Does anyone else find the idea of essay questions on the SAT at least, idiotic? Not much more so than the idea of a multiple choice test determining the rest of your life. Although it's impossible to grade essasy on a truly objective scale, they still provide useful information. All else being equal, the student who can spell at least half their words correctly, form sentences with something resembling proper grammar, carry a coherent argument for more than a sentence at a time, and write somewhat legibly (pre-med students aside) will probably do better in college.
There are decent ways around that verbosity- if you have a sensor net you want accessible, you're probably going through some manner of gateway already, which can be responsible for the XML encoding. There are XML compression schemes- I lost some of my links, but the one I was looking tended to get better compression on XML encoded data than normal compression on the un-encoded data, because it could rearrange and compress all of the metadata, as well as using the metadata to select optimal compressors for the data itslef. You can google for other XML comression schemes- I could put in links but i wouldn't know what I was talking about.
I see millions of users and companies who would have to change applications as the real problem.
If the concern is that current mail clients won't support improved protocols, what's to stop someone from writing an 'email proxy server' which automagically sets itself to handle communications under whatever shiny new protocol (or better use of the old ones) we're talking about, and then sets the user's client to contact it at 127.0.0.1?
Although I agree that the database people are being way to whiny, I would have thought that after all the problems with Phoenix, the Moz team could have come up with something that returns zero results on google. My suggestion is lizzardlite. Or tinymoz. Or somethning. I realize that there aren't very many people who a) would use mozilla or it's variants b) have heard of firebird the database and c) are likely to confuse them, but there may be people who aren't so computer savvy for whom it's a problem. I'd just think that after all the previous headaches, it would be worth choosing something which wouldn't cause namespace collisions.
All sorts of places have great kids pages: You could try the NRA or the CIA, for instance.
More seriously, you could try somethings like HowStuffWorks.com or project-oriented sites like PARTS or FIRST (yes, I have a robotics bias) that could get them involved in activities beyond just websurfing.
I'll betcha places like Smithsonian, National Geo, NPR, PBS or other traditional educational media organizations are good places to look as well. I swear BBC has a kid's oriented news page. It's just too bad 2600 doesn't have a kid's page...
I think there are two main levels which have to be considered. Roughly, there's the could-destroy-all-life-on-earth level, and the could-destroy-the-universe level. The destroying life level is the one where the 'what will this be used for' concern is valid. "I think the odds are no better than 50-50 that our present civilization on Earth will survive to the end of the present century," Rees says. Maybe so. We've had the ability to fuck all life on Earth for a few decades, and we've been to the brink of using it. Hopefully we're wiser for it. In that way, our 'present civilization' should be constantly evolving. We can all agree that at least something is wrong with civilization (although we may not agree what). Over time, civilization will change, maybe gradually, maybe suddenly. If we don't have the humanity to handle our technology, everything may change very suddenly. But in the worst case, we'll probably wipe out life on Earth as we know it, and in a half million years the cockroaches and anything else that survived will start a new civilization. The Roman empire rose up, changed a bit, but didn't survive. In certain respects we're only recently evolving to the same levels that they did. That's kinda how civilization works. Ripping a hole in spacetime that can destroy the universe is different. You don't want to go into your basement and mix a bunch of chemicals together and call it 'fuel research' without at least taking some chemistry classes. I think this is the more important aspect of the article, not 'we shouldn't do research into things could could be used for terrorism.' This type of problem is also less constrained by the 'someone else will do it' arguments: outlaws probably don't have the resources to build a gigantic supercollider (or whatever you happen to need in order to create a black hole). Like the fuel research, we should definately study nanotech, advanced physics, etc., just be damn sure we know what we're doing and aren't going to cause a big bang (or get sucked into an alternate dimension with vampire leeches and shit).
Back in the day you could get Handheld scanner things that you just drag across a documnent. They probably still exist. You could just put a linear optical image sensor along the edge of a PDA, an optical mouse-type sensor at each end to see how fast it's moving, and drag it across a document. Probably hell on your batter life, but assumably you're not doing this all day. Or you could build it into an ipaq sleeve with extra battery. Still, neat idea.
In the interest of pointless nitpicking, USAPATRIOT stands for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism. (And I thought I spend too much time coming up with useless shit). Truncating it to Patriot is kinda like referring to TCP/IP simply as CP/IP (and there are probably just as few people who are likely to get really upset). Still, I like to think of it as the 'ooosa pat riot' act.
"The advertisement is the most truthful part of a newspaper." - Thomas Jefferson
My, how far we've come. I wish more people took the time to return or reject charges for things which don't perform as advertised, but I'm guilty myself. It's just corporate america dicking thousands of people out of a few buck each...
'xactly. There's some way you could get the list of books they have, probably by asking the right person (otherwise you may need a script to querry http://catalog.loc.gov/). That way you have correct spellings, ISBNs, etc. Then you have a database for people to add reviews, synopses, etc. to.
I ordered a 12.1 iBook from terrasoft in december- in the end I was so displeased with it that I gave it to my parents as a replacement for their revision A iMac, to run in OSX and not boot to Yellow Dog. Certainly not everything was Terrasoft's fault (I'd be ok with apple's refusal to replace units with dead pixels if it said anything about that in the warranty), but it took longer than they said to get it to me, they didn't configure the machine as I asked, didn't include the passwords when they shipped it to me, didn't properly support the usb mouse they sold with it, and when I sent it back for reconfiguration it took a while. The engineer was nice enough to take the time to set up OpenOffice, but that's supposed to be an included package. I realize that mouse support and such are under development and hard to configure correctly, but if i wanted a not-quite-correctly-configured system i would have done it myself. Ok, done ranting. Long story short, i'd try buying an apple and putting debian or mandrake on it if you want PPC linux.
Just so long as you're not a chicken...
on
Soundless Music?
·
· Score: 3, Funny
"True story: 7 Hz is the resonant frequency of a chicken's skull cavity. This was determined empirically in Australia, where a new factory generating 7-Hz tones was located too close to a chicken ranch: When the factory started up, all the chickens died.
From Borland's Turbo C Reference Guide..."
The internet says it's true, and that's good enough for me.
consumers would... start looking for software that doesn't have a binding license attached
I was buying stuff at Frys for Xmas, and the extended warranty on one product had a 3 page contract with it, including the clause about the warranty not covering accidental damage. Unfortunately, I wasn't going to skip giving my mom a present because of it, but i did take my sweet time reading the thing before signing it. The clerk said i was the first person she'd seen read the warranty contract. (It was a camcorder, actually, but I think this would apply similarly to software lisences. And luckily, my dad bought her one also, so i returned it right after xmas). Point being, you have to agree to stupid terms for just about everything: cell phones, internet service, software, warranties. Bank accounts come with 5mm thick booklets in 3 point font. Buying a car involves a goodly fraction of a dead tree. I don't even want to think about buying a house. People just consider signing their rigths away to be the cost of doing business. Sure, you could maintain your right to expect some guaranteed goods or services for your money, so long as you want to buy a tent, cash, and live in a riverbed. In the end, people assume that whatever they're agreeing to is reasonable, and that otherwise, it would be illegal. I hope this suit proves this to be the case.
Perhaps, but free speech does not shield you from the law, it only states that such speech cannot be banned.
The entire point of something like this going before the courts is to decide if it's legal or not. If the court says it's legal, then there is no 'shielding from the law.' You can't whine about something being illegal unless there's a law that the courts think prohibits it.
I saw Clarke speak on Tuesday- I was encouraged by his statement on privacy rights, as well as his assertion that we (consumers and the federal government) shouldn't buy crappy software. I think he actually used the word "crappy", and he was definitely referring to MS (this was like 2 days after Slammer). He called for microsoft to actually demonstrate some improvement in security from that PR stunt last Feb. But alas. I wish I colud say I was surprised...
So now i can pick up used copies of the 'inferior' versions of LOTR, Matrix, Tron, Pulp Fiction, etc for cheap, and not feel so bad about supproting the Hollywood Machine? Cool....
the internet sez contact with Challenger was lost about 73 seconds after takeoff, which would have left a bit over 2 minutes until an impact at 207 seconds. Still a horrible way to die, though.
Oh yeah, my other point- non infringing downloading of copyrighted works. If we are indeed paying for a license to enjoy these copyrighted works, that license shouldn't be tied to the plastic disk the works come on. I have a list of like 15 CDs i've lost/misplaced/scratched beyond use, and if i were to buy more CDs from RIAA artists, they'd be used and potentially scratched. I'd rather have the right to download good digital copies of these. I'd rather that the material is just there, and people don't illegally copy it because they can buy it at a reasonable price. But if it's there and they don't illegally copy it because they could do time, that's still better than it not being there. But yeah, in the end, the recording industry is still a bunch of ass clowns.
So i agree that the punishment doesn't fit the crime, but consider this: the point of this law is to punish the people who are actually infringing. It doesn't involve flooding the network with crap. It doesn't legalize the RIAA haxoring your computer looking for files. It has no effect on people using p2p networks for trading free (libre) music. It's not a proposal to cripple computer hardware (CBTPA, DRM). I'm not so good at legaleese (yet), but the gist seems to be that it clarifies penalties for infringement. While i agree that the penalties could be overly severe, the ones mentioned are maxima, and i would hope, at least, that you have to guilty of some serious infringement to get the full penalty.
I have to agree that we'd be better off just sharing legal music across p2p networks and let the RIAA go fuck themselves. Back in college i pulled a bunch of songs off of other people's share drives. I since bought CDs of most of those. But now i know better. If they don't want me buying their music, so be it. I just wish they'd blame their shitty sales on their shitty products and consumer-hostile attitude. Just my 2 cents.
The phone system actually supports hex dialing. It's not hard to find rants about it. It wouldn't be so hard to put just one digit into use, say for modem numbers which the average human never needs to remember (and those who do memorize modem numbers will be able to comprehend hex). Just adding 1 digit nearly doubles the number of 7 digit permutations (11^7 / 10^7 ~ 1.9).
Either that, or use a DNS like system to assign names to number/extension pairs.
I said that last time cell phones came up, and someone replied that there is a bluetooth protocol for establishing 'vibrate zones' or somesuch. But it was while ago.
The other thing i feel obligated to point out every time this comes up is the lack of ringer scheduling. I have a Treo. It has my schedule in it. It knows when i have class better than i do. Why the FSCK can't it turn the riger off during appointments, and back on afterwards? Even phones which sync to Outlook for phone numbers could do this on a limited basis.
And movie timers? You could have a single phone app which give you movie times for the n closest theatres, and turns your ringer off during the 163 minutes of the one you select.
Couldn't you collide some matter and antimatter? If you had some mass and then it co-annihilates, it should be like turning gravity off. I'm sure the resulting gravity change is small, but there's a possibility that it could be measureable.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone else find the idea of essay questions on the SAT at least, idiotic?
Not much more so than the idea of a multiple choice test determining the rest of your life. Although it's impossible to grade essasy on a truly objective scale, they still provide useful information. All else being equal, the student who can spell at least half their words correctly, form sentences with something resembling proper grammar, carry a coherent argument for more than a sentence at a time, and write somewhat legibly (pre-med students aside) will probably do better in college.
All your pets' names are belong to Microsoft?
Seriously, given the number of people who use a pet's name for a password, displaying a list of them on the screen seems like a huge security risk.
There are decent ways around that verbosity- if you have a sensor net you want accessible, you're probably going through some manner of gateway already, which can be responsible for the XML encoding. There are XML compression schemes- I lost some of my links, but the one I was looking tended to get better compression on XML encoded data than normal compression on the un-encoded data, because it could rearrange and compress all of the metadata, as well as using the metadata to select optimal compressors for the data itslef. You can google for other XML comression schemes- I could put in links but i wouldn't know what I was talking about.
I see millions of users and companies who would have to change applications as the real problem.
If the concern is that current mail clients won't support improved protocols, what's to stop someone from writing an 'email proxy server' which automagically sets itself to handle communications under whatever shiny new protocol (or better use of the old ones) we're talking about, and then sets the user's client to contact it at 127.0.0.1?
Although I agree that the database people are being way to whiny, I would have thought that after all the problems with Phoenix, the Moz team could have come up with something that returns zero results on google. My suggestion is lizzardlite. Or tinymoz. Or somethning. I realize that there aren't very many people who a) would use mozilla or it's variants b) have heard of firebird the database and c) are likely to confuse them, but there may be people who aren't so computer savvy for whom it's a problem. I'd just think that after all the previous headaches, it would be worth choosing something which wouldn't cause namespace collisions.
All sorts of places have great kids pages: You could try the NRA or the CIA, for instance.
More seriously, you could try somethings like HowStuffWorks.com or project-oriented sites like PARTS or FIRST (yes, I have a robotics bias) that could get them involved in activities beyond just websurfing.
I'll betcha places like Smithsonian, National Geo, NPR, PBS or other traditional educational media organizations are good places to look as well. I swear BBC has a kid's oriented news page. It's just too bad 2600 doesn't have a kid's page...
I think there are two main levels which have to be considered. Roughly, there's the could-destroy-all-life-on-earth level, and the could-destroy-the-universe level.
The destroying life level is the one where the 'what will this be used for' concern is valid. "I think the odds are no better than 50-50 that our present civilization on Earth will survive to the end of the present century," Rees says. Maybe so. We've had the ability to fuck all life on Earth for a few decades, and we've been to the brink of using it. Hopefully we're wiser for it. In that way, our 'present civilization' should be constantly evolving. We can all agree that at least something is wrong with civilization (although we may not agree what). Over time, civilization will change, maybe gradually, maybe suddenly. If we don't have the humanity to handle our technology, everything may change very suddenly. But in the worst case, we'll probably wipe out life on Earth as we know it, and in a half million years the cockroaches and anything else that survived will start a new civilization. The Roman empire rose up, changed a bit, but didn't survive. In certain respects we're only recently evolving to the same levels that they did. That's kinda how civilization works.
Ripping a hole in spacetime that can destroy the universe is different. You don't want to go into your basement and mix a bunch of chemicals together and call it 'fuel research' without at least taking some chemistry classes. I think this is the more important aspect of the article, not 'we shouldn't do research into things could could be used for terrorism.' This type of problem is also less constrained by the 'someone else will do it' arguments: outlaws probably don't have the resources to build a gigantic supercollider (or whatever you happen to need in order to create a black hole). Like the fuel research, we should definately study nanotech, advanced physics, etc., just be damn sure we know what we're doing and aren't going to cause a big bang (or get sucked into an alternate dimension with vampire leeches and shit).
Back in the day you could get Handheld scanner things that you just drag across a documnent. They probably still exist. You could just put a linear optical image sensor along the edge of a PDA, an optical mouse-type sensor at each end to see how fast it's moving, and drag it across a document. Probably hell on your batter life, but assumably you're not doing this all day. Or you could build it into an ipaq sleeve with extra battery.
Still, neat idea.
In the interest of pointless nitpicking, USAPATRIOT stands for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism. (And I thought I spend too much time coming up with useless shit). Truncating it to Patriot is kinda like referring to TCP/IP simply as CP/IP (and there are probably just as few people who are likely to get really upset). Still, I like to think of it as the 'ooosa pat riot' act.
"The advertisement is the most truthful part of a newspaper." - Thomas Jefferson
My, how far we've come. I wish more people took the time to return or reject charges for things which don't perform as advertised, but I'm guilty myself. It's just corporate america dicking thousands of people out of a few buck each...
'xactly. There's some way you could get the list of books they have, probably by asking the right person (otherwise you may need a script to querry http://catalog.loc.gov/). That way you have correct spellings, ISBNs, etc. Then you have a database for people to add reviews, synopses, etc. to.
I ordered a 12.1 iBook from terrasoft in december- in the end I was so displeased with it that I gave it to my parents as a replacement for their revision A iMac, to run in OSX and not boot to Yellow Dog. Certainly not everything was Terrasoft's fault (I'd be ok with apple's refusal to replace units with dead pixels if it said anything about that in the warranty), but it took longer than they said to get it to me, they didn't configure the machine as I asked, didn't include the passwords when they shipped it to me, didn't properly support the usb mouse they sold with it, and when I sent it back for reconfiguration it took a while. The engineer was nice enough to take the time to set up OpenOffice, but that's supposed to be an included package. I realize that mouse support and such are under development and hard to configure correctly, but if i wanted a not-quite-correctly-configured system i would have done it myself.
Ok, done ranting. Long story short, i'd try buying an apple and putting debian or mandrake on it if you want PPC linux.
"True story: 7 Hz is the resonant frequency of a chicken's skull cavity. This was determined empirically in Australia, where a new factory generating 7-Hz tones was located too close to a chicken ranch: When the factory started up, all the chickens died.
From Borland's Turbo C Reference Guide..."
The internet says it's true, and that's good enough for me.
consumers would ... start looking for software that doesn't have a binding license attached
I was buying stuff at Frys for Xmas, and the extended warranty on one product had a 3 page contract with it, including the clause about the warranty not covering accidental damage. Unfortunately, I wasn't going to skip giving my mom a present because of it, but i did take my sweet time reading the thing before signing it. The clerk said i was the first person she'd seen read the warranty contract. (It was a camcorder, actually, but I think this would apply similarly to software lisences. And luckily, my dad bought her one also, so i returned it right after xmas). Point being, you have to agree to stupid terms for just about everything: cell phones, internet service, software, warranties. Bank accounts come with 5mm thick booklets in 3 point font. Buying a car involves a goodly fraction of a dead tree. I don't even want to think about buying a house. People just consider signing their rigths away to be the cost of doing business. Sure, you could maintain your right to expect some guaranteed goods or services for your money, so long as you want to buy a tent, cash, and live in a riverbed. In the end, people assume that whatever they're agreeing to is reasonable, and that otherwise, it would be illegal. I hope this suit proves this to be the case.
Perhaps, but free speech does not shield you from the law, it only states that such speech cannot be banned.
The entire point of something like this going before the courts is to decide if it's legal or not. If the court says it's legal, then there is no 'shielding from the law.' You can't whine about something being illegal unless there's a law that the courts think prohibits it.
I saw Clarke speak on Tuesday- I was encouraged by his statement on privacy rights, as well as his assertion that we (consumers and the federal government) shouldn't buy crappy software. I think he actually used the word "crappy", and he was definitely referring to MS (this was like 2 days after Slammer). He called for microsoft to actually demonstrate some improvement in security from that PR stunt last Feb.
But alas.
I wish I colud say I was surprised...
So now i can pick up used copies of the 'inferior' versions of LOTR, Matrix, Tron, Pulp Fiction, etc for cheap, and not feel so bad about supproting the Hollywood Machine? Cool....
Object D," hit the water 207 seconds after launch
the internet sez contact with Challenger was lost about 73 seconds after takeoff, which would have left a bit over 2 minutes until an impact at 207 seconds. Still a horrible way to die, though.
yeah!
(How often does that happen?)
Oh yeah, my other point- non infringing downloading of copyrighted works. If we are indeed paying for a license to enjoy these copyrighted works, that license shouldn't be tied to the plastic disk the works come on. I have a list of like 15 CDs i've lost/misplaced/scratched beyond use, and if i were to buy more CDs from RIAA artists, they'd be used and potentially scratched. I'd rather have the right to download good digital copies of these. I'd rather that the material is just there, and people don't illegally copy it because they can buy it at a reasonable price. But if it's there and they don't illegally copy it because they could do time, that's still better than it not being there.
But yeah, in the end, the recording industry is still a bunch of ass clowns.
So i agree that the punishment doesn't fit the crime, but consider this: the point of this law is to punish the people who are actually infringing. It doesn't involve flooding the network with crap. It doesn't legalize the RIAA haxoring your computer looking for files. It has no effect on people using p2p networks for trading free (libre) music. It's not a proposal to cripple computer hardware (CBTPA, DRM). I'm not so good at legaleese (yet), but the gist seems to be that it clarifies penalties for infringement. While i agree that the penalties could be overly severe, the ones mentioned are maxima, and i would hope, at least, that you have to guilty of some serious infringement to get the full penalty.
I have to agree that we'd be better off just sharing legal music across p2p networks and let the RIAA go fuck themselves. Back in college i pulled a bunch of songs off of other people's share drives. I since bought CDs of most of those. But now i know better. If they don't want me buying their music, so be it. I just wish they'd blame their shitty sales on their shitty products and consumer-hostile attitude.
Just my 2 cents.
Perhaps you should RTFA:
"There already have been successful prosecutions under the NET Act of Web pirates--but not of peer-to-peer pirates."
The phone system actually supports hex dialing. It's not hard to find rants about it. It wouldn't be so hard to put just one digit into use, say for modem numbers which the average human never needs to remember (and those who do memorize modem numbers will be able to comprehend hex). Just adding 1 digit nearly doubles the number of 7 digit permutations (11^7 / 10^7 ~ 1.9).
Either that, or use a DNS like system to assign names to number/extension pairs.
I said that last time cell phones came up, and someone replied that there is a bluetooth protocol for establishing 'vibrate zones' or somesuch. But it was while ago.
The other thing i feel obligated to point out every time this comes up is the lack of ringer scheduling. I have a Treo. It has my schedule in it. It knows when i have class better than i do. Why the FSCK can't it turn the riger off during appointments, and back on afterwards? Even phones which sync to Outlook for phone numbers could do this on a limited basis.
And movie timers? You could have a single phone app which give you movie times for the n closest theatres, and turns your ringer off during the 163 minutes of the one you select.
Couldn't you collide some matter and antimatter? If you had some mass and then it co-annihilates, it should be like turning gravity off. I'm sure the resulting gravity change is small, but there's a possibility that it could be measureable.