Just a thought, but could such a system create an environment that discourages cholesterol buildup and the formation of blood clots in the arteries/veins?
Now they just need to merge this with a federally required RFID marker to identify you and the system can simply flag you as a threat automatically whenever you act outside of set threshold determined by a collectively gathered log of your previous day to day activities.
An angel investor, that is! ("venture capitalist" for the uninitiated....)
It may be a bit more competitive now, due to the struggling economy, but for a long time, there have been groups and individuals out there just looking for innovative ideas to invest in. (Kind of similar to ABC's recent "Shark Tank" show, but without all the reality TV nonsense...)
You can find several of these investors on the internet via a web search. Most of them have actual business websites. (And not just some ad posted on craigslist...)
Just be sure to check references before making any deals to ensure their legitimacy.
Have these wind turbines registered with the National Weather Service and mark the locations in the system. Also, place transponders on the turbines to verify their operational status. If a tornado is detected near a known turbine location and the turbine fails to report its status, there probably is "something" in the area bad enough to damage a turbine.
Simply make the device itself expendable to the owner. Create a setup where any storage media on the device can be quickly removed when not in use and implement it in a way that forces the user to practice it regularly. For example, make removing the storage itself the "on/off" switch for the device.
Release a undisclosed "bug fix" every few days to keep an app higher up in the listings. I've noticed a few developers who, like clockwork, release a new bug fix every week on the same app, with no info on what exactly was broken in the previous version.
Remove and relaunch the same app every couple of months. Not even a bad review can harm a clean slate.
"Theme" your apps and release dozens of variants into the same category. You might just get lucky and find a few idiots biting because one version of your app has a picture of a kitty in it!
This almost sounds like an induced form of synesthesia, a condition where someone's senses operate involuntarily as a merged experience. For example, sounds that generate visual feedback or brief changes in taste.
Most likely, there won't be "satellite" devices like smart phones in the future. Instead, your data will simply "follow" you around automatically and independently, allowing you to access it at any time from anywhere that's connected to whatever the internet has become by then. (Probably some elaborate cloud configuration that's built into literally everything at the nanoscopic level via a "smart dust" that acts as both a diagnostic sensory tool for whatever it's applied to and as an always-on communication terminal accessible to anyone.
In short, the world will adapt to you as needed, making the act of owning personal information/communication devices obsolete.
From my point of view, large-footprint downloadable content for console-based games is both lazy and deceptive on the part of game publishers. Game consoles aren't generally designed for long-term storage of files in excess of a few megabytes per game. In the past, such content would have been packaged and sold as sequels. Nowadays, the publishers are foregoing the work and expense involved in manufacturing physical copies in favor of downloads tied to a single system.
Don't be fooled by the arguments that this is done solely to get the game out the door sooner and into eager players hands. Instead, DLC is merely the first stage in bringing modern game consoles in line with the phantom's locked-down digital only approach to game distribution. Next, we got smaller download-only games (Virtual Console, PSN, XBLA) to test the waters with content tied to the user. That was followed by publishers working in "exclusive" content included on the disc of new games but accessible only once by the original buyer via codes obtained from the retailers... again, tied to the user. Now, we're entering the fourth stage... full retail games repackaged as downloads at a "budget discount"... but still tied to the user.
There's only two stages left until we're fully in line with the phantom... simultaneous release of new retail games as downloads, followed by download only releases of new, big-budget titles.
This is all an elaborate effort to stamp out the used game market by making the only "used" games valueless "digital" copies tied directly to the user with no option to transfer ownership later on... all done under the guise of "added value" and "convenience".
Enjoy it now if you want, but just remember where that money all disappeared to a few years down the road, where having physical copies of those titles could be saving your ass from a night in a cardboard box.
Between the "crutch of knowledge" position the internet has taken up in our brains combined with the constant barrage of messages from various sources that science is "evil" (ie, the scientific community agenda to kill religion, science geeks are potential terrorists, etc...), we're getting dumber by the minute. God forbid we ever get hit by some event that takes electricity away from us... we'll be lucky if we can figure out how to feed ourselves.
"Steve Ballmer is currently holding the entire planet hostage, threatening to 'push the button' on the 'global Windows kill switch' known as 'Windows Genuine Advantage'. Billions await their data's fate until Ballmer's demands to lift the federal ban on Word and $200,000,000 in cash..."
Another possibility, check your local library. I know at least one library in my area still archives Apple II software on floppies that users can check out, It might give you some other ideas on where to look.
Hmmm... no idea, but my guess is that it might have been one of those "Microzine" publications that included a game disk with each issue. (Had them around a lot during the mid-to-late 80s.)
You might want to check out the new Red Faction game. Not only is everything in it completely destructible, but recursively so. I've found myself going around to large vehicles in the game, bombing them, then bombing the remains a few more times for salvage. The buildings in the game even offer some unique opportunities, like tossing propane containers into the air and then shooting them to weaken the structure at their mid points.
Also, the remote trigger and proximity bombs can be attached to just about anything. Placed strategically, you can even set up a blasting order that will collapse large structures on top of enemy troops.
There's even some impossibly large targets in the game you can't completely demolish in just one pass of explosive charges.
A neat trick I used to do with the Apple II was to put two machines side by side on the same power bar, switch both machines on then flipping on the power bar, causing the machines to boot simultaneously. Next, I'd load up a Stock Trading game on both machines and start playing.
Why do this, you ask?
Well, the Apple II uses a very simple random number generator that is always the same sequence from the moment the system powers up. So, by booting two machines simultaneously, it put the random number generators on each system in sync with one another.
In terms of the Stock Trading game, this meant I could use one machine as a sort of crystal ball, allowing me to see into the game's future, and then use the generated results to only buy up stocks that were going to increase in value and sell off those that would decrease.
As long as the machines booted up simultaneously, this always worked.
Hmm... speaking of which, I wonder if there might be a practical use of this by combining it with a tesla coil setup. (Instead of a loop, have a series of brushes contacting the smooth side of the sticky tape right at the point where the sticky side of the tape separates from the spool, only done at high speed.
Think before hitting that "submit" button if you used a "paste" command. You might just end up ruining your life like all those 80+ year old music pirates did by daring to use a P2P file sharing service they've never heard of.
All of these great literary works were never intended to be interactive... as in "something that changes the outcome of the story based entirely on the audience itself".
These writers didn't leave much in the way of "what if..." contingencies involving their characters and plots. If they had, there never would've been a market for all those "choose your own adventure" books they used to hock on us during school book drives when we were still growing up.
That said, wouldn't a series of adult-themed "choose your own adventure" style books be kind of interesting? But, instead of simple "turn to page x" instructions, you'd have to solve various puzzles to know where to go next. Oh, and maybe a mechanism to slice off fingers for wimps who can't commit to their choices...
Perhaps it's just me, but haven't people been selling wrappers for such software on other platforms for years? Usually these wrappers are sold as a service that makes it easier to use the software pre-packaged in a binary form, allowing end users to benefit from it without needing to know how to compile binaries for themselves.
In the case of the iPhone, end users don't even have that option available to them without having to join apple's developer program or making potentially risky modifications their iPhone.
Paying someone to do such dirty work for them doesn't seem all that wrong if the primary purpose of OSS / GPL'd software is to make it available to anyone wishing to make use of it.
While this app might allow you to identify an "offender" in a particular area, it really does nothing to make anyone safer.
Sure, you have their pictures, but are you really going to memorize them all? And what purpose will it serve?
If it comes down to it, knowing what someone looks like *before* they ever break into your home to rape you in your sleep won't stop them from raping you if they're intent on doing so.
The other side of the coin, is that you're probably going to do more harm to yourself psychologically with such an app than any of these "offenders" who for whatever reason has somehow strangely ignored you and your family before now.
Oh, and here's some food to think about... predators often like to lick their chops at anything that acts scared around them. If you go driving past their house and stare at them on a regular basis, it might make them crazy enough to start checking you out.
Sometimes it's best to simply leave a hornets' nest alone rather than trying to poke at it with a stick.
Most of these netbooks support boot over USB. Why not just use an external USB powered drive as the machine's only boot and data storage media? When not in use, keep the drive in your pocket. Anyone who'd be interested in stealing the netbook would probably just be satisfied with the machine itself and probably wouldn't think to see if it boots before taking it.
Perhaps future netbook iterations will use a similar setup where you can simply eject the drive from the system and run the interface off the internal USB.
... why don't they just abandon the static tests for ones that are randomly generated on the fly? They could just store a set of seed values for the generator and assign observations to them in a database.
Humor, at its most basic level, is simply the end result of doing something other than what you set your audience up to expect. However, humor is also highly subjective. Because of this, you either have to adapt to your audience's tastes or you have to cater to a very small group of like-minded people. This means producing a large-scale interactive experience based on humor is extremely difficult to pull-off. As a result, the "humor" that ends up in such products usually ends up either watered down for a broad audience or made so abrasive that it only appeals to children (or anyone else) who enjoys "fart" jokes.
At this point, the best anyone has come up with are complicated dialog trees that involve input from the user to meet the user's approximate tastes.
Fortunately, this could change once technologies, like Microsoft's Project Natal, arrive on the scene. This will give programmers a way to gauge a user's reaction to something on-screen and then immediately adapt to it to help push the envelope further into the desired direction.
Slashdot Mirror
Just a thought, but could such a system create an environment that discourages cholesterol buildup and the formation of blood clots in the arteries/veins?
Now they just need to merge this with a federally required RFID marker to identify you and the system can simply flag you as a threat automatically whenever you act outside of set threshold determined by a collectively gathered log of your previous day to day activities.
An angel investor, that is! ("venture capitalist" for the uninitiated....)
It may be a bit more competitive now, due to the struggling economy, but for a long time, there have been groups and individuals out there just looking for innovative ideas to invest in. (Kind of similar to ABC's recent "Shark Tank" show, but without all the reality TV nonsense...)
You can find several of these investors on the internet via a web search. Most of them have actual business websites. (And not just some ad posted on craigslist...)
Just be sure to check references before making any deals to ensure their legitimacy.
Have these wind turbines registered with the National Weather Service and mark the locations in the system. Also, place transponders on the turbines to verify their operational status. If a tornado is detected near a known turbine location and the turbine fails to report its status, there probably is "something" in the area bad enough to damage a turbine.
Simply make the device itself expendable to the owner. Create a setup where any storage media on the device can be quickly removed when not in use and implement it in a way that forces the user to practice it regularly. For example, make removing the storage itself the "on/off" switch for the device.
Some other tactics I've noticed lately:
Release a undisclosed "bug fix" every few days to keep an app higher up in the listings. I've noticed a few developers who, like clockwork, release a new bug fix every week on the same app, with no info on what exactly was broken in the previous version.
Remove and relaunch the same app every couple of months. Not even a bad review can harm a clean slate.
"Theme" your apps and release dozens of variants into the same category. You might just get lucky and find a few idiots biting because one version of your app has a picture of a kitty in it!
This almost sounds like an induced form of synesthesia, a condition where someone's senses operate involuntarily as a merged experience. For example, sounds that generate visual feedback or brief changes in taste.
Most likely, there won't be "satellite" devices like smart phones in the future. Instead, your data will simply "follow" you around automatically and independently, allowing you to access it at any time from anywhere that's connected to whatever the internet has become by then. (Probably some elaborate cloud configuration that's built into literally everything at the nanoscopic level via a "smart dust" that acts as both a diagnostic sensory tool for whatever it's applied to and as an always-on communication terminal accessible to anyone.
In short, the world will adapt to you as needed, making the act of owning personal information/communication devices obsolete.
From my point of view, large-footprint downloadable content for console-based games is both lazy and deceptive on the part of game publishers. Game consoles aren't generally designed for long-term storage of files in excess of a few megabytes per game. In the past, such content would have been packaged and sold as sequels. Nowadays, the publishers are foregoing the work and expense involved in manufacturing physical copies in favor of downloads tied to a single system.
Don't be fooled by the arguments that this is done solely to get the game out the door sooner and into eager players hands. Instead, DLC is merely the first stage in bringing modern game consoles in line with the phantom's locked-down digital only approach to game distribution. Next, we got smaller download-only games (Virtual Console, PSN, XBLA) to test the waters with content tied to the user. That was followed by publishers working in "exclusive" content included on the disc of new games but accessible only once by the original buyer via codes obtained from the retailers... again, tied to the user. Now, we're entering the fourth stage... full retail games repackaged as downloads at a "budget discount"... but still tied to the user.
There's only two stages left until we're fully in line with the phantom... simultaneous release of new retail games as downloads, followed by download only releases of new, big-budget titles.
This is all an elaborate effort to stamp out the used game market by making the only "used" games valueless "digital" copies tied directly to the user with no option to transfer ownership later on... all done under the guise of "added value" and "convenience".
Enjoy it now if you want, but just remember where that money all disappeared to a few years down the road, where having physical copies of those titles could be saving your ass from a night in a cardboard box.
Between the "crutch of knowledge" position the internet has taken up in our brains combined with the constant barrage of messages from various sources that science is "evil" (ie, the scientific community agenda to kill religion, science geeks are potential terrorists, etc...), we're getting dumber by the minute. God forbid we ever get hit by some event that takes electricity away from us... we'll be lucky if we can figure out how to feed ourselves.
"Steve Ballmer is currently holding the entire planet hostage, threatening to 'push the button' on the 'global Windows kill switch' known as 'Windows Genuine Advantage'. Billions await their data's fate until Ballmer's demands to lift the federal ban on Word and $200,000,000 in cash..."
Isn't fiction fun?
Another possibility, check your local library. I know at least one library in my area still archives Apple II software on floppies that users can check out, It might give you some other ideas on where to look.
Hmmm... no idea, but my guess is that it might have been one of those "Microzine" publications that included a game disk with each issue. (Had them around a lot during the mid-to-late 80s.)
You might want to check out the new Red Faction game. Not only is everything in it completely destructible, but recursively so. I've found myself going around to large vehicles in the game, bombing them, then bombing the remains a few more times for salvage. The buildings in the game even offer some unique opportunities, like tossing propane containers into the air and then shooting them to weaken the structure at their mid points.
Also, the remote trigger and proximity bombs can be attached to just about anything. Placed strategically, you can even set up a blasting order that will collapse large structures on top of enemy troops.
There's even some impossibly large targets in the game you can't completely demolish in just one pass of explosive charges.
Needless to say, lots of room for experimenting!
A neat trick I used to do with the Apple II was to put two machines side by side on the same power bar, switch both machines on then flipping on the power bar, causing the machines to boot simultaneously. Next, I'd load up a Stock Trading game on both machines and start playing.
Why do this, you ask?
Well, the Apple II uses a very simple random number generator that is always the same sequence from the moment the system powers up. So, by booting two machines simultaneously, it put the random number generators on each system in sync with one another.
In terms of the Stock Trading game, this meant I could use one machine as a sort of crystal ball, allowing me to see into the game's future, and then use the generated results to only buy up stocks that were going to increase in value and sell off those that would decrease.
As long as the machines booted up simultaneously, this always worked.
... making the products more durable, rather than adding the "fuck you" sensors?
Apple Inc. is one evil bastardization of a once great company.
Hmm... speaking of which, I wonder if there might be a practical use of this by combining it with a tesla coil setup. (Instead of a loop, have a series of brushes contacting the smooth side of the sticky tape right at the point where the sticky side of the tape separates from the spool, only done at high speed.
Think before hitting that "submit" button if you used a "paste" command. You might just end up ruining your life like all those 80+ year old music pirates did by daring to use a P2P file sharing service they've never heard of.
All of these great literary works were never intended to be interactive... as in "something that changes the outcome of the story based entirely on the audience itself".
These writers didn't leave much in the way of "what if..." contingencies involving their characters and plots. If they had, there never would've been a market for all those "choose your own adventure" books they used to hock on us during school book drives when we were still growing up.
That said, wouldn't a series of adult-themed "choose your own adventure" style books be kind of interesting? But, instead of simple "turn to page x" instructions, you'd have to solve various puzzles to know where to go next. Oh, and maybe a mechanism to slice off fingers for wimps who can't commit to their choices...
"For $8,000 this comes with a turnkey satellite + satellite development software environment..."
This sounds awesome... almost like a Lego Mindstorms kit, except it goes into outer-freakin'-space!
Perhaps it's just me, but haven't people been selling wrappers for such software on other platforms for years? Usually these wrappers are sold as a service that makes it easier to use the software pre-packaged in a binary form, allowing end users to benefit from it without needing to know how to compile binaries for themselves.
In the case of the iPhone, end users don't even have that option available to them without having to join apple's developer program or making potentially risky modifications their iPhone.
Paying someone to do such dirty work for them doesn't seem all that wrong if the primary purpose of OSS / GPL'd software is to make it available to anyone wishing to make use of it.
While this app might allow you to identify an "offender" in a particular area, it really does nothing to make anyone safer.
Sure, you have their pictures, but are you really going to memorize them all? And what purpose will it serve?
If it comes down to it, knowing what someone looks like *before* they ever break into your home to rape you in your sleep won't stop them from raping you if they're intent on doing so.
The other side of the coin, is that you're probably going to do more harm to yourself psychologically with such an app than any of these "offenders" who for whatever reason has somehow strangely ignored you and your family before now.
Oh, and here's some food to think about... predators often like to lick their chops at anything that acts scared around them. If you go driving past their house and stare at them on a regular basis, it might make them crazy enough to start checking you out.
Sometimes it's best to simply leave a hornets' nest alone rather than trying to poke at it with a stick.
Most of these netbooks support boot over USB. Why not just use an external USB powered drive as the machine's only boot and data storage media? When not in use, keep the drive in your pocket. Anyone who'd be interested in stealing the netbook would probably just be satisfied with the machine itself and probably wouldn't think to see if it boots before taking it.
Perhaps future netbook iterations will use a similar setup where you can simply eject the drive from the system and run the interface off the internal USB.
... why don't they just abandon the static tests for ones that are randomly generated on the fly? They could just store a set of seed values for the generator and assign observations to them in a database.
Humor, at its most basic level, is simply the end result of doing something other than what you set your audience up to expect. However, humor is also highly subjective. Because of this, you either have to adapt to your audience's tastes or you have to cater to a very small group of like-minded people. This means producing a large-scale interactive experience based on humor is extremely difficult to pull-off. As a result, the "humor" that ends up in such products usually ends up either watered down for a broad audience or made so abrasive that it only appeals to children (or anyone else) who enjoys "fart" jokes.
At this point, the best anyone has come up with are complicated dialog trees that involve input from the user to meet the user's approximate tastes.
Fortunately, this could change once technologies, like Microsoft's Project Natal, arrive on the scene. This will give programmers a way to gauge a user's reaction to something on-screen and then immediately adapt to it to help push the envelope further into the desired direction.