Sorry, no. We do accomplish the hope listed in that quote. Any company which directly challenges the government will be slapped down. The problem is that the people running the companies have figured this out and simply move behind the scenes to take control of key elements of government important to their industry. It's subversion not war.
Of course even more refuse to release funds even though they know the check is good. They will not hesitate to put a two week hold on a check and keep it there even if the correspondent bank has removed the funds from the drawing account and credited the bank where the check was deposited after a single day.
That being said, there are very specific rules about how long each type of check can be held. Cashier's checks are subject to short times because it is assumed that one bank can tell if another bank's check is bad. After all, it really only takes a phone call and typing a few numbers into a computer to find out if the a bank issued the check. It is poor systems, incompetence and weak international interfaces that make this kind of thing possible.
Oh and as for changing the rules forget it. The banks have more money, motivation and personal influence with the government than you ever will. Even minor unfavorable changes to their governing laws are now only possible for a brief period in the wake of the recent record breaking financial collapse and scandal. They will be this way until well after you are dead and gone.
The network effect has already kicked in. If you want to replace Facebook it will have to be with a product that offers more value on an individual user basis AND can interface with Facebook so users will have access to those social networks as well as access to the additional functionality. If you start there you can wean people off of the older application. While the approach you describe may give users more freedom from corporate/government/whoever control it gives them less freedom to do the activities they now do on the social networking site.
So I guess he doesn't need funding then? Oh and doesn't have any good causes he feels could benefit from donated earnings?
As for not predicting the movement of stock markets, if you can predict business decisions you can predict selected market movements. Will XYZ get the contract? Their stock will go up. Will Mr. suchandsuch decide to buy company z? You can bet company Z stock is going to rise. When you make or lose money based on your predictions every prediction is documented - if you're up you're right and if not you're wrong.
The value of a "90 pct hit rate" can only be reasonably compared to a combination of other forecasting methods and random chance. Documentation of every prediction, wrong and right is essential.
Green? Injected into people? Material could go beserk and cause rapid growth of tumors? The company is testing quietly to avoid government intervention? Now we know Racoon City is actually in Colorado. Watch out, you all know what happens next.
Your time alive is worth more than your family's home, education and future? You would give the children to the state because all of your income above the barest essentials goes to pay current and back medical bills that cannot go away because bankruptcy only works once? You would transform 20 years of your spouse's retirement into 20 years of working at Walmart so they can eat for another week of life?
If you don't have a family then I agree, your life is worth everything you have and everything more you can borrow or talk out of someone. Unfortunately although it's true you can't take it with you its also true you can take other people down before you go. "My life is priceless" makes sense when the decision is between not buying a nice car or a new video game vs. dying but that's not the amount at stake when you pay for medical care. To choose imposing financial ruin and associated suffering on people you presumably love to put off for a few months something that we all must eventually do is simply selfish.
It's not until you consider these implications that you can really say "I would pay any price for one more day of my life."
This depends on your definition of 'secure'. With a monoculture it might be easier to implement an exploit across the entire enterprise, but it will be more difficult than finding a single chink in the armor of an enterprise with a thousand standards even if 999 of those standards are each more secure than the chosen monoculture. The thousand cultures breach will be smaller, but corporate culture being what it is a major network compromise could get the same press as a minor one.
The dollars and cents argument is definitely a possibility. Multiple standards puts a load not only onto line IT (think multiple skill sets required), but help desk(gotta support them), application development(gotta consider them), human resources (gotta hire people who understand them), etc. etc. 'You should let everyone do what they want and just spend enough to support it' is a strategic direction of extreme suck.
Of course it could just be that Microsoft has an exec in their pocket.
Is this thing really trying to recognize and distinguish twenty or thirty different brain patterns each associated with a particular letter, number or mark? It seems setting it up to read morse code or some other binary coded system would make it faster and easier on the user. You could even put the letters and codes up on the screen. Too bad the article doesn't have more info.
Fredrick Brown "The first time machine, gentlemen," Professor Johnson proudly informed his two colleagues. "True, it is a small-scale experimental model. It will operate only on objects weighing less than three pounds, five ounces and for distances into the past and future of twelve minutes or less. But it works."
The small-scale model looked like a small scale—a postage scale—except for two dials in the part under the platform.
Professor Johnson held up a small metal cube. "Our experimental object," he said, "is a brass cube weighing one pound, two point three ounces. First, I shall send it five minutes into the future."
He leaned forward and set one of the dials on the time machine. "Look at your watches," he said.
They looked at their watches. Professor Johnson placed the cube gently on the machine's platform. It vanished.
Five minutes later, to the second, it reappeared.
Professor Johnson picked it up. "Now five minutes into the past." He set the other dial. Holding the cube in his hand he looked at his watch. "It is six minutes before three o'clock. I shall now activate the mechanism—by placing the cube on the platform—at exactly three o'clock. Therefore, the cube should, at five minutes before three, vanish from my hand and appear on the platform, five minutes before I place it there."
"How can you place it there, then?" asked one of his colleagues.
"It will, as my hand approaches, vanish from the platform and appear in my hand to be placed there. Three o'clock. Notice, please."
The cube vanished from his hand.
It appeared on the platform of the time machine.
"See? Five minutes before I shall place it there, it is there!"
His other colleague frowned at the cube. "But," he said, "what if, now that it has already appeared five minutes before you place it there, you should change your mind about doing so and not place it there at three o'clock? Wouldn't there be a paradox of some sort involved?"
"An interesting idea," Professor Johnson said. "I had not thought of it, and it will be interesting to try. Very well, I shall not..."
There was no paradox at all. The cube remained.
But the entire rest of the Universe, professors and all, vanished.
Moral: The real rules for the time traveler include: know exactly what's going to happen when you start screwing around with fundamental universe wide constants like causality.
Money mules loose too (not that banks give a damn about them) and if we could get people to understand that there is no such thing as a free lunch and laundering money is a bad idea all those transactions could be traced and the banks that get them could be told 'go get Ivan or don't expect wire transfers in the future.' The local banks would do it just to reduce the paperwork they have to do and save some money.
Bingo. To summarize: spend lots of other people's money.throwing crap at the wall as fast as you can until something sticks. Alternatively, be rich, dabble at things and have fun. Not really realistic advice for most people.
Possible approach: I proposed this to a variety of people and was never able to get funding. Maybe it can help your Dad. Let me know if it does. It's cheap (especially compared to medical devices), relatively easy and doesn't require surgery. Please feel free to make a single one for home use, but I do reserve all commercial rights.
Take a low res B&W camera Use an aduino or even palmtop to further lower the image quality to match the x by y of the 'display' you're going to make Output the image via appropriate switching transistors and at appropriate amperages to a matrix of individual loops of nicrome wire. Add a pad over the top of the wire to prevent accidental burns. Stick the pad to your chest, arm or stomach For the matrix black is on, white is off. For you hot is black, cool is white.
It will take a bit of time to get used to, but with it you get low-res sight via variation in skin temperature for less than $200. Point the camera in different directions and you can 'feel' what's there, including behind you.
If you need more details email me, the approach has been wildly abbreviated to fit into a slashdot post. - Its s h i p p i n g (at) proboticsamerica (dot) com
You could argue cost of living I suppose, but overall the US is about normal. This is normalized for GNP. We're down at 35, but the Ukrane and Sudan are not really kicking our asses, so I'm guessing they have GNP issues and the ed spending is lagging.
Hmm $5 charge..... What do you want to bet the Republican and Democratic parties, Tea Party, Police Departments, Exxon, Greenpeace, Chase Bank, Hillary Clinton, Rush Limbaugh, Goldman Sachs, everyone's ex's and pretty much everyone else anyone dislikes all find 'helpful' people registering on their behalf? If this list feeds to the no fly list there's going to be hell to pay.
Those are primary cells, not rechargables. The line is just before the one you list
A100 Primary (non-rechargeable) lithium batteries and cells are forbidden for transport aboard passenger carrying aircraft. Secondary (rechargeable) lithium batteries and cells are authorized aboard passenger carrying aircraft in packages that do not exceed a gross weight of 5 kg.
The interesting bit is that it's the packages that can't weigh more than 5kg. What's a package? Could be the battery shell, could be your laptop, could be your laptop plus laptop bag. The TSA will decide, you will not have input. Since laptops are generally less than 11lbs it will be a problem mainly for people selling instruments, equipment and other (slightly) larger items.
Actually no, the prize is to developers to make a game that promotes nutrition. That is there will be several 'medals' awarded to developer teams and each medal can get up to $3k. They are awarding two medals worth 3k and an undeclared but it looks like small number of medals for lesser competitors.
I would actually expect something more like what you described given how our society seems to work sometimes, but in this particular example it's NOT the case. I'm not sure what level of development they expect for a possibility of $3k, but it will probably end up being bored flash developers and computer-precocious grammar school classes that compete.
Thanks, I expected that it was some kind of obfusticate and delay but apparently they dump the risk onto some other criminals as well. That does mean that every Euro can be traced up until it leaves an ATM (and then presumably you have a photo, time and location of the criminal). I guess that means it depends on non-integrated banking systems, the ATM card buyers being able to cash out the cards quickly and police disdain for chasing ATM thieves. Plus the sheer volume of legitimate transactions of course.
I just didn't know if there was some pirate banking haven, magic trick or weird market manipulation that they were using to make their tracks disappear.
I can't really understand how the money from selling that property can be kept by the scammer. Sure you can wire funds around, but you can never wire to anything but a bank or financial institution (or ten) and unless you show up to pull out the funds personally in cash with fake ID there is always a trail.
Think about it - Bank 1 calls bank 2 saying the wire is bad and even if bank 2 has already wired it out to banks 3-15 they can still contact them and demand the funds back. Banking privacy doesn't cover crimes like that. I guess you could buy things with paypal or a debit card, but then there has to be a shipping address. There seems to be something major I'm missing here.
Do we still need publishers? The question should really be 'what function that publishers perform do we still need and how should those functions be provided?' Perhaps also 'Can a startup provide these functions and replace the entrenched companies?' We still need someone to plan the path from manuscript to finished book including content editing, grammar editing, artwork (inside figures and on the cover), legal issues (in every country where it's released), promotion/advertising, marketing (advising when a release will be available, how it will be different from last edition, etc). Should the publishers profit from owning relationships with the distributors, bookshops and retailers even when they're selling electronically? No, they shouldn't be able to gain from a monopoly in what should be a competitive market, but we still need some functions.
When a internet enabled solution for those issues starts to take off the publishers will start to lose their grasp on the book market and we all will be better off for it.
Its a brilliant business model: Sell $2 million worth of roadsters to generate publicity and get the hang of building electric, get a 400+ million dollar low interest loan, throw the dice on getting a product out and if you win you're rich. If you lose declare bankruptcy and retire on the salaries you paid yourself from the loan.
If they tried to actually build cars they might get another $2 million in revenue which might get them one million in cash flow but it doesn't even compare to the $400 million they can play with courtesy of the government and it distracts the company from paying attention to the $400 mill project.
These guys are brilliant hypesters with good government management skills.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, no. We do accomplish the hope listed in that quote. Any company which directly challenges the government will be slapped down. The problem is that the people running the companies have figured this out and simply move behind the scenes to take control of key elements of government important to their industry. It's subversion not war.
Why do you rob lawyers? Because that's where all the money is.
Of course even more refuse to release funds even though they know the check is good. They will not hesitate to put a two week hold on a check and keep it there even if the correspondent bank has removed the funds from the drawing account and credited the bank where the check was deposited after a single day.
That being said, there are very specific rules about how long each type of check can be held. Cashier's checks are subject to short times because it is assumed that one bank can tell if another bank's check is bad. After all, it really only takes a phone call and typing a few numbers into a computer to find out if the a bank issued the check. It is poor systems, incompetence and weak international interfaces that make this kind of thing possible.
Oh and as for changing the rules forget it. The banks have more money, motivation and personal influence with the government than you ever will. Even minor unfavorable changes to their governing laws are now only possible for a brief period in the wake of the recent record breaking financial collapse and scandal. They will be this way until well after you are dead and gone.
The network effect has already kicked in. If you want to replace Facebook it will have to be with a product that offers more value on an individual user basis AND can interface with Facebook so users will have access to those social networks as well as access to the additional functionality. If you start there you can wean people off of the older application. While the approach you describe may give users more freedom from corporate/government/whoever control it gives them less freedom to do the activities they now do on the social networking site.
So I guess he doesn't need funding then? Oh and doesn't have any good causes he feels could benefit from donated earnings?
As for not predicting the movement of stock markets, if you can predict business decisions you can predict selected market movements. Will XYZ get the contract? Their stock will go up. Will Mr. suchandsuch decide to buy company z? You can bet company Z stock is going to rise. When you make or lose money based on your predictions every prediction is documented - if you're up you're right and if not you're wrong.
The value of a "90 pct hit rate" can only be reasonably compared to a combination of other forecasting methods and random chance. Documentation of every prediction, wrong and right is essential.
Green? Injected into people? Material could go beserk and cause rapid growth of tumors? The company is testing quietly to avoid government intervention? Now we know Racoon City is actually in Colorado. Watch out, you all know what happens next.
Your time alive is worth more than your family's home, education and future? You would give the children to the state because all of your income above the barest essentials goes to pay current and back medical bills that cannot go away because bankruptcy only works once? You would transform 20 years of your spouse's retirement into 20 years of working at Walmart so they can eat for another week of life?
If you don't have a family then I agree, your life is worth everything you have and everything more you can borrow or talk out of someone. Unfortunately although it's true you can't take it with you its also true you can take other people down before you go. "My life is priceless" makes sense when the decision is between not buying a nice car or a new video game vs. dying but that's not the amount at stake when you pay for medical care. To choose imposing financial ruin and associated suffering on people you presumably love to put off for a few months something that we all must eventually do is simply selfish.
It's not until you consider these implications that you can really say "I would pay any price for one more day of my life."
This depends on your definition of 'secure'. With a monoculture it might be easier to implement an exploit across the entire enterprise, but it will be more difficult than finding a single chink in the armor of an enterprise with a thousand standards even if 999 of those standards are each more secure than the chosen monoculture. The thousand cultures breach will be smaller, but corporate culture being what it is a major network compromise could get the same press as a minor one.
The dollars and cents argument is definitely a possibility. Multiple standards puts a load not only onto line IT (think multiple skill sets required), but help desk(gotta support them), application development(gotta consider them), human resources (gotta hire people who understand them), etc. etc. 'You should let everyone do what they want and just spend enough to support it' is a strategic direction of extreme suck.
Of course it could just be that Microsoft has an exec in their pocket.
Is this thing really trying to recognize and distinguish twenty or thirty different brain patterns each associated with a particular letter, number or mark? It seems setting it up to read morse code or some other binary coded system would make it faster and easier on the user. You could even put the letters and codes up on the screen. Too bad the article doesn't have more info.
Fredrick Brown
"The first time machine, gentlemen," Professor Johnson proudly informed his two colleagues. "True, it is a small-scale experimental model. It will operate only on objects weighing less than three pounds, five ounces and for distances into the past and future of twelve minutes or less. But it works."
The small-scale model looked like a small scale—a postage scale—except for two dials in the part under the platform.
Professor Johnson held up a small metal cube. "Our experimental object," he said, "is a brass cube weighing one pound, two point three ounces. First, I shall send it five minutes into the future."
He leaned forward and set one of the dials on the time machine. "Look at your watches," he said.
They looked at their watches. Professor Johnson placed the cube gently on the machine's platform. It vanished.
Five minutes later, to the second, it reappeared.
Professor Johnson picked it up. "Now five minutes into the past." He set the other dial. Holding the cube in his hand he looked at his watch. "It is six minutes before three o'clock. I shall now activate the mechanism—by placing the cube on the platform—at exactly three o'clock. Therefore, the cube should, at five minutes before three, vanish from my hand and appear on the platform, five minutes before I place it there."
"How can you place it there, then?" asked one of his colleagues.
"It will, as my hand approaches, vanish from the platform and appear in my hand to be placed there. Three o'clock. Notice, please."
The cube vanished from his hand.
It appeared on the platform of the time machine.
"See? Five minutes before I shall place it there, it is there!"
His other colleague frowned at the cube. "But," he said, "what if, now that it has already appeared five minutes before you place it there, you should change your mind about doing so and not place it there at three o'clock? Wouldn't there be a paradox of some sort involved?"
"An interesting idea," Professor Johnson said. "I had not thought of it, and it will be interesting to try. Very well, I shall not ..."
There was no paradox at all. The cube remained.
But the entire rest of the Universe, professors and all, vanished.
Moral: The real rules for the time traveler include: know exactly what's going to happen when you start screwing around with fundamental universe wide constants like causality.
Money mules loose too (not that banks give a damn about them) and if we could get people to understand that there is no such thing as a free lunch and laundering money is a bad idea all those transactions could be traced and the banks that get them could be told 'go get Ivan or don't expect wire transfers in the future.' The local banks would do it just to reduce the paperwork they have to do and save some money.
Bingo. To summarize: spend lots of other people's money.throwing crap at the wall as fast as you can until something sticks. Alternatively, be rich, dabble at things and have fun. Not really realistic advice for most people.
Possible approach: I proposed this to a variety of people and was never able to get funding. Maybe it can help your Dad. Let me know if it does. It's cheap (especially compared to medical devices), relatively easy and doesn't require surgery. Please feel free to make a single one for home use, but I do reserve all commercial rights.
Take a low res B&W camera
Use an aduino or even palmtop to further lower the image quality to match the x by y of the 'display' you're going to make
Output the image via appropriate switching transistors and at appropriate amperages to a matrix of individual loops of nicrome wire.
Add a pad over the top of the wire to prevent accidental burns.
Stick the pad to your chest, arm or stomach
For the matrix black is on, white is off. For you hot is black, cool is white.
It will take a bit of time to get used to, but with it you get low-res sight via variation in skin temperature for less than $200. Point the camera in different directions and you can 'feel' what's there, including behind you.
If you need more details email me, the approach has been wildly abbreviated to fit into a slashdot post. - Its s h i p p i n g (at) proboticsamerica (dot) com
According to this: (shows CA is 17th per in capita ed spending. Caveat: Data 2006, not sure if they've cut anything) Most of it to primary levels too.
http://www.ppinys.org/reports/jtf/educationspending.htm
You could argue cost of living I suppose, but overall the US is about normal. This is normalized for GNP. We're down at 35, but the Ukrane and Sudan are not really kicking our asses, so I'm guessing they have GNP issues and the ed spending is lagging.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/edu_pub_spe_per_stu_pri_lev-spending-per-student-primary-level
Not to mention 30 days after the zombie apocalypse we're all screwed. Zombie tech support doesn't take calls.
Hmm $5 charge..... What do you want to bet the Republican and Democratic parties, Tea Party, Police Departments, Exxon, Greenpeace, Chase Bank, Hillary Clinton, Rush Limbaugh, Goldman Sachs, everyone's ex's and pretty much everyone else anyone dislikes all find 'helpful' people registering on their behalf? If this list feeds to the no fly list there's going to be hell to pay.
Those are primary cells, not rechargables. The line is just before the one you list
A100 Primary (non-rechargeable) lithium batteries and cells are forbidden for transport aboard passenger carrying aircraft. Secondary (rechargeable) lithium batteries and cells are authorized aboard passenger carrying aircraft in packages that do not exceed a gross weight of 5 kg.
The interesting bit is that it's the packages that can't weigh more than 5kg. What's a package? Could be the battery shell, could be your laptop, could be your laptop plus laptop bag. The TSA will decide, you will not have input. Since laptops are generally less than 11lbs it will be a problem mainly for people selling instruments, equipment and other (slightly) larger items.
Actually no, the prize is to developers to make a game that promotes nutrition. That is there will be several 'medals' awarded to developer teams and each medal can get up to $3k. They are awarding two medals worth 3k and an undeclared but it looks like small number of medals for lesser competitors.
I would actually expect something more like what you described given how our society seems to work sometimes, but in this particular example it's NOT the case. I'm not sure what level of development they expect for a possibility of $3k, but it will probably end up being bored flash developers and computer-precocious grammar school classes that compete.
Thanks, I expected that it was some kind of obfusticate and delay but apparently they dump the risk onto some other criminals as well. That does mean that every Euro can be traced up until it leaves an ATM (and then presumably you have a photo, time and location of the criminal). I guess that means it depends on non-integrated banking systems, the ATM card buyers being able to cash out the cards quickly and police disdain for chasing ATM thieves. Plus the sheer volume of legitimate transactions of course.
I just didn't know if there was some pirate banking haven, magic trick or weird market manipulation that they were using to make their tracks disappear.
I can't really understand how the money from selling that property can be kept by the scammer. Sure you can wire funds around, but you can never wire to anything but a bank or financial institution (or ten) and unless you show up to pull out the funds personally in cash with fake ID there is always a trail.
Think about it - Bank 1 calls bank 2 saying the wire is bad and even if bank 2 has already wired it out to banks 3-15 they can still contact them and demand the funds back. Banking privacy doesn't cover crimes like that. I guess you could buy things with paypal or a debit card, but then there has to be a shipping address. There seems to be something major I'm missing here.
Do we still need publishers? The question should really be 'what function that publishers perform do we still need and how should those functions be provided?' Perhaps also 'Can a startup provide these functions and replace the entrenched companies?' We still need someone to plan the path from manuscript to finished book including content editing, grammar editing, artwork (inside figures and on the cover), legal issues (in every country where it's released), promotion/advertising, marketing (advising when a release will be available, how it will be different from last edition, etc). Should the publishers profit from owning relationships with the distributors, bookshops and retailers even when they're selling electronically? No, they shouldn't be able to gain from a monopoly in what should be a competitive market, but we still need some functions.
When a internet enabled solution for those issues starts to take off the publishers will start to lose their grasp on the book market and we all will be better off for it.
missed a couple of zeros - 200 mill vs. 465 and cash flow of maybey $100M. Concept still applies
Its a brilliant business model: Sell $2 million worth of roadsters to generate publicity and get the hang of building electric, get a 400+ million dollar low interest loan, throw the dice on getting a product out and if you win you're rich. If you lose declare bankruptcy and retire on the salaries you paid yourself from the loan.
If they tried to actually build cars they might get another $2 million in revenue which might get them one million in cash flow but it doesn't even compare to the $400 million they can play with courtesy of the government and it distracts the company from paying attention to the $400 mill project.
These guys are brilliant hypesters with good government management skills.
Oops - and it's velocity of course.
All depends on how close it is and what it masses. True for any body that passed by that wasn't radiating so much it would vaporize the place.