Read the article:.. a member of the Huntsville/Madison County Chamber of Commerce and the North Alabama African-American Chamber of Commerce. What would you say are the chances that the person collecting the shopping carts from the parking lot is a member of the CoC? This guy may be nuts, but he probably holds a decent job.
Saw this a while ago on the wear-hard list, but another interesting site mentioned there was www.androidworld.com. Maybe not the best designed site in the world, but some interesting stuff if you like robots;-)
I'm working on the trash-talking furby, i swear. The basic idea is this: there's one motor inside which runs a series of cams for the eyes, ears, mouth, and butt. Roughly, there's 180 degrees where the butt doesnt move, and the other 180 it goes up and down as the motor rotates. Now, each of those is split for, say, mouth movement: in the ranges 0-90 and 180-270, the mouth moves- if you want it to talk and tilt forward you use one range, if you want it to sit still and talk, you use the other. And it keeps getting subdivided into smaller ranges so you pick the angle range where the appropriate body parts move, and run the motor back and forth in that range.
But i digress. The cool part is that the motor, home switch, and encoder just unplug from the motherboard, so it's not hard to plug them into your handy HC11 eval board and write a little controll algorithm. The fact that i haven't done this yet only speaks to my superior lazieness. But i will soon. Once i have a furby connected to my computer, i just cat whosyourdaddy to/dev/furby and i'm set. (and maybe i can get i posted and hose my website when i do:-) Check furby autposy for more info, or just pick one up for $5 and cut it open. Anyways, check out
So, i realize that this: "you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?" is probably the most replied-to snippet in the whole article, and rightly so: the slashdot trolls should take a lesson in writing such one-sided misleading tripe that nobody with a functioning neuron left in their head can read your words without wanting to correct you. What i haven't really seen pointed out is that music is, in theory, art. As in, "if you painted a pretty picture, and people liked it, would it bother you if someone took a photo of your painting so they could show your pretty picture to other peolpe and they could enjoy it too?" Granted, since i'm an engineer, my opinions about art don't count for shit in this society, but i was at least under the impression that artists are supposed to be in it for the art. (If your're going to be in it for the money, be an engineer. Just don't expect peolpe to take your art seriously...) I think people should at least attempt to remove their heads from their asses long enough to realize that humans have had music for at least an order of magnitude longer than we've had a recording industry, if not two orders.
But she did not have a percentage for books and could not cite an author or genre helped by the availability of used editions.
Some car makers advertise that their cars are worth more used, and expect people to buy them because of that. Books and CDs and such cost so much less than cars that resale value hasn't been much of an issue, but i'm sure some people would be more willing to buy a book if they knew they could sell it for a reasonable percentage of it's original value once they'd finished reading it. It's stupid to imply that people can't redistribute legal copies of copyrighted works.
On the other hand, the writer's guild hasn't done anything illegal, isn't passing any new laws, etc. They have the right to do whatever they please with their own websites, and until the average consumer starts thinking logically enough to take resale value into account when making small purchases, this is probably in the writers' best interests.
If you buy one there, don't let them make you suffer the Final Indignity
OT, but you don't have to stop for them to count the number of objects in your bag which are beyond their comprehension (wow, that's a lot of little microchip thiniges). I'll usually cooperate if the person is standing around, but i refuse to wait in line for this "service" so if they're busy "helping" other customers i just walk through. Of course if you didn't pay for something it becomes theft once you go through the door and then they can stop you...
or you could set it on an inventory control tag demagnitizer- the kind that say Do Not Place Credit Cards On This Surface that they have at checkout stands in music stores and the like. Some clerk set my credit card on one and it seemed to demagnitize it pretty well...
Most of the supermarkets in my area allow you to link a phone number to the card, so you can tell them the number every time you buy stuff and they can track your spending habits even if you forget the card. The cool thing is that phone numbers are easy to disseminate. For intsance: 8583362714 works at Ralphs and Vons and affiliated stores (safeway, pavilions, and some others i believe) in california. My purchasing history moves from southern california to northern california far more often than i do. Help it move somewhere else if you want! And while the store may notice if you enter the number and address of their main office or a 555 number, i doubt there's much stopping you from using a pay phone outside and the name of you choosing. (Thank you Mr Hollings- you saved $3 on you purchase of wine and condoms today.)
One approach I think would be interesting is sort of a biological challenge-response, where the system would provide some "input" to the user's body (ok, bear with me here), and examine the body's reaction. A very impractical but perhaps illustrative example might be an immunological response: the system injects the user with vaccine-level doses of certian pathogens, and examines some blood samples to see what kinds of antibodies are produced and how fast. If i've had that particular flu strain (or a vaccine for it), my body will generate a good antibody very quickly, vs someone who hasn't. Granted, the database has to be updated as to what vaccines and diseases i've had (including those i was exposed to in previous challenge-response access situations), but it should be difficult to fake this kind of response. Surely, i wouldn't tolerate this kind of authentication for my email account, but a military computer which controls a bunch of nukes might be a different story (better than "Joshua", at least...)
My guess is there are a number of other, less invasive measurements which could be taken, like how fast your pupil responds to a bright flash or comparing the interference patterns from an iris scan to a laser hologram (ok, i know that's a stretch, but laser holograms do hold a _lot_ of information, and in an optical computing system it might be possible to implement something like this using an uncopyable (ie non-digital) film).
Either way, there's still the problem the authenticating server knowing enough about you to evaluate the response, but someone who got a copy of that respons couldn't use it again without getting the exact same challenge, or intercepting enough of them to build a physiological model to predict responses.
Hey, i just thought of something- you can contribute to my campaign. I support people's rights. I make common sense decisions. I'm not a corporate whore (as long as the university of california isn't a corporation). Granted, it's still a good decade or so before i start campaigning seriously, but i'll take donations now;-)
But when you've got "real" people give money to both sides, you just have an escalated arms race.
Not necessarily- if you think the only option is writing your check to the democrats or republicans, then yes, it's an escalating arms race. If you support a particular person, someone who isn't backed by one of the political machines, someone who supports your rights (or, even better, just makes decisions using good judgement and common sense, regardless of who paid for their campaign), someone who probably needs your support because they're not just a corporate whore, then you don't have to contribute to the "arms race." You can help the "resistance." Viva la resistance;-)
Dude, it's a little late for that. It's been a while since/. ran the story (look it up yourself) but one of the best is VAXBar
Someday i hope to get back to the network-controlled drink mixing machine (yes it will have/dev/vodka) but that's on the back burner for a bit.
On the more serious side, i think if you did want to mix computing and beverages, you'd do better using the heat from your cpu for keeping your coffee warm, not putting extra load on your cooling system (and god forbid warming up your beer when you run a big job)
can anybody here do math? A penny is a hundredth of a dollar. A hundred hundred is ten thousand, hence it stands to reason that a hundedth of a penny is a ten-thousandth of a dollar.
A penny is one hundredth of a dollar so the figure shown above is.23 cents or 2.3 tenths of a penny not hundredth. Ok, geeze people. The point of using fractions like "hundredths" is not to have to use decimal fractions like "2.3 tenths". If you want to express it in decimal form just leave it as.0023 dollars.
First off, if you just want to make sure the colors are visible on top of each other, you could calculate the luminance of each color using.30*R +.59*G +.11*B and make sure that those numbers differ signifigantly. Some other rules of thumb are here, under color rules.
As far as color discrimability, you might want to look for info on MacAdam's ellipses of just noticeable color differences. There's a picutre on this page which shows the main idea: how different a color has to be in order to notice the difference depends on what color it is. Humans can discern more shades of green than red or blue.
But the PPro 200 hanging on my wall at home was FREE. As in beer. Which means i could run something like RULE on it to serve the approximately 2 hits per month to my personal web page and use the $300 to buy more beer. The point is, people shouldn't have to spend $300 just to have a decent system while perfectly usable hardware is ending up in the dump.
The only people who need Linux to run on old hardware are the Luddites who refuse to part with their old equipment, and they are nothing but an albatross around the neck of the Linux community
It's not like writing less bloated code is a bad thing. Crapping out code that does stuff is not hard. If Linux was just a bunch of bloatware kludged together to barely work, it would require a lot less effort. (Hell, it'd probably be done.) The hard part is designing a good system, and that benefits everybody.
It's been, what, a little over a week sice IDEA (the Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Club, which is apparently "An Affiliated Chapter of the IDEA Center") brought some guy to UCSD to explain how evolution is wrong. sigh.
I've been using some manner of dual head system for a few years. Once you get used to having the real estate, it's hard to go back. I now have a pc with one big AGP-connected monitor and a secondary 17in runnig on a pci card, which is great for non-graphics intensive stuff like a terminal window, mp3 player, contact manager/schedule, but mainly for displaying documentation or assignments or other useful info while i'm coding on the bigger monitor.
Anyways, my point was that i end up using my extra monitors for simple stuff like showing a text document, which could easily be done by an old laptop or obsolete pentium desktop you have lying around. So, you can use x2vnc or win2vnc to link the computers together. I use this to set my laptop next to some other display, and i can mouse over, even copy and paste, like both displays were on the same system.
Is it racism to point out the simple fact that 20 out of 20 9-11 terrorists and the famed Shoe-Bomber were those fellas with more consonants than vowels?
I think strictly speaking, someone's name has more to do with their parent's culture than their race, but discriminating like that is still as bad. My name is andrew cosand. _ndr_w c_s_nd, 8, a___e_ _o_a__, 4: I have twice as many consonants as vowels. I'm white, i was born in LA and live in Southern California. I'm reasonably well educated, financially ok (i wouldn't say well off), and agnostic. But none of this is going to clue you in on whether or not i'm going to blow up the building you work in. The fact that you pick the spelling of someone's name as a basis of discrimination (like you'd have actually discriminated against a guy named Richard Reid...) merely helps to point out how bad an idea profiling is.
Slashdot Mirror
Read the article: .. a member of the Huntsville/Madison County Chamber of Commerce and the North Alabama African-American Chamber of Commerce.
What would you say are the chances that the person collecting the shopping carts from the parking lot is a member of the CoC? This guy may be nuts, but he probably holds a decent job.
Saw this a while ago on the wear-hard list, but another interesting site mentioned there was www.androidworld.com. Maybe not the best designed site in the world, but some interesting stuff if you like robots ;-)
I'm working on the trash-talking furby, i swear. The basic idea is this: there's one motor inside which runs a series of cams for the eyes, ears, mouth, and butt. Roughly, there's 180 degrees where the butt doesnt move, and the other 180 it goes up and down as the motor rotates. Now, each of those is split for, say, mouth movement: in the ranges 0-90 and 180-270, the mouth moves- if you want it to talk and tilt forward you use one range, if you want it to sit still and talk, you use the other. And it keeps getting subdivided into smaller ranges so you pick the angle range where the appropriate body parts move, and run the motor back and forth in that range.
/dev/furby and i'm set. (and maybe i can get i posted and hose my website when i do :-)
But i digress. The cool part is that the motor, home switch, and encoder just unplug from the motherboard, so it's not hard to plug them into your handy HC11 eval board and write a little controll algorithm. The fact that i haven't done this yet only speaks to my superior lazieness. But i will soon. Once i have a furby connected to my computer, i just cat whosyourdaddy to
Check furby autposy for more info, or just pick one up for $5 and cut it open.
Anyways, check out
So, i realize that this: "you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?" is probably the most replied-to snippet in the whole article, and rightly so: the slashdot trolls should take a lesson in writing such one-sided misleading tripe that nobody with a functioning neuron left in their head can read your words without wanting to correct you.
What i haven't really seen pointed out is that music is, in theory, art. As in, "if you painted a pretty picture, and people liked it, would it bother you if someone took a photo of your painting so they could show your pretty picture to other peolpe and they could enjoy it too?"
Granted, since i'm an engineer, my opinions about art don't count for shit in this society, but i was at least under the impression that artists are supposed to be in it for the art. (If your're going to be in it for the money, be an engineer. Just don't expect peolpe to take your art seriously...)
I think people should at least attempt to remove their heads from their asses long enough to realize that humans have had music for at least an order of magnitude longer than we've had a recording industry, if not two orders.
Did anyone else read the title on this and think they'd accidentally gone to The Onion instead of slashdot?
But she did not have a percentage for books and could not cite an author or genre helped by the availability of used editions.
Some car makers advertise that their cars are worth more used, and expect people to buy them because of that. Books and CDs and such cost so much less than cars that resale value hasn't been much of an issue, but i'm sure some people would be more willing to buy a book if they knew they could sell it for a reasonable percentage of it's original value once they'd finished reading it. It's stupid to imply that people can't redistribute legal copies of copyrighted works.
On the other hand, the writer's guild hasn't done anything illegal, isn't passing any new laws, etc. They have the right to do whatever they please with their own websites, and until the average consumer starts thinking logically enough to take resale value into account when making small purchases, this is probably in the writers' best interests.
i_uncontitionally_agree_to_pay_one_cent_per_bit_in _this_message@cosand.org
Simple. I see Subject: Are You Getting the Best Rate on Your MORTGAGE? 10121 5K, I send a bill for $50.
guess i didn't pretend to read the excerpt i was griping about. d'oh.
How is Teoma attached to ask.com (ask jeeves)?
Gerasoulis and the other co-owners agreed to sell their Piscataway, N.J.-based company to Emeryville-based Ask Jeeves for $4.4 million last year.
Did you even pretent to read the article? Or did you just not know that Ask Jeves is ask.com?
And this is Insightful?
If you buy one there, don't let them make you suffer the Final Indignity
OT, but you don't have to stop for them to count the number of objects in your bag which are beyond their comprehension (wow, that's a lot of little microchip thiniges). I'll usually cooperate if the person is standing around, but i refuse to wait in line for this "service" so if they're busy "helping" other customers i just walk through. Of course if you didn't pay for something it becomes theft once you go through the door and then they can stop you...
or you could set it on an inventory control tag demagnitizer- the kind that say Do Not Place Credit Cards On This Surface that they have at checkout stands in music stores and the like. Some clerk set my credit card on one and it seemed to demagnitize it pretty well...
Most of the supermarkets in my area allow you to link a phone number to the card, so you can tell them the number every time you buy stuff and they can track your spending habits even if you forget the card. The cool thing is that phone numbers are easy to disseminate. For intsance: 8583362714 works at Ralphs and Vons and affiliated stores (safeway, pavilions, and some others i believe) in california. My purchasing history moves from southern california to northern california far more often than i do. Help it move somewhere else if you want!
And while the store may notice if you enter the number and address of their main office or a 555 number, i doubt there's much stopping you from using a pay phone outside and the name of you choosing. (Thank you Mr Hollings- you saved $3 on you purchase of wine and condoms today.)
One approach I think would be interesting is sort of a biological challenge-response, where the system would provide some "input" to the user's body (ok, bear with me here), and examine the body's reaction. A very impractical but perhaps illustrative example might be an immunological response: the system injects the user with vaccine-level doses of certian pathogens, and examines some blood samples to see what kinds of antibodies are produced and how fast. If i've had that particular flu strain (or a vaccine for it), my body will generate a good antibody very quickly, vs someone who hasn't. Granted, the database has to be updated as to what vaccines and diseases i've had (including those i was exposed to in previous challenge-response access situations), but it should be difficult to fake this kind of response. Surely, i wouldn't tolerate this kind of authentication for my email account, but a military computer which controls a bunch of nukes might be a different story (better than "Joshua", at least...)
My guess is there are a number of other, less invasive measurements which could be taken, like how fast your pupil responds to a bright flash or comparing the interference patterns from an iris scan to a laser hologram (ok, i know that's a stretch, but laser holograms do hold a _lot_ of information, and in an optical computing system it might be possible to implement something like this using an uncopyable (ie non-digital) film).
Either way, there's still the problem the authenticating server knowing enough about you to evaluate the response, but someone who got a copy of that respons couldn't use it again without getting the exact same challenge, or intercepting enough of them to build a physiological model to predict responses.
Hey, i just thought of something- you can contribute to my campaign. I support people's rights. I make common sense decisions. I'm not a corporate whore (as long as the university of california isn't a corporation). Granted, it's still a good decade or so before i start campaigning seriously, but i'll take donations now ;-)
But when you've got "real" people give money to both sides, you just have an escalated arms race.
;-)
Not necessarily- if you think the only option is writing your check to the democrats or republicans, then yes, it's an escalating arms race. If you support a particular person, someone who isn't backed by one of the political machines, someone who supports your rights (or, even better, just makes decisions using good judgement and common sense, regardless of who paid for their campaign), someone who probably needs your support because they're not just a corporate whore, then you don't have to contribute to the "arms race." You can help the "resistance." Viva la resistance
the worlds first PC-case/Bar fridge.
/. ran the story (look it up yourself) but one of the best is VAXBar
/dev/vodka) but that's on the back burner for a bit.
Dude, it's a little late for that. It's been a while since
Someday i hope to get back to the network-controlled drink mixing machine (yes it will have
On the more serious side, i think if you did want to mix computing and beverages, you'd do better using the heat from your cpu for keeping your coffee warm, not putting extra load on your cooling system (and god forbid warming up your beer when you run a big job)
can anybody here do math? A penny is a hundredth of a dollar. A hundred hundred is ten thousand, hence it stands to reason that a hundedth of a penny is a ten-thousandth of a dollar.
I'm going to go cry now.
A penny is one hundredth of a dollar so the figure shown above is .23 cents or 2.3 tenths of a penny not hundredth. .0023 dollars.
Ok, geeze people. The point of using fractions like "hundredths" is not to have to use decimal fractions like "2.3 tenths". If you want to express it in decimal form just leave it as
Sorry, couldn't resist.
ditto
No, it's thousandths. ;)
Uh, dude, $0.0023 is 23 hundredths of a penny. You can call it 230 thousanths if you want, but then why not call it 230,000 millionths?
First off, if you just want to make sure the colors are visible on top of each other, you could calculate the luminance of each color using .30*R + .59*G + .11*B and make sure that those numbers differ signifigantly. Some other rules of thumb are here, under color rules.
As far as color discrimability, you might want to look for info on MacAdam's ellipses of just noticeable color differences. There's a picutre on this page which shows the main idea: how different a color has to be in order to notice the difference depends on what color it is. Humans can discern more shades of green than red or blue.
AMD 1800+ mobo/CPU combo sells for under $300
But the PPro 200 hanging on my wall at home was FREE. As in beer. Which means i could run something like RULE on it to serve the approximately 2 hits per month to my personal web page and use the $300 to buy more beer. The point is, people shouldn't have to spend $300 just to have a decent system while perfectly usable hardware is ending up in the dump.
The only people who need Linux to run on old hardware are the Luddites who refuse to part with their old equipment, and they are nothing but an albatross around the neck of the Linux community
It's not like writing less bloated code is a bad thing. Crapping out code that does stuff is not hard. If Linux was just a bunch of bloatware kludged together to barely work, it would require a lot less effort. (Hell, it'd probably be done.) The hard part is designing a good system, and that benefits everybody.
It's been, what, a little over a week sice IDEA (the Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Club, which is apparently "An Affiliated Chapter of the IDEA Center") brought some guy to UCSD to explain how evolution is wrong. sigh.
I've been using some manner of dual head system for a few years. Once you get used to having the real estate, it's hard to go back. I now have a pc with one big AGP-connected monitor and a secondary 17in runnig on a pci card, which is great for non-graphics intensive stuff like a terminal window, mp3 player, contact manager/schedule, but mainly for displaying documentation or assignments or other useful info while i'm coding on the bigger monitor.
Anyways, my point was that i end up using my extra monitors for simple stuff like showing a text document, which could easily be done by an old laptop or obsolete pentium desktop you have lying around. So, you can use x2vnc or win2vnc to link the computers together. I use this to set my laptop next to some other display, and i can mouse over, even copy and paste, like both displays were on the same system.
Is it racism to point out the simple fact that 20 out of 20 9-11 terrorists and the famed Shoe-Bomber were those fellas with more consonants than vowels?
I think strictly speaking, someone's name has more to do with their parent's culture than their race, but discriminating like that is still as bad. My name is andrew cosand. _ndr_w c_s_nd, 8, a___e_ _o_a__, 4: I have twice as many consonants as vowels. I'm white, i was born in LA and live in Southern California. I'm reasonably well educated, financially ok (i wouldn't say well off), and agnostic. But none of this is going to clue you in on whether or not i'm going to blow up the building you work in. The fact that you pick the spelling of someone's name as a basis of discrimination (like you'd have actually discriminated against a guy named Richard Reid...) merely helps to point out how bad an idea profiling is.
I preffer a cold fotay of Schlitz Malt Liquor myself, but hey, everyone's entitled to their own opinion.
Cheers.