Regardless of the fact that the Berlin Wall came down before eBay even existed, that was exactly what happened to it. It got cut up in small pieces and they were sold all over the place. Actually, they still are. Just go to ebay, search for Berlin Wall and you can buy a lot of bits of concrete. Some even authenticated.
Ok, not being quite serious, but I loooove my java. Actually, I had a pretty bad case of it when I got out of the army. 72 hour shifts and the hurry up and wait life of a paramedic. At it's worst, I had a 15 cups a day habbit. That also made sure that I was pretty hyped on the 4 am emergency calls. You won't get around feeling like shit for the first few days when you start cutting down, but coffee is not crack cocaine, and it will be over in a few days to a week. The best advice I can give is not to do it in your normal environment, or while you are at work. Take one week off, go somewhere where you don't have access to a coffee maker 24/7 and do something fun. I went on a hiking trip, but diving lessions, vegetating on a sunny beach, or going on a guided tour of Italy also worked for some of my addicted friends. And remember, get a cup if you get the shakes, but try sticking to the smallest one you can find.
The only remaining problem seems to be that I developed caffeine insensitivity. I still love the taste (ILLY RULES!!!!), but I can have a few cups of coffee or Diet Coke and go straight to bed nowadays.
Most of them are heavy, can't accomodate much in addition to your laptop and are either shoddily made, or overpriced or both. Oh, and they make you a walking advertisement for any criminal who needs a quick buck. I logged a few hundred thousand air miles and serious distance in cars, trains and other modes of transportation using either a small 600cu inch Lowe backpack or a Patagonia Half Mass messenger bag. Actually, any decent quality bag will do. The trick is not to drop it, but if you are really concerned, some foam (or a rolled up t-shirt, if you are traveling) works probably as well as any "laptop bag".
Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan would make the top of my fiction list for 2003. Starts a bit slow, but I still read it in one night. The basic premise is that rich enough people can digitize their consciousness and travel, or be reincarnated, by just transferring the "stack" to a new human "sleeve". But the fun moments are really the details like self aware hotels, catholics as a small right-to-die sect, outdated robots running gun shops etc. A bit over the top in places, but it hangs together pretty well.
Sigh....seems the youth of today truly do not know what a good sound system is...all they know is the off the shelf mass marketed stuff at CC or BB..Stuff like that is really only one level above a good boom box.
Yeah, it's not really a sound system if you can't crank it up to 11.
Good for them, although catering to audiophiles keeps a lot of people employed by selling overpriced stuff. A $50,000 speaker system can feed the guy who built it for a year.
Apart from the weird contraption that he strapped on his back, what is the big news here? My former army unit and special forces all across NATO have done HAHO (High Altitude High Opening) jumps that go more than 50km since the 80s. Usually with predecessors of the G9. The main problem is that it's extremly cold at 8-10,000 meters and that you have to jump with supplemental oxygen. Don't try this at home, people have gotten frostbite and even died in exercises.
There is a big difference between this and the other examples cited. And one that might render this experiment useless. The Iowa Electronic Markets and similar experiments let masses bid on how masses react. (Everyone, but mainly US citizens, can place a bid on how the US population as a whole will vote). The USS Scorpion had experts in the field bidding on where the submarine could be found. In both cases, the bidders are part of a relevant population, either by being experts or by being part of the pool that will contribute to the final decision.
This DARPA initiative let's every Tom, Dick and Harry bid on what a small group of people, namely 5-20 terrorist leaders, will do.
To make this work like the earlier examples, they'd either limit bidding to members or Hamas, Hizbollah, Al Queda, PIRA and other terrorist groups (not quite feasible). Or they have to limit this to experts like police, intelligence services, insurance companies, security consultants, political observers, maybe journalists and the like.
Yes, but I have a pretty high confidence level that Joe Spammer's ways of trying to hide their identity will pale in comparison to what Microsoft's techies and legal department can muster. After all, for spam to work, they need to give their customers a chance to fork over some cash. And if one of the largest legal departments in the world starts going after whoever ends up with the cash, good luck.
Obligatory Stephenson quote: "Microsoft are 10 times smarter and about 100 times more aggressive than any government"
You must be a saint. I can't drive through Denver without thinking of ways of punishment for urban planners. Streets that go nowhere like 270, shutting down I-25 with repairs (I got into a 3 hour traffic jam on I-25 at 9PM on a Saturday, and again at 3am on a Sunday). A total lack of signage. Major thoroughfares that end up in residential areas like US 6. And don't get me started on the I-25/I-70 intersection. Trucks barreling down from Breckenridge at 90 miles an hour and they have the bright idea to put a curve and lane restrictions at the intersection.
One great source for these views of the future are Reader's Digest from the 50s and 60s. I found about 23 years of them in my parents attic and they are absolutely fascinating. From flying cars (15 years from 1957)and cargo submarines, over expanding Boston harbor by careful use of hydrogen bombs, to living on Mars, pretty much every concept is covered. The most touching part is that _all_ the predictions have been wrong. Not half, not most, but as far as I can tell all. Nice pictures, though.
(AP) Across the United States, emergency services have been overwhelmed by calls about weird looking young males running around in circle screaming "Linus and the RIAA" while ripping out their hair and flagellating themselves. According to San Jose fire chief Elppa Letni: "We a currently stretched very thin with over 500 cases in the last hour. Thankfully, most of the victims are so out of shape that it is fairly easy to catch them. Claming them down is another matter, but a mixture of Ritalin and Code Red seems to do the trick."
Let's compile a list of bible verses that get blocked by censorware, publish it on the web and have someone at every place that installs NetNanny write a fundamentalist letter to the editor along the lines of "NetNanny censorware blocks our children's access to the WORD". Do the same with compassionate conservatism lingo, pro-life web sites, NRA... and see how fast NN get's brabded as part of a vast left wing conspiracy.
Hemos, please get a quintuple espresso, read the following sentence out loud, see if you can understand it yourself, and rewrite in something approximating English:
"The conventional wisdom around web stuff that's been free, but converts to much pay is that "they die off, no one wants to use it anymore etc etc", but I think what people fail to realize is that for many business, less people is *just fine*, if those people are paying. "
Actually, there is an even easier way: bistatic radar. You basically need to seperate the sender and the receiver, do some fancy math and use highly sensitive radar. There have been consistent stories that the steath planes used in the Gulf war were pretty visible on UK shipes with modern phased array radar, too. Of course a lot of that technology is boyond the reach of what are basically developing countries like Irak, Afghanistan and North Korea. But Siemens might have an even easier solution to detecting stealth bombers.
Up to now, the MPAA has mostly affected geeks, students, or other politically not very relevant groups, and to a large part of the electorate, somewhat mistrusted group. Especially republicans know that they (a) don't vote for them and (b) don't donate.
But if Joe Sixpack can't tape the Superbowl on his TiVo, the phone lines on Capitol Hill will melt.
After a stint of sleeplessness last week I was starting to wonder if some of the spam actually comes through multi level marketing scams. Some of the pitches on late night TV (make $3000 a month on your computer) sound a lot like whoever falls for them is stuck putting up web pages or sending email about Herbal Viagra etc.
There seem to be some somewhat legitimate businesses that seem to have fallen for list sellers, but 99,999% of the spam I get seems to deal with totally screwball products and services.
Does anyone have an idea if MLM has discovered spam or is it really just some groups or companies that send this stuff under hundreds of different names?
I've now been in software development and public policy for about 10 years. (Yes, unlike a bunch of people here, I DO have another life outside of coding). And my basic comment on surveys/studies like this is: "Take 'em out and shoot them for wasting money, bandwidth and braincells."
This is the same BS that permeates the medical profession, social sciences and a bunch of other subjects. Basically, take an informal study (let's send an email survey to some clueless people), contact some industry leaders (send email to some CIOs who have better stuff to do than fill out dumba** surveys), do intense follow up (talk to the 2 CIOs, 3 SQA managers and 500 marketing flak that don't hang up on you immediately), investigate important papers (find the 5 papers by CS wankers that didn't get rejected by some overworked advisors), do an extrapolation (use this fit thingy in Excel with a quadratic or exponetial model), pretty it up in Powerpoint, call some journalist, and publish.
This is not to say that I doubt that sloppy coding it a huge problem. Hey, it took us two years ('96 and '97) to get all to crap out one of our developers put in in a state of demetia, but making sweeping claims like this and throwing around huge numbers is just the usuall pop scientific approach to funding and "scientfic recognition"
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Try a Leica Vector. Basically a binocular with a built in range finder. Used by a lot of military snipers.
Regardless of the fact that the Berlin Wall came down before eBay even existed, that was exactly what happened to it. It got cut up in small pieces and they were sold all over the place. Actually, they still are. Just go to ebay, search for Berlin Wall and you can buy a lot of bits of concrete. Some even authenticated.
I think Toyota started this with their MR2. They somehow forgot that MR-deux is very close to merde (shit) in French.
A Trabant meets a donkey:
Trabent: Hi, I am a car
Donkey: Hi, I am a horse
-Two stroke engine until the GDR collapsed in 1989. You could always tell if one was around by looking for blue plumes of smoke.
-Bakelite body (I saw a couple of cool Mercedes on Tabby accidents as a paramedic. The Trabant actually disintegrated on impact)
-18hp When the wall came down, they basically got run over by 150mph BMWs and Mercedes on West German roads.
-Horrendously unreliable. As in "I spent more time lying under my car than on my wife".
-It's nickname was Pappe (cardboard). What else do you need to know?Ok, not being quite serious, but I loooove my java. Actually, I had a pretty bad case of it when I got out of the army. 72 hour shifts and the hurry up and wait life of a paramedic. At it's worst, I had a 15 cups a day habbit. That also made sure that I was pretty hyped on the 4 am emergency calls.
You won't get around feeling like shit for the first few days when you start cutting down, but coffee is not crack cocaine, and it will be over in a few days to a week. The best advice I can give is not to do it in your normal environment, or while you are at work. Take one week off, go somewhere where you don't have access to a coffee maker 24/7 and do something fun. I went on a hiking trip, but diving lessions, vegetating on a sunny beach, or going on a guided tour of Italy also worked for some of my addicted friends. And remember, get a cup if you get the shakes, but try sticking to the smallest one you can find.
The only remaining problem seems to be that I developed caffeine insensitivity. I still love the taste (ILLY RULES!!!!), but I can have a few cups of coffee or Diet Coke and go straight to bed nowadays.
Most of the nubmers they quote seem to come from this page. The site has also some data on newer sites.
Most of them are heavy, can't accomodate much in addition to your laptop and are either shoddily made, or overpriced or both. Oh, and they make you a walking advertisement for any criminal who needs a quick buck. I logged a few hundred thousand air miles and serious distance in cars, trains and other modes of transportation using either a small 600cu inch Lowe backpack or a Patagonia Half Mass messenger bag. Actually, any decent quality bag will do. The trick is not to drop it, but if you are really concerned, some foam (or a rolled up t-shirt, if you are traveling) works probably as well as any "laptop bag".
Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan would make the top of my fiction list for 2003. Starts a bit slow, but I still read it in one night. The basic premise is that rich enough people can digitize their consciousness and travel, or be reincarnated, by just transferring the "stack" to a new human "sleeve". But the fun moments are really the details like self aware hotels, catholics as a small right-to-die sect, outdated robots running gun shops etc. A bit over the top in places, but it hangs together pretty well.
Yeah, it's not really a sound system if you can't crank it up to 11.
Good for them, although catering to audiophiles keeps a lot of people employed by selling overpriced stuff. A $50,000 speaker system can feed the guy who built it for a year.
Apart from the weird contraption that he strapped on his back, what is the big news here? My former army unit and special forces all across NATO have done HAHO (High Altitude High Opening) jumps that go more than 50km since the 80s. Usually with predecessors of the G9. The main problem is that it's extremly cold at 8-10,000 meters and that you have to jump with supplemental oxygen. Don't try this at home, people have gotten frostbite and even died in exercises.
There is a big difference between this and the other examples cited. And one that might render this experiment useless. The Iowa Electronic Markets and similar experiments let masses bid on how masses react. (Everyone, but mainly US citizens, can place a bid on how the US population as a whole will vote). The USS Scorpion had experts in the field bidding on where the submarine could be found. In both cases, the bidders are part of a relevant population, either by being experts or by being part of the pool that will contribute to the final decision.
This DARPA initiative let's every Tom, Dick and Harry bid on what a small group of people, namely 5-20 terrorist leaders, will do.
To make this work like the earlier examples, they'd either limit bidding to members or Hamas, Hizbollah, Al Queda, PIRA and other terrorist groups (not quite feasible). Or they have to limit this to experts like police, intelligence services, insurance companies, security consultants, political observers, maybe journalists and the like.
Yes, but I have a pretty high confidence level that Joe Spammer's ways of trying to hide their identity will pale in comparison to what Microsoft's techies and legal department can muster. After all, for spam to work, they need to give their customers a chance to fork over some cash. And if one of the largest legal departments in the world starts going after whoever ends up with the cash, good luck.
Obligatory Stephenson quote: "Microsoft are 10 times smarter and about 100 times
more aggressive than any government"
You must be a saint. I can't drive through Denver without thinking of ways of punishment for urban planners. Streets that go nowhere like 270, shutting down I-25 with repairs (I got into a 3 hour traffic jam on I-25 at 9PM on a Saturday, and again at 3am on a Sunday). A total lack of signage. Major thoroughfares that end up in residential areas like US 6. And don't get me started on the I-25/I-70 intersection. Trucks barreling down from Breckenridge at 90 miles an hour and they have the bright idea to put a curve and lane restrictions at the intersection.
One great source for these views of the future are Reader's Digest from the 50s and 60s. I found about 23 years of them in my parents attic and they are absolutely fascinating. From flying cars (15 years from 1957)and cargo submarines, over expanding Boston harbor by careful use of hydrogen bombs, to living on Mars, pretty much every concept is covered. The most touching part is that _all_ the predictions have been wrong. Not half, not most, but as far as I can tell all. Nice pictures, though.
(AP) Across the United States, emergency services have been overwhelmed by calls about weird looking young males running around in circle screaming "Linus and the RIAA" while ripping out their hair and flagellating themselves. According to San Jose fire chief Elppa Letni: "We a currently stretched very thin with over 500 cases in the last hour. Thankfully, most of the victims are so out of shape that it is fairly easy to catch them. Claming them down is another matter, but a mixture of Ritalin and Code Red seems to do the trick."
Let's compile a list of bible verses that get blocked by censorware, publish it on the web and have someone at every place that installs NetNanny write a fundamentalist letter to the editor along the lines of "NetNanny censorware blocks our children's access to the WORD".
Do the same with compassionate conservatism lingo, pro-life web sites, NRA... and see how fast NN get's brabded as part of a vast left wing conspiracy.
Hemos, please get a quintuple espresso, read the following sentence out loud, see if you can understand it yourself, and rewrite in something approximating English:
"The conventional wisdom around web stuff that's been free, but converts to much pay is that "they die off, no one wants to use it anymore etc etc", but I think what people fail to realize is that for many business, less people is *just fine*, if those people are paying. "
Actually, there is an even easier way: bistatic radar. You basically need to seperate the sender and the receiver, do some fancy math and use highly sensitive radar. There have been consistent stories that the steath planes used in the Gulf war were pretty visible on UK shipes with modern phased array radar, too. Of course a lot of that technology is boyond the reach of what are basically developing countries like Irak, Afghanistan and North Korea. But Siemens might have an even easier solution to detecting stealth bombers.
Up to now, the MPAA has mostly affected geeks, students, or other politically not very relevant groups, and to a large part of the electorate, somewhat mistrusted group. Especially republicans know that they (a) don't vote for them and (b) don't donate.
But if Joe Sixpack can't tape the Superbowl on his TiVo, the phone lines on Capitol Hill will melt.
After a stint of sleeplessness last week I was starting to wonder if some of the spam actually comes through multi level marketing scams. Some of the pitches on late night TV (make $3000 a month on your computer) sound a lot like whoever falls for them is stuck putting up web pages or sending email about Herbal Viagra etc.
There seem to be some somewhat legitimate businesses that seem to have fallen for list sellers, but 99,999% of the spam I get seems to deal with totally screwball products and services.
Does anyone have an idea if MLM has discovered spam or is it really just some groups or companies that send this stuff under hundreds of different names?
Actually, I think Dick Armey's web site does much more damage to children than a lot of the porn that's out there.
I've now been in software development and public policy for about 10 years. (Yes, unlike a bunch of people here, I DO have another life outside of coding). And my basic comment on surveys/studies like this is: "Take 'em out and shoot them for wasting money, bandwidth and braincells."
This is the same BS that permeates the medical profession, social sciences and a bunch of other subjects. Basically, take an informal study (let's send an email survey to some clueless people), contact some industry leaders (send email to some CIOs who have better stuff to do than fill out dumba** surveys), do intense follow up (talk to the 2 CIOs, 3 SQA managers and 500 marketing flak that don't hang up on you immediately), investigate important papers (find the 5 papers by CS wankers that didn't get rejected by some overworked advisors), do an extrapolation (use this fit thingy in Excel with a quadratic or exponetial model), pretty it up in Powerpoint, call some journalist, and publish.
This is not to say that I doubt that sloppy coding it a huge problem. Hey, it took us two years ('96 and '97) to get all to crap out one of our developers put in in a state of demetia, but making sweeping claims like this and throwing around huge numbers is just the usuall pop scientific approach to funding and "scientfic recognition"
Sorry, had a rotten day taking to journalists.
Can anyone say Whisky?
Actually, we've done something like that as a technology demonstration for wireless access to webMathematica.