Now if only these were CD-RWs... and they can keep sending me the nice, reusable cases, just no more paper sleeves, thanks. A friend of mine was actually asked "Buy blank CDs? Why not just use the free ones from AOL?"
There's absolutely no excuse for this. If i tapped into the electric lines coming into my house and hooked a bunch of equipment to the line before it went to the meter, i don't think the FBI would show up with search warrants. I'd probably get my service cut off, and the electric company would ask for a lot of money before reconnecting it. Or if you live near power lines and run a loop under them to pick up power- they're not going to do much more than tell you to stop. Same thing if i tapped into the watermain without paying. They're railroading these people.
I'm tempted to order cable internet just so i can let the guy show up, balk at the draconian contract, and tell him to shove it. Luckily i don't have that much time.
Plaque is also the nasty stuff that builds up on your teeth and in your arteries (like when you eat the type of diet in question). While it's not usually considered a verb, verbing nouns is not all that unusual around here. The idea of 'plaqueing society' is a bit metaphorical, but not incomprehensible.
Now how will I know the best way to enlarge my penis or get that degree from a fine, unaccredited institution?!
Thanks to the majick of Windows Mesenger Serivce, you don't even need email to learn about prestigeous degree opportunities! This information can be (untraceably) delivered straight to your desktop, multiple times per day!
are there harsh export restrictions on smoke detectors using Americium 241? It's not like you take a bunch of 'radioactive stuff' and put it together and make a bomb. Get a clue.
Generally, warming the ice is not the problem- it's the melting part that uses a lot of energy. Accoridng to the internet, the heat of fusion for water is 334.44 J/g, compared to a specific heat 4.18 J/g per deg C. So melting a certain amount of water taks as much energy as raising it's temperature the 80 deg C from -143 to the -63 you're claiming. Not to mention that the higher you bring the temperature, the more energy you'll loose to heat radiation into the surrounding ice. Yeah, drilling through ice sounds silly, but there's a reason.
no, i don't really think that cingular cut handspring a check for $200. Yes, it's all markup. It's all about the MAN trying to squeeze as much profit out of me as possible. That's how capitalism works. If, in general, more people buy things when you price them at $600-$200=$400 (but you still have to pay sales tax on $600) than if you just priced them at $400 to begin with, then that's how things get priced.
The point, though, is that cell phones are not sold for profit. They are given away/subsidized so that service providers can profit on service (which is not a bad business model, until someone chips the harware and fucks with you profit stream). But no service provider is going to subsidize a phone which is designed to aviod using their service whenever possible.
I'd like to have a headset that switches to the best avalable carrier, be that my cell phone, the landline in the lab (where my cell phone doesn't work), 802.11 VoIP, or maybe directly to the headset of the person i'm talking to, if they happen to be in range. Actually, i'd rather that my cell handset did this, but since Cingular covered $200 of it, i don't see it switching to landline or 802.11 VoIP anytime soon.
or anyone who violates the terms of the cease-fire agreement that they made.
I'm not sure that's completely relavent. I wasn't following foreign policy very closely at the time, but i doubt Iraq entered into any cease-fires because they felt like it. If we are going to insist on writing whatever self-serving* rules we want, people will probably agree to play by them as long as we hold a gun to their head, but not much longer. We can come back with the gun 10 years later, but i think we'd be better off coming up with a set of rules that everybody agrees with.
*(do you think we'd have cared as much about Kuwait if we didn't have some commercial interest? Have we done much about Tibet recently? Or any one of a number of places in Africa? Or hell, human right violations right here in the good ol' USofA?)
Off of Yahoo News "Schroeder's first move in what is expected to be a gradual reconciliation effort was to say that Herta Daeubler-Gmelin, the justice minister who last week allegedly said President Bush's desire to distract from domestic politics with war recalled Hitler's methods, would not be in his new cabinet." She of course later tried to explain that she was not trying to compare Bush to Hitler, but still got canned for it.
So we should be invading Iraq so we can stop a dictator from running roughshod other the rights of the poor of his country?
Well, either we should or we shouldn't, but if we are going to invade countries to overturn oppressive regimes, we should base the decisions on the extent of the human rights violations being committed, not our oil/money interests, and we should stop putting oppressive regimes into power to support our oil/money interests.
It's the fact that the government lies about _why_ they invade countries that's annoying. Protecting human rights is great, but that's pretty clearly not what we're up to. But anybody who opresses their citizens _and_ threatens our oil supply is gonna find themselves in a world of hurt.
In other news, dialing unlisted phone numbers without the express written consent of the number's owner is now a criminal offense.
Krikey. I just don't know where they find people this stupid. Same goes for this deep linking crap. Maybe people should have to pass some sort of test before they get to use the Internet. Otherwise the have to use AOL until they at least understand that anything you post to the web could be publically accessible.
I saw one of these a few months ago, along with a prototype of their phone os. It was cool shit. I was impressed. I nearly faltered in my flaming passionate anti-MS hatred (the one with the big rusty acid dripping spikes sticking out of it). It was like the time i set my Win2k laptop down next to an IRDA-enabled LaserJet, and i could just print to it. Both times, I was impressed with what MS had done. But on both those occasions, the same thing occured to me which brought me back to my normal state: if it weren't for microsoft, i could probably have done this years ago. I'm pretty sure one of my dad's friends had a tablet on his desktop back in the early 80s. I was like 6 at the time so it's a but fuzzy, but tablet technology has been under development for most of my lifetime. And IR data? My parent's replaced the old B&W tv with no VHF knob around the time of the 1984 olympics, and the new tv came with and IR remote. Granted, your standard TV remote doesn't do hundreds of Kbits/sec, but the ideas and the basic technology were there. We needn't have waited for microsoft to decide they were good and ready to support _______. If they didn't take such rigorous steps to destroy competition in the computer sector, I think we'd be years ahead of where we are now. Microsoft didn't start the computer revolution, they just bullied their way into an illegal monopoly over it. Sure, WinXP TabletPC edition is cool. But for all the money we've given them, we should expect more than this.
Ok, done now. (And for the record, vague references to "we" are basically intedned to include the whole world, because the advancement of computer technology affects or will affect most of Earth's population in the near future. The idea of naming it the "Information Age" is that IT is at least as important to human history as stone, bronze, industry, and nuclear technology. )
My question is this: How is it Nintendo et. al. can program an incredibly skilled Tetris AI, but scientists at MIT cannot?
First, a disclaimer- IHNRTFA. But still, my guess is that the optimal solution is NP-hard. That is, given the exact sequence of blocks, give the sequence of moves which will get rid of them all as fast as possible and/or with the highest score possible. If you just know the current piece, you have about 48 moves to evaluate (assuming it's like 12 blocks wide and there are 4 possible rotations). If you know the next you have 48^2, but even an NES could probably evaluate those faster than you could given some simple cost function. A lot of computer science is coming up with approximations which are close to optimal (ie they beat humans or at least don't pile up and die) while remaining computationally feasible.
I'm not sure where this 20x quieter thing comes from, but generally. a 10dB increase in sound output is considered "twice as loud." Note that a 3dB increase is twice as much energy (well, 3.0something, but close enough). Similarly, -3dB is the "half power point."
This technology cannot currently triangulate a war{driv,chalk,walk}er.
Well, I dunno. The implication is that the APs can triangulate, but i don't see anything in the article saying it's not the client doing the triangulation. Or maybe they have a deal with some manufactuer to get more info from the AP, or maybe you have to set up a comptuer with a PC card. Ooooor, you could just set up some simple 2.4GHz receivers which give you signal strengths and/or delays for tringulation (although that's pretty clearly not what these guys are doing).
wow. I posted that 7 mintues after the story went up and it's still redundant.... Guess i'm not the only person who can't resist a clueless troll in the article.
Not likely. The systems that get picked up by war____ers are generally the ones that someone took out of the box and plugged into the wall. Anyone who bothers to set up a triangulation system would probably already be using MAC restriction or other security measures. (Technically, you can still see a secured network and mark its location, but you could do that with a triangulation-restricted network too).
Back in the 80s, we got an Amiga 1000, and my dad was trying to hook up an apple image writer to the serial port. Apparently, the Amiga would dump error messages to the serial port, expecting a terminal to be connected. So at some point, he tries to print something, it doesn't work, the machine trys printing an error message to the serial port. So the printer makes it laborious dot matrix printing noises, and then advances the paper, which says "Printer not found".
Or something to that effect. It was a few years ago, so probably MacOS8. Just the standard error box with no explaination besides "Oooooops"
There's always the old favorite "This application has performed a fatal error and will be shut down: Windows" and the similar "This file appears to be corrupted or infected, and should be replaced: Symantec AntiVirus." I'll post the screenshot of the antivirus one if i find it.
Slashdot Mirror
Now if only these were CD-RWs ... and they can keep sending me the nice, reusable cases, just no more paper sleeves, thanks.
A friend of mine was actually asked "Buy blank CDs? Why not just use the free ones from AOL?"
There's absolutely no excuse for this. If i tapped into the electric lines coming into my house and hooked a bunch of equipment to the line before it went to the meter, i don't think the FBI would show up with search warrants. I'd probably get my service cut off, and the electric company would ask for a lot of money before reconnecting it. Or if you live near power lines and run a loop under them to pick up power- they're not going to do much more than tell you to stop. Same thing if i tapped into the watermain without paying. They're railroading these people.
I'm tempted to order cable internet just so i can let the guy show up, balk at the draconian contract, and tell him to shove it. Luckily i don't have that much time.
Plaque is also the nasty stuff that builds up on your teeth and in your arteries (like when you eat the type of diet in question). While it's not usually considered a verb, verbing nouns is not all that unusual around here. The idea of 'plaqueing society' is a bit metaphorical, but not incomprehensible.
That being said, yes, you're probably right.
You laugh. Try "Starwars the 70's Custom Van!" I shit you not.
Now how will I know the best way to enlarge my penis or get that degree from a fine, unaccredited institution?!
Thanks to the majick of Windows Mesenger Serivce, you don't even need email to learn about prestigeous degree opportunities! This information can be (untraceably) delivered straight to your desktop, multiple times per day!
are there harsh export restrictions on smoke detectors using Americium 241?
It's not like you take a bunch of 'radioactive stuff' and put it together and make a bomb. Get a clue.
Generally, warming the ice is not the problem- it's the melting part that uses a lot of energy. Accoridng to the internet, the heat of fusion for water is 334.44 J/g, compared to a specific heat 4.18 J/g per deg C. So melting a certain amount of water taks as much energy as raising it's temperature the 80 deg C from -143 to the -63 you're claiming. Not to mention that the higher you bring the temperature, the more energy you'll loose to heat radiation into the surrounding ice.
Yeah, drilling through ice sounds silly, but there's a reason.
If I go out to get the paper on a windy day, will I be stuck chasing my front door around for the following two hours?
;-) (And, back door, technically).
No stupid, you just stand there and wait for it to come back around
A whole 727, probably up around 100,000 pounds stripped, on a 4' column?
Aww, c'mon. It's only like 45,000 lbs stripped, according to the web page. And 4 feet isn't all that puny.
no, i don't really think that cingular cut handspring a check for $200. Yes, it's all markup. It's all about the MAN trying to squeeze as much profit out of me as possible. That's how capitalism works. If, in general, more people buy things when you price them at $600-$200=$400 (but you still have to pay sales tax on $600) than if you just priced them at $400 to begin with, then that's how things get priced.
The point, though, is that cell phones are not sold for profit. They are given away/subsidized so that service providers can profit on service (which is not a bad business model, until someone chips the harware and fucks with you profit stream). But no service provider is going to subsidize a phone which is designed to aviod using their service whenever possible.
I'd like to have a headset that switches to the best avalable carrier, be that my cell phone, the landline in the lab (where my cell phone doesn't work), 802.11 VoIP, or maybe directly to the headset of the person i'm talking to, if they happen to be in range. Actually, i'd rather that my cell handset did this, but since Cingular covered $200 of it, i don't see it switching to landline or 802.11 VoIP anytime soon.
or anyone who violates the terms of the cease-fire agreement that they made.
I'm not sure that's completely relavent. I wasn't following foreign policy very closely at the time, but i doubt Iraq entered into any cease-fires because they felt like it. If we are going to insist on writing whatever self-serving* rules we want, people will probably agree to play by them as long as we hold a gun to their head, but not much longer. We can come back with the gun 10 years later, but i think we'd be better off coming up with a set of rules that everybody agrees with.
*(do you think we'd have cared as much about Kuwait if we didn't have some commercial interest? Have we done much about Tibet recently? Or any one of a number of places in Africa? Or hell, human right violations right here in the good ol' USofA?)
Off of Yahoo News
"Schroeder's first move in what is expected to be a gradual reconciliation effort was to say that Herta Daeubler-Gmelin, the justice minister who last week allegedly said President Bush's desire to distract from domestic politics with war recalled Hitler's methods, would not be in his new cabinet."
She of course later tried to explain that she was not trying to compare Bush to Hitler, but still got canned for it.
So we should be invading Iraq so we can stop a dictator from running roughshod other the rights of the poor of his country?
Well, either we should or we shouldn't, but if we are going to invade countries to overturn oppressive regimes, we should base the decisions on the extent of the human rights violations being committed, not our oil/money interests, and we should stop putting oppressive regimes into power to support our oil/money interests.
It's the fact that the government lies about _why_ they invade countries that's annoying. Protecting human rights is great, but that's pretty clearly not what we're up to. But anybody who opresses their citizens _and_ threatens our oil supply is gonna find themselves in a world of hurt.
In other news, dialing unlisted phone numbers without the express written consent of the number's owner is now a criminal offense.
Krikey. I just don't know where they find people this stupid. Same goes for this deep linking crap. Maybe people should have to pass some sort of test before they get to use the Internet. Otherwise the have to use AOL until they at least understand that anything you post to the web could be publically accessible.
I saw one of these a few months ago, along with a prototype of their phone os. It was cool shit. I was impressed. I nearly faltered in my flaming passionate anti-MS hatred (the one with the big rusty acid dripping spikes sticking out of it). It was like the time i set my Win2k laptop down next to an IRDA-enabled LaserJet, and i could just print to it. Both times, I was impressed with what MS had done. But on both those occasions, the same thing occured to me which brought me back to my normal state: if it weren't for microsoft, i could probably have done this years ago. I'm pretty sure one of my dad's friends had a tablet on his desktop back in the early 80s. I was like 6 at the time so it's a but fuzzy, but tablet technology has been under development for most of my lifetime. And IR data? My parent's replaced the old B&W tv with no VHF knob around the time of the 1984 olympics, and the new tv came with and IR remote. Granted, your standard TV remote doesn't do hundreds of Kbits/sec, but the ideas and the basic technology were there. We needn't have waited for microsoft to decide they were good and ready to support _______. If they didn't take such rigorous steps to destroy competition in the computer sector, I think we'd be years ahead of where we are now. Microsoft didn't start the computer revolution, they just bullied their way into an illegal monopoly over it. Sure, WinXP TabletPC edition is cool. But for all the money we've given them, we should expect more than this.
Ok, done now. (And for the record, vague references to "we" are basically intedned to include the whole world, because the advancement of computer technology affects or will affect most of Earth's population in the near future. The idea of naming it the "Information Age" is that IT is at least as important to human history as stone, bronze, industry, and nuclear technology. )
My question is this: How is it Nintendo et. al. can program an incredibly skilled Tetris AI, but scientists at MIT cannot?
First, a disclaimer- IHNRTFA. But still, my guess is that the optimal solution is NP-hard. That is, given the exact sequence of blocks, give the sequence of moves which will get rid of them all as fast as possible and/or with the highest score possible. If you just know the current piece, you have about 48 moves to evaluate (assuming it's like 12 blocks wide and there are 4 possible rotations). If you know the next you have 48^2, but even an NES could probably evaluate those faster than you could given some simple cost function. A lot of computer science is coming up with approximations which are close to optimal (ie they beat humans or at least don't pile up and die) while remaining computationally feasible.
So it can't scream in pain when it gets /.ed?
I'm not sure where this 20x quieter thing comes from, but generally. a 10dB increase in sound output is considered "twice as loud." Note that a 3dB increase is twice as much energy (well, 3.0something, but close enough). Similarly, -3dB is the "half power point."
This technology cannot currently triangulate a war{driv,chalk,walk}er.
Well, I dunno. The implication is that the APs can triangulate, but i don't see anything in the article saying it's not the client doing the triangulation. Or maybe they have a deal with some manufactuer to get more info from the AP, or maybe you have to set up a comptuer with a PC card. Ooooor, you could just set up some simple 2.4GHz receivers which give you signal strengths and/or delays for tringulation (although that's pretty clearly not what these guys are doing).
PS- you forgot warflyers.
on how long it takes to get Linux on that thing?
Ohh, and then you add WiFi and when you park in a parking lot it could set up an ad-hoc Beow...
*ducks*
wow. I posted that 7 mintues after the story went up and it's still redundant.... Guess i'm not the only person who can't resist a clueless troll in the article.
Not likely. The systems that get picked up by war____ers are generally the ones that someone took out of the box and plugged into the wall. Anyone who bothers to set up a triangulation system would probably already be using MAC restriction or other security measures. (Technically, you can still see a secured network and mark its location, but you could do that with a triangulation-restricted network too).
Back in the 80s, we got an Amiga 1000, and my dad was trying to hook up an apple image writer to the serial port. Apparently, the Amiga would dump error messages to the serial port, expecting a terminal to be connected. So at some point, he tries to print something, it doesn't work, the machine trys printing an error message to the serial port. So the printer makes it laborious dot matrix printing noises, and then advances the paper, which says "Printer not found".
Unfortunately, the article was incorrect then.
You should be used to that by now....
Or something to that effect. It was a few years ago, so probably MacOS8. Just the standard error box with no explaination besides "Oooooops"
There's always the old favorite "This application has performed a fatal error and will be shut down: Windows" and the similar "This file appears to be corrupted or infected, and should be replaced: Symantec AntiVirus." I'll post the screenshot of the antivirus one if i find it.