It's not very often that I can't find anything better to do with my time than contribute money to the Entertainment Industry (meaning MPAA, RIAA, etc, not small live shows or indie bands). Granted, movies are entertaining. So is talking to people. Or sports. Or use your imagination, if you have any left. Why the hell should I want mass produced industrial entertainment anyways? Art has been around far longer the means to make insane amounts of money off it.
My friend has a tibook, and when his power adapter thingie somehow got a hole in the cord, they were apparently very nice about replacing it, esp when he mentioned he had apple care. If you have a dead pixel, thought, forget about it. Apple doesn't consider pixels defective when they dont do what theyre supposed to, just 'anomolous'. You need a bunch of 'anomolies" before its a defect. I had one on an iBook. No such problem on the armada i had before or the lifebook i have now. I realize it's kinda luck of the draw, but by the time i pay close to $1800 for a laptop (w/ drive, memory, applecare, etc), I want it to work, dammit.
But you DONT buy music. You buy a license to use it.
Oppenheim kinda covered this when he and Lessig were taking questions. Here's the basic idea: Q: When I buy music, am I buying a physical object which stores music, or am I buying a license to enjoy the music on that object? A: No.
This is why I no longer buy products of the entertainment industry. (well, almost never).
Pogo is, iirc, another item (besides the already mentioned tungsten) which fits a phone into a pda like thing and requires you to use a headset. And I wouldn't get one. I have a handspring treo 180, which seems to suffer from a problem with the connections to the speaker in the flip lid. For about a month (it took me a while to get around to having it replaced), I had to carry my hands free adapter around with me to hear the other person on the phone. It's such a pain to get the wire out and untangled that I generally either had to flip the treo open and tell the person to hang on (they could still hear me fine), or I'd miss the call and have to call back. Even if it is a little big, the treo is still more usable as a flip phone than with the headset wire.
In an ideal world, though, I would like a bluetooth headset which could connect to a pda/wide-area-wireless(phone) device (as well as a landline base station or desktop computer VoIP system).
and my completely unbiased (yeah, right) opinion tells me it will work to our advantage by driving more customers to us. I got a new phone almost exactly a year ago, so my service commitment expires any day. If it weren't for having to change my phone number, I'd drop Cingular in a second. I know all the carriers are in the business of dicking customers out of their money, but cingular's rates, service (coverage, etc) and customer service are astoundingly bad. Hopefully I can switch carriers on Nov 25th...
We used to have web boards for some classes in colloge. You were supposed to read the material and post a comment or question about it ahead of time, which could be used to drive discussion in class.
One practice was to wait until shortly before class started, check the discussion board, pick a comment by someone you didn't like, and post a comment about how you disagreed with everything they said. I could see how that kind of environment could get ugly on a slashcode site.
That being said, if everyone had some mod points, and the prof did a reasonable job of checking for abuses, I think it could work. Most people would think twice about posting obnoxious trolls or flamebait if they're being graded on their participation.
No matter what concept for curriculum one comes up with, as long as the students can get onto the Internet, they will
So long as you have control of the network connections (ethernet or 802.11), you can prevent them from accessing anything not relavent to the course. It might be sufficient to simply make it difficult to connect to outside sites (use a dhcp serever which provides an address for a 'special' dns server, or block or delay packets from anything not on a whitelist for that particular lecture.
Which is not to say that you should. Some people go to class to keep abreast of what's going on, not to actually learn from the lectuer. They may already know the material, or learn better by reading or having a friend explain it than by listening to a lecturer drone on. If they're not hurting anything, let people chat.
HP Labs had their Websigns like two years ago. You have a PDA with a GPS and a compass. You point it at stuff, it pulls up info or lets you interact. We've been working with them on ways of getting away from using a GPS and compass, as they don't work so well indoors.
I think CMU or MIT had like a headmounted version, probably on slashdot a year ago?
To them music isn't art, it's a product that they can own and profit from. But they can only do that as long as people are willing to pay. If they go around acting like robber-barrons (exploiting their workers (musicians), illegally fixing prices, etc), people will have few qualms about copying music instead of paying exorbinant prices. I think it's adapt-or-die for the entertainment industry. We know they don't really buy their line about filesharing jeapordizing the future of music. Neither does anybody else- music has been around about as long as human civilization. They just happen to make money selling it , and for them to survive, they either have to bring their prices down and consumers' payment ethic up (done by not looking like evil corporations), or they just have to buy a police state so that they can maintain the status quo. I'd rather not see the US's current transition towards being a police state go any further, so I think that the record companies should attempt to be so nice that people would feel bad copying their songs, and so cheap that they won't be motivated to. I know that isn't going to happen, but I just wanted to throw out a suggestion for a peaceful solution.
Well, there's a serious side to this idea, and a stupid one. The stupid side is that if the copyright nazis really want to get you, they're gonna have to have you install some kind of malware ahead of time (like the Kaza deluxe RIAA special platinum edition), so they have the ability to mess you with when you piss them off. Which is obviously stupid, but got me thinking.
On a more serious note, what if the RIAA set up their own file sharing network, which (bear with me here), was actually good enough that people would use it? They're supposed to be here to help promote art (in it's audio form) and distribute recordings. Why don't they set up a service to do so? It could go through their central servers, so they could monitor the files and make sure that nobody was downloading non-free files. And if you wanted to download non-free files, you could pay for them. The fatal flaw is that they'd have to encourage enough good artists to make songs available for free (the way many will do with live recordings or a limited number of sample songs), and/or charge reasonable prices for non-free songs. Capitalism is a double edged sword: you can charge an arm and a leg for something, bun only as long as people are willing to pay.
Schweet. 1. Hack into people's windows boxes. 2. DDoS annoying politician of your choice. 3. Download some copyrighted material. 4. Victim's machine magically self destructs, taking any evidence with it. 5. Rinse. 6. Repeat.
This is why I'll be running for office. I may not be the best politician in the world, but I could do better than Hatch with both thumbs up my ass.
"Huh... The sensors are showing a shift in load distribution from seat 32A to 32B. "Wasn't that the gentleman who just asked for a blanket? "I think so. And now the reading is oscillating at around 0.5 Hz. Odd....
This is just begging for a computer vision system to render your reflection, but delete the person sneaking up behind you. Then, once they scare the shit out of you, it switches back to mirror mode so the other person shows up again.
I don't know how they are going to prevent people from simply disabling the GPS device...
Off the top of my head, they could build a small chip which holds some short clip of popular music, but is encrypted as long as the GPS is getting a signal. By tampering with the GPS antenna, you circumvent the encryption. Later that night, the DMCA encryption squad raids your house and hauls you off.
Just a though. (I do love living in a police state, though, don't you? Among other things, it makes it easier to answer questions about 'but how would the goverment enforce this fuckwitted idea?')
Katy Johnson... uses her site to promote what she calls her "platform of character education."
Uh-huh. Really. She's clearly evil because her site is in flash and has one of the longest and most boring skip-intro's I've ever seen. And all though there's plenty to nitpick (although I like the 25 and 36 star American flags- I was just thinking that most of those states in the middle are useless anyway), one thing bugs the shit out of me: the cast of characters for her comic strip. And not just the fact that they're all skinny and well endowed (and thus excelent role models for the young girls I assume this is aimed at). I take offense at Bekka's intro
Bekka studies a lot and the kids mock her... She doesn't care; She's going to be a doctor...
Hrm. Let's promote the American cultural tradition of mocknig smart people. That's a great approach to character education. Seriously- when I was in high school I wasn't even cool enough to wear a black trench coat. The last thing I feel like seeing is a washed up beauty queen reinforcing the whole 'pick on the nerd' mentality. I think the US is singularly fucked up in the cultural assumption that smart guys don't get girls* and that you have to be some kind of steroid swilling football watching smooth talking asshole to automatically get women. Why are there never movies where the football player wishes he could get the cheerleader away from the chess team captain? But I guess beauty pagents, and people like Katy, are direct results of this culture, and thus blindly propogating it. Sigh. I think I should go to sleep before I get into my theories about the pick-on-the-nerd mentality leading to school shootings.
*or rather that smart people don't get members of their desired group.
Her website seems to claim that she was 'Miss Vermont 1999' and 'Miss Vermont USA 2001'. I guess I could see the distinction between 'Miss Vermont' and 'Miss Vermont USA' being overlooked by the fact checker. I certainly couldn't care less.
Re:12v Power Over CAT5?
on
PeltierBeer
·
· Score: 1
So, there are a couple of people who have schemes for running power over cat5. As long as you pick 2 of the 4 unused wires, this isn't really a problem. I run my phone through the blue pair on the cat5 coming into my room- means I only have one cable snaking through the hall. While marking it certainly wouldn't be a bad idea, I'd say anyone who unplugs my beer and tries to plug the cable into a laptop deserves whatever they get.
If the thermocouple ran over the cat5, you could have the power supply modulate the power to the peltier, and see what effect that had on the temperature. Full glass = lots of thermal mass = small fluctuations in peltier power don't effect beer temperature. Dangerously low on beer = low thermal mass = power fluctuations effect beer temp (although you'd want to have the smallest detectable fluctuations here...). When the system recognizes that you're running low, it activates the beerbot to come outside and replenish your supply.
And as a sidenote w.r.t. a previous comment on drinking Guinness quickly, I have to agree that Irish Car Bombs are the way to go for that. Tasty....
I'm reading Mitnick's book right now- I can't say I reccomend it. So far it just seems like 'how not to give out your password For Dummies'. It has all these little "Lingo" and "Mitnick Message" sections to try and clue you in on key points, in case you didn't pick up from the stories that you shouldn't give out potentially sensitive info to people you don't know. Maybe it get's better later on, but up to like chapter 8 it's kinda boring.
We finally got some webcams set up so we could see his parking spot and the desk he likes to work at. For a bit we had one in his actual office. And it's _still_ impossible to track him down...
I've always thought that different sizes of bills would be inconvenient, but having the length of the bill be proportional to the denomination could be useful. Easier for the blind (although they'd probably need a special ruler unless the differences were inconveniently large). It would also prevent the bleach-and-reprint counterfitting technique.
The laser beam would be pretty narrow- a cordless drill and a big old drill bit should clear a nice 1.5 inch diameter path between nodes. I guess to line the hole up, you'd need GPS readings and a laser pointer, and then you just go out at dusk and drill a hole through anything the laser hits.
Those aren't really all-else-being-equal cases. New immigrants probably have to take a TOEFL anyways. That should be used to judge their projected ability to communicate in English, not the SAT which is given to native speakers. Part of life is information recall (similar to spelling), not just problem solving. If someone really is better at problem solving but has bad spelling, they'll probably kick ass on the multiple choice sections anyways. And I think you're discounting the grammar and coherent argument portions. I read stuff all the time which just doesn't make sense. Sometimes I'm willing to sit down and try to deduce what the author meant, sometimes I'm not, and sometimes it's a lost cause. Word's grammar checker still isn't good enough to fix everything (and I'll bet you your pint of choice that it never will be;-)
Slashdot Mirror
It's not very often that I can't find anything better to do with my time than contribute money to the Entertainment Industry (meaning MPAA, RIAA, etc, not small live shows or indie bands). Granted, movies are entertaining. So is talking to people. Or sports. Or use your imagination, if you have any left. Why the hell should I want mass produced industrial entertainment anyways? Art has been around far longer the means to make insane amounts of money off it.
Take your movies and shove 'em.
My friend has a tibook, and when his power adapter thingie somehow got a hole in the cord, they were apparently very nice about replacing it, esp when he mentioned he had apple care.
If you have a dead pixel, thought, forget about it. Apple doesn't consider pixels defective when they dont do what theyre supposed to, just 'anomolous'. You need a bunch of 'anomolies" before its a defect. I had one on an iBook. No such problem on the armada i had before or the lifebook i have now. I realize it's kinda luck of the draw, but by the time i pay close to $1800 for a laptop (w/ drive, memory, applecare, etc), I want it to work, dammit.
But you DONT buy music. You buy a license to use it.
Oppenheim kinda covered this when he and Lessig were taking questions. Here's the basic idea:
Q: When I buy music, am I buying a physical object which stores music, or am I buying a license to enjoy the music on that object?
A: No.
This is why I no longer buy products of the entertainment industry. (well, almost never).
Pogo is, iirc, another item (besides the already mentioned tungsten) which fits a phone into a pda like thing and requires you to use a headset.
And I wouldn't get one. I have a handspring treo 180, which seems to suffer from a problem with the connections to the speaker in the flip lid. For about a month (it took me a while to get around to having it replaced), I had to carry my hands free adapter around with me to hear the other person on the phone. It's such a pain to get the wire out and untangled that I generally either had to flip the treo open and tell the person to hang on (they could still hear me fine), or I'd miss the call and have to call back. Even if it is a little big, the treo is still more usable as a flip phone than with the headset wire.
In an ideal world, though, I would like a bluetooth headset which could connect to a pda/wide-area-wireless(phone) device (as well as a landline base station or desktop computer VoIP system).
and my completely unbiased (yeah, right) opinion tells me it will work to our advantage by driving more customers to us.
I got a new phone almost exactly a year ago, so my service commitment expires any day. If it weren't for having to change my phone number, I'd drop Cingular in a second. I know all the carriers are in the business of dicking customers out of their money, but cingular's rates, service (coverage, etc) and customer service are astoundingly bad.
Hopefully I can switch carriers on Nov 25th...
We used to have web boards for some classes in colloge. You were supposed to read the material and post a comment or question about it ahead of time, which could be used to drive discussion in class.
One practice was to wait until shortly before class started, check the discussion board, pick a comment by someone you didn't like, and post a comment about how you disagreed with everything they said. I could see how that kind of environment could get ugly on a slashcode site.
That being said, if everyone had some mod points, and the prof did a reasonable job of checking for abuses, I think it could work. Most people would think twice about posting obnoxious trolls or flamebait if they're being graded on their participation.
No matter what concept for curriculum one comes up with, as long as the students can get onto the Internet, they will
So long as you have control of the network connections (ethernet or 802.11), you can prevent them from accessing anything not relavent to the course. It might be sufficient to simply make it difficult to connect to outside sites (use a dhcp serever which provides an address for a 'special' dns server, or block or delay packets from anything not on a whitelist for that particular lecture.
Which is not to say that you should. Some people go to class to keep abreast of what's going on, not to actually learn from the lectuer. They may already know the material, or learn better by reading or having a friend explain it than by listening to a lecturer drone on. If they're not hurting anything, let people chat.
HP Labs had their Websigns like two years ago. You have a PDA with a GPS and a compass. You point it at stuff, it pulls up info or lets you interact. We've been working with them on ways of getting away from using a GPS and compass, as they don't work so well indoors.
I think CMU or MIT had like a headmounted version, probably on slashdot a year ago?
To them music isn't art, it's a product that they can own and profit from.
But they can only do that as long as people are willing to pay. If they go around acting like robber-barrons (exploiting their workers (musicians), illegally fixing prices, etc), people will have few qualms about copying music instead of paying exorbinant prices. I think it's adapt-or-die for the entertainment industry. We know they don't really buy their line about filesharing jeapordizing the future of music. Neither does anybody else- music has been around about as long as human civilization. They just happen to make money selling it , and for them to survive, they either have to bring their prices down and consumers' payment ethic up (done by not looking like evil corporations), or they just have to buy a police state so that they can maintain the status quo.
I'd rather not see the US's current transition towards being a police state go any further, so I think that the record companies should attempt to be so nice that people would feel bad copying their songs, and so cheap that they won't be motivated to.
I know that isn't going to happen, but I just wanted to throw out a suggestion for a peaceful solution.
I'm colorblind, you insensitive clod.
Well, there's a serious side to this idea, and a stupid one. The stupid side is that if the copyright nazis really want to get you, they're gonna have to have you install some kind of malware ahead of time (like the Kaza deluxe RIAA special platinum edition), so they have the ability to mess you with when you piss them off. Which is obviously stupid, but got me thinking.
On a more serious note, what if the RIAA set up their own file sharing network, which (bear with me here), was actually good enough that people would use it? They're supposed to be here to help promote art (in it's audio form) and distribute recordings. Why don't they set up a service to do so? It could go through their central servers, so they could monitor the files and make sure that nobody was downloading non-free files. And if you wanted to download non-free files, you could pay for them.
The fatal flaw is that they'd have to encourage enough good artists to make songs available for free (the way many will do with live recordings or a limited number of sample songs), and/or charge reasonable prices for non-free songs. Capitalism is a double edged sword: you can charge an arm and a leg for something, bun only as long as people are willing to pay.
Schweet.
1. Hack into people's windows boxes.
2. DDoS annoying politician of your choice.
3. Download some copyrighted material.
4. Victim's machine magically self destructs, taking any evidence with it.
5. Rinse.
6. Repeat.
This is why I'll be running for office. I may not be the best politician in the world, but I could do better than Hatch with both thumbs up my ass.
"Huh... The sensors are showing a shift in load distribution from seat 32A to 32B.
"Wasn't that the gentleman who just asked for a blanket?
"I think so. And now the reading is oscillating at around 0.5 Hz. Odd....
This is just begging for a computer vision system to render your reflection, but delete the person sneaking up behind you. Then, once they scare the shit out of you, it switches back to mirror mode so the other person shows up again.
I don't know how they are going to prevent people from simply disabling the GPS device...
Off the top of my head, they could build a small chip which holds some short clip of popular music, but is encrypted as long as the GPS is getting a signal. By tampering with the GPS antenna, you circumvent the encryption. Later that night, the DMCA encryption squad raids your house and hauls you off.
Just a though. (I do love living in a police state, though, don't you? Among other things, it makes it easier to answer questions about 'but how would the goverment enforce this fuckwitted idea?')
Katy Johnson ... uses her site to promote what she calls her "platform of character education."
...
Uh-huh. Really. She's clearly evil because her site is in flash and has one of the longest and most boring skip-intro's I've ever seen. And all though there's plenty to nitpick (although I like the 25 and 36 star American flags- I was just thinking that most of those states in the middle are useless anyway), one thing bugs the shit out of me: the cast of characters for her comic strip. And not just the fact that they're all skinny and well endowed (and thus excelent role models for the young girls I assume this is aimed at). I take offense at Bekka's intro
Bekka studies a lot and the kids mock her
She doesn't care; She's going to be a doctor...
Hrm. Let's promote the American cultural tradition of mocknig smart people. That's a great approach to character education. Seriously- when I was in high school I wasn't even cool enough to wear a black trench coat. The last thing I feel like seeing is a washed up beauty queen reinforcing the whole 'pick on the nerd' mentality. I think the US is singularly fucked up in the cultural assumption that smart guys don't get girls* and that you have to be some kind of steroid swilling football watching smooth talking asshole to automatically get women. Why are there never movies where the football player wishes he could get the cheerleader away from the chess team captain?
But I guess beauty pagents, and people like Katy, are direct results of this culture, and thus blindly propogating it.
Sigh. I think I should go to sleep before I get into my theories about the pick-on-the-nerd mentality leading to school shootings.
*or rather that smart people don't get members of their desired group.
Her website seems to claim that she was 'Miss Vermont 1999' and 'Miss Vermont USA 2001'. I guess I could see the distinction between 'Miss Vermont' and 'Miss Vermont USA' being overlooked by the fact checker. I certainly couldn't care less.
So, there are a couple of people who have schemes for running power over cat5. As long as you pick 2 of the 4 unused wires, this isn't really a problem. I run my phone through the blue pair on the cat5 coming into my room- means I only have one cable snaking through the hall. While marking it certainly wouldn't be a bad idea, I'd say anyone who unplugs my beer and tries to plug the cable into a laptop deserves whatever they get.
If the thermocouple ran over the cat5, you could have the power supply modulate the power to the peltier, and see what effect that had on the temperature. Full glass = lots of thermal mass = small fluctuations in peltier power don't effect beer temperature. Dangerously low on beer = low thermal mass = power fluctuations effect beer temp (although you'd want to have the smallest detectable fluctuations here...). When the system recognizes that you're running low, it activates the beerbot to come outside and replenish your supply.
And as a sidenote w.r.t. a previous comment on drinking Guinness quickly, I have to agree that Irish Car Bombs are the way to go for that. Tasty....
came across this on everything2. Might be worth perusing.
I'm reading Mitnick's book right now- I can't say I reccomend it. So far it just seems like 'how not to give out your password For Dummies'. It has all these little "Lingo" and "Mitnick Message" sections to try and clue you in on key points, in case you didn't pick up from the stories that you shouldn't give out potentially sensitive info to people you don't know. Maybe it get's better later on, but up to like chapter 8 it's kinda boring.
We finally got some webcams set up so we could see his parking spot and the desk he likes to work at. For a bit we had one in his actual office. And it's _still_ impossible to track him down...
I've always thought that different sizes of bills would be inconvenient, but having the length of the bill be proportional to the denomination could be useful. Easier for the blind (although they'd probably need a special ruler unless the differences were inconveniently large). It would also prevent the bleach-and-reprint counterfitting technique.
The laser beam would be pretty narrow- a cordless drill and a big old drill bit should clear a nice 1.5 inch diameter path between nodes. I guess to line the hole up, you'd need GPS readings and a laser pointer, and then you just go out at dusk and drill a hole through anything the laser hits.
Those aren't really all-else-being-equal cases. New immigrants probably have to take a TOEFL anyways. That should be used to judge their projected ability to communicate in English, not the SAT which is given to native speakers. Part of life is information recall (similar to spelling), not just problem solving. If someone really is better at problem solving but has bad spelling, they'll probably kick ass on the multiple choice sections anyways. And I think you're discounting the grammar and coherent argument portions. I read stuff all the time which just doesn't make sense. Sometimes I'm willing to sit down and try to deduce what the author meant, sometimes I'm not, and sometimes it's a lost cause. Word's grammar checker still isn't good enough to fix everything (and I'll bet you your pint of choice that it never will be ;-)