of litigation and the delay pretty much killed the effort.
I read the original article and I gather that the problem with maintaining digital copies is as much the choice of format as anything else. My newest PC can no longer render avi movies that my 2001 era digital camera took. I am sure that if I invested the time to find the right codec, I could read it, but the point is that even after you manage to find an archive medium that will last for decades without any deterioration, you next need to find a format that will survive. This includes the technology and software necessary to read the medium. It is becoming increasingly likely that all optical-based disks will become obsolete within the next ten years. Will the readers still work after that period of time? Or will some of the components fail over time? The problem of the movie industry is the same problem we face for our own digital archives, whether for business or personal use. If anybody wants to be able to read the current digital data you have to be prepared to constantly reformat and convert material or you will have to hire engineers and programmers to figure out how to extract the data.
Why is it that the idiots of the world are the ones that make comments like these? Does this idiot think that people will be moved by this?
This whole news item, which I first saw reported elsewhere, just seems too much to be true. Nothing really adds up. I think that this is some sort of hoax, joke, or that something like this happened, but it is being blown way out of proportion to what actually happened.
Actually, the in-house attorneys for AT&T undoubtedly issued a stop shred order as soon as the case was filed. Technically, a judge does not have to issue such an order as a verified threat that litigation is imminent is sufficient to allow a federal court to sanction a company for deleting or destroying files. Penalties can be very high for destruction of evidence.
The fact that he Judge in this case issued the order (at the request of the plaintiffs) indicates that the Judge was likely worried that the normal procedure would not be followed. Orders like this are usually not issued in the typical case. The Judge may have shared some of the concerns given in the speculations in these comments.
But given the confidential nature of the program and the contents of any data mining, it will be extraordinarily expensive to get access to any such information and to process it even if it is not shredded. It is not like this information can be handed over to plaintiffs' counsel and their experts. Good luck, though to those working on the case. I hope you find out the full extent of this program and whether it has been abused.
Anybody who thinks that Congress will stand up to the Administration on Telecom snooping is crazy. Here is the dialogue that I see:
W.H. Staffer: "Lord Cheney, House Judiciary Committee Chair Conyers is trying to block the Telecoms are real Patriots Immunity Bill
Cheney: "Oh ya? Hold on . . . Here it is. Let me make a call.
Cheney: "Mr. Black? this is Lord Cheney.
Mr. Black: "We know it is you. How can we do your bidding?
Cheney: "Conyers is getting in the way of the TARP bill. What can you give me? I need that NARUS STA-6400 data crunched right now!
Mr. Black: "Conyers . . . Conyers, OK here we go, House ISP routers and home routers . . . OK do you want his home e-mail? office e-mail? You want it summarized or verbatim?
Mr. Black: "Oh, I know, how about web page browsing history for the last two years?
Cheney: "I don't care. Just get me something good!
Mr. Black: "Ah, yes. Here is what you want. oooh. Nasty. Shall I send it to you or do you want me to send it to Mr. Conyers directly? Anonymously, of course.
Cheney: Send it to me damn it. This will be fun.
Well, I beg to differ. I get very nice astrophotography shots of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars WITHOUT using the tracker. I just do it manually, use a remote to fire off the camera (to keep vibration down) and then recompile the shots together using free software. I'd love to have the tracker, but my ETX telescope does not have one.
Don't try to build your own telescope before you even own one. That is like saying you should build your own car before you drive. You have listed a budget ($1,000) and a scope of work (astrophotography).
At that budget you will really only be able to take photographs of planets and the moon. Those nice photos of nebula take a lot more money. I'd say that a budget of $3,000 might start to get you there. There is a very steep price to quality curve for good star photos. If you want the cheapest way to really see nebula, get a very large set of binoculars. You will be stunned. Otherwise, here is what worked for me:
Equipment:
Meade Astro ETX-90AT (325 x 96mm) Telescope $600
Tripod: $100
Good Used Compact Digital Camera with a screw filter attachment: $150
Eyepiece Converter for camera: $70
Extra eyepiece for planetary observation: $80.
This adds up to $1,000. Few posting on this page will like it because every part listed here has significant drawbacks, but it will indeed get you photographs of planets.
Go to http://www.weasner.com/etx/menu.html to see how to put it all together.
Wake me up when a single player emerges that plays both formats and costs about $250. Until then, this is just so irrelevant. Except for the fact that this lack of a standard will delay my purchase of products in either format another year.
In situations like this it is not always correct to blame the lawyers and to give the company that hired the lawyers a free pass on the blame. These companies have in house intellectual property divisions charged with protecting the company's assets. Those corporate minions hire the lawyers and give them a job to do. The lawyers are more than happy to do what they have been asked to do, and generally there is not a whole lot of leeway on the implementation of that job. If the company wants to avoid bad press, then it ought to reconsider its options, legal and otherwise, available to it and change its strategy.
You may have a point. All my failed spiral bulbs faced down and were in enclosed glass. They had the brown spots you mention. Of course the reason I used them in that application was because those are not lights used for reading and they are harder to replace--I thought the longer life would be a boon. Those bulbs typically face up. So, even though these bulbs generate comparatively little heat, they must be many times more sensitive to heat than regular incandescent bulbs.
I did the math and bought several packs of swirl bulbs for all of the light fixtures that were not the main source of light for reading. It cost me quite a bit of dough, but as several posters say, the match works out. However, within six months they had all failed. Most had burn marks on the base. I sent a letter to the manufacturer notifying it that their bulbs not only lasted but a few months but posed a fire hazard as well. No reply.
So, I screwed regular bulbs back in. I'll let the technology mature before trying it again.
Nice try L1, but Rambus was (unfortunately perhaps) cleared. And NTP is not a competitor. It just holds the patent.
Some responses:
1. These numbers are standard for most of the 40 mil plants being built in Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Kansas, and Nebraska during the last two years. That would account for at least 5 plants in operation and about a dozen coming on line. These numbers come from an existing plant and to be safe, I got them off the SEC filing that is publicly available. I'm not going to name the individual plant.
2. I take issue with pundits that say all energy has to be accounted for in a simple-minded but direct approach. That approach ignores the economics involved. As an example, the corn will be grown and shipped regardless of whether there is an ethanol plant nearby. In fact, it will be shipped several thousand miles more if it has to go to China, Africa or Europe. Partly because of the high transportation costs, the cost paid for grain in the US is depressed. Now with an ethanol plant nearby, Farmer Brown hauls it 2-20 miles in his semi (they use mostly semis and straight trucks now) and that is it. There is some energy gain by hauling the corn a shorter distance. The cost of hauling the ethanol is lower in comparison to the corn given that it is product with a much higher density of value, pound for pound. I would liken that to the cost of hauling gold ore to carrying a gold coin in your pocket. What the economic reviews sometimes forget (when they focus solely on energy) is that the price of corn goes up to redirect the corn to the plant instead of overseas buyers.
You know, it isn't that hard to find the real numbers behind these studies. Here are the production and cost figures for a real live plant:
For a small 40 million gallon ethanol/year plant, the BTU inputs are 2 trillion BTUs per year for natural gas, electricity, and corn. The output in BTUs is 3 trillion BTUs. In order to push the numbers into negative territory, the ethanol critics have to generate more than 1 trillion BTUs of additional energy costs. I have not read the Berkeley study, but I bet it includes the food that the employees eat, the cost of generating the paper in the books they read, and all sorts of other absurd numbers.
Here is the actual data for a brand-new (2005) 40 million gallon ethanol plant that uses 15 million bushels of corn per year:
Inputs:
Natural Gas:
4,000 Mcf per day of gas at a cost of $3.95 per Mcf
Natural gas: 1,028,000 BTU/MCF = 1,496,768,000,000 BTU inputs for natural gas
Electricity:
30,000,000 kilowatt hours per year for an estimated price of $.040 per kilowatt- hour
High estimate: 8,962 Btu per KWH
Low estimate: 3,416 BTU per KWH
Taking the low estimate, 102,480,000,000 BTU
Corn:
339,196,122,625 BTU for fertilizer (122 bushels per acre, 15 million bushels, 124 pounds of nitrogen per acre, 22,159 BTU/lb for fertilizer)
Total inputs:
Input BTU: 1,998,444,122,625 Input total
Outputs:
40 million gallons of ethanol, 128,000 tons of distillers grains and 115,500 tons of raw carbon dioxide gas.
LHV: Low heat value--76,000 Btu per gallon of ethanol.
HHV: High heat value--83,961 Btu per gallon of ethanol.
Low: 76,000 x 40,000,000 = 3,040,000,000,000 BTU
Surplus:
1,041,555,877,375 BTU
The original cost to design, build, and launch the Hubble was 1.5 billion. I say we either take our chances on how long it lasts until the new telescope goes up in several years or rebuild it with (this time) better optics and digital sensors. Say we fix it for 2 billion. Who is to say that something other than the gyroscopes will go out soon thereafter? This is a complicated piece of equipment that is getting very old and is past its design life. And the engineers working on the repair project don't even think it has an especially high chance of success. Sure, I like the pictures as much as anyone else, but 2 billion dollars for a shot at a repair?
Maybe I missed seeing this in the other comments, but massive arrays here on earth are approaching and surpassing Hubble's abilities. So it is not true that we will be plunged into an eternal darkness until the new scope goes up.
The filter does not create light, it reflects light. The posters you are thinking about are treated with UV pigments, a totally different end of the spectrum. Our eyes erroneously translate UV into white. It therefore "glows" to our eyes because it is transmitting a wavelength that our eyes have a hard time seeing. Hence the reason that a lot of flowers are white. They are actually UV and they rely upon that wavelength to attract night moths and butterflies. The coating on the lens for IR filtering reflects the IR wavelength. That is why it is called a filter. --Takes another hit off the bong.
No, you don't get it. A filter reflects light. It does not allow it to pass through. A better IR filter will work in the opposite way you describe.
The anti-pirate camera is filming the reflection off of the IR filter on the camcorder. Most modern camcorders use chips that are ultra-sensitive to IR wavelengths. In order to block it, filters are installed behind the lens. By beaming an IR lightsource into the theater, you can pick up any filter in the audience-- it will glow light a flame.
Remember the Sony "nightvision" cameras that caused the uproar over filming through clothes? The camera had the ability to shunt the IR filter to the side and film in near-infrared.
Not true. The filter will only increase the transmission of IR lightwaves. The more the filter blocks the wavelength, the more successful the anti-pirate camera will be. Keep in mind that the anti-pirate camera is filming the reflection off of the filter. Most modern camcorders use chips that are ultra-sensitive to IR wavelengths. In order to block it, filters are installed behind the lens. By beaming an IR lightsource into the theater, you can pick up any filter in the audience-- it will glow light a flame.
First, I find it humerous that a number of the first people to post comments all mentioned that they had watched pirated movies.
/.'s readership is known for, I find that interesting.
Second, I have not seen a single post that adequately states how this technology really works. Given the level of technical ability
My guess? CCD cameras almost always use an infrared filter. They have to or the color gets screwed up. This technology bathes the theater in infrared light and the camera simply picks up the reflection off of the filter. Take off the filter and you mess up the image. Keep it on, and your camera glows.
The sheer volume of messages must mean that most spammers are out for only one thing: credit card information. And the best way to get those is to run some scripts to strip out the necessary information. I cannot believe that they can take the time to actually parse out the information by hand, figure out which non-existent product they are selling, and sell anything. 6,000 per day would be 8 seconds per message in a 12-hour day, more or less. I have heard that 40-60 percent of spammers never ship any product, just take a bite out of your credit card and move on. This goes a long way toward confirming that suspicion.
When he turned 13, I gave him an old 486, a manual on BASIC, and told him how to find it on the windows directory. Didn't do anything else other than type up a few lines of simple code. Natural curiosity took over. Soon he was writing complicated and lengthy RPGs, similar to what came out in the '80s. Next summer I gave him an old C++ book some visual basic stuff, and some disks. The next summer Java. And now he is going to be applying to a college that offers computer science in the fall. He codes in his sleep now. Oh, this summer's project is to take some boxes, some Linux disks, and make a web server, firewall, and Linux server.
My thought is that if the kid has the normal curiosity then just give them the tools and they will figure it out. There are plenty of old books and software available on Ebay and used book stores.