i can't see why a monopoly on a prime band of communication spectrum can't be anything but pure gold.
I thought that was the whole point of this. If it passes the threshold, then there is no "monopoly on a prime band.. yada yada".
Getting the band for unlimited use for your company's product would be a goldmine, especially for 4.638 billion, just under the threshold.
But, if you bid more than 4.638 billion, I'm not sure what you get. You can't promise your customers that their phones will work, because you don't know what kind of science-fair type phone their neighbors may be using.
Even with a bid more than 4.638 billion, you can still control what plans the customers buy for use on the network, but you can't control the hardware. I'm anxious to see how it turns out.
All of the questions in the interview were made before the first episode of CT was released.
I was a big fan of MST3k at one time, so I jumped at the chance to buy one of the new shows. All other fans (or previous fans) should do the same. The rest of this comment contains my reactions to the first episode.
I'm a little a disappointed with the new format. Adding new props (as silhouettes) was a great idea, but I don't think they were executed very well. The "freeze frames" should probably not be used for more than about 5 seconds, or you will lose the interest of the viewers. I don't know what the solution should be for this. Maybe the lights should come on, maybe the silhouetted characters should retreat to another stage (like in the original episodes), or maybe a selection of digital stills from the film should be animated in a pseudo-dance video during these breaks.
"Oozing Skull" had horrible sound (some dialog was lost), and was too slowly paced to keep many fans in it. I know this is characteristic of many of the horrible movies you find, but it makes it very hard to make an entertaining show. There are many great B-movies from the 70s that are faster paced, and would probably work better for your new format. Is it possible to use them? If you can ever get "Death Race 2000", I will be very happy:)
Stephen Hawking's presence was a great idea. Can he be a recurring guest? I'd really like to see him join in with the riffing, instead of awkwardly waltzing around the stage while everyone stares at him. I really think that some story line needs to be added, to give purpose to the silhouette characters. The story line certainly should be something that would allow for frequent celebrity appearances. If you're able to hire another cast member (outsiders aren't all bad), you should definitely find one with impression skills.
I'm very excited that you and the others are back at it again. It's clear that you have a number of updated production techniques in the first episode, and the imagination that made the original MST3k great is still there. I doubt that enough people will fork over money on a regular basis to keep it going (unless you can find a way to talk fans into getting some kind of subscription package), but I think that the concept of riffing off of B-movies is sure money-maker, if only done correctly. I'm quite excited about what you (and the rest of the crew) is able to produce.:)
For those of you who want to invest real capital in cyber-world banks, you can still do it at Entropia Universe
Last year, 5 banks opened up in Entropia Universe, each with a minimum of $100,000 capital for making loans. You can check your in-game items into a safety deposit box at such a cyber-bank, and receive a credit line (in real dollars), using the in-game item as collateral.
Even the premium version of google apps stores the data on a google server, and as such, corporations should never use it.
Most corporations have strict policies about not allowing proprietary information travel along any external transmission lines. A company like Prudential would certainly use an office suite for documents containing customer info, so they would never be able to switch completely to google apps. I'm pretty sure that transferring such customer data to google would even be against the law.
I don't even use google docs for personal use, unless I plan to make the file public. I can't imagine someone considering using it for corporate use.
However, there's a 95% chance that any EVE online player will have the following qualities:
Own only one computer.
Not be technical.
Not read the forums where the information is posted.
The people that I hung out with in Eve were randomly picked. Our corp was small (15-20 people), but everyone I knew in the group was technically savvy. The CEO of our corp was a guy that owned his own contracting business IRL, and had developed his own software for it. All players in our corp were college kids or adults, and nearly all were in technology-driven fields. This was the norm for corporations in that game.
Because of the way that Eve billing works, it highly encourages you to have more than one account. Many of the players that I met were playing 2 accounts at a time (one for mining, one guarding with firepower). Those that didn't have two machines usually used one pc with two monitors.
Please don't get Eve mixed up with some of the other lesser MMO worlds out there. Project Entropia, Runescape, PoxNora, Guild Wars, etc are just filled with prepubescents who can't convince their parents to pay for a subscription MMO. Eve online is pretty much the other end of the spectrum.
Fixing your boot.ini will hardly be a problem for the majority of Eve players. Sure, a few people may leave the game because of this, but those people will probably have other reasons to leave, and will point to the boot.ini screw-up as just "the last straw".
The best part of the deal is not described well on the Dell site. You get a figurine of your character in a snow-globish type of thing. Still overpriced by my estimation, but important none-the-less. Here's a video showing the FigurePrint:
This blog says that you'll also get a special in-game pet. Those who don't play WoW don't understand how much value people put on such things. Many people buy blizzcon tickets ($100) each year just to collect the in-game pet from that year.
A very useful site similar to tinyurl is imgred.com. I've found it very useful when posting to various web forums.
Many sites don't allow their images to be loaded from foreign sites (often referred to as hot-linking). They do this to protect their bandwidth. I often find myself making a clone of the image on my own server, and then posting that in my image. imgred.com will do this for you, saving a lot of time.
I can't understand why people would use tinyurl on their own site. I'm always wary of such links, because I never have any idea where they lead. But, I could see people using imgred on their own sites to save on their own bandwidth. That seems to be a much bigger concern.
To be completely sure that your private messages remain private, you must:
Hand deliver cryptography keys to other party
Encrypt all sensitive messages prior to delivery
Trust other party to never share the encryption method
Today, with public keys, we can generally skip step 1. The other party
can send you their public keys through unencrypted email, or on a public bulletin board,
and using them will be fine, as long the mailservices between you didn't tamper
with those public keys during transmission.
Everyone (even your mom) knows that steps 2 and 3 are non-negotiable.
So, why would anyone think that sending a private message through facebook would really be private? With encryption as cheap and easy as it today, I think that this is a non-concern. There's no guarantee that facebook won't sell your information to the highest bidder. The same goes if you use gmail or MSN hotmail for email. There is no practical reason that anyone should need to "trust" such companies to keep your information private. That responsibility is yours and yours alone.
The headline makes it sound as if the German government is going to mandate all users turn over their hard drives, or that the government is going to force all citizens to install trojans. It makes a good headline, but the story is much less interesting:
"Now, along with several other European countries, Germany is seeking authority to plant secret Trojan viruses into the computers of suspects..."
Don't they already have this authority? Is there anyone in the world who doesn't have this "authority"?
When it comes to security, you have to expect that it's war outside your firewall, and all varieties of people are going to be trying to get in. No one is responsible for your security mistakes except for you. I hate the government, but if they manage to root my system, I'll tip my hat to them. If they manage to root the system of a terrorist, I'll bow in deep respect.
Someone needs to attempt to hack the computers of known terrorists. I know that vigilante justice is trying. I don't know why we would restrict the government from trying too.
There is already a policy like this, called P3P (Platform for Privacy Preferences Project).
P3P lets a create a all-encompassing privacy plan for their browser, and only websites that comply with particular levels of user privacy, and sign their sites as doing so, are able to set and read cookies in the way that the user specifies. The standard was created by W3C, and even had support initially from IE and Mozilla.
The code for P3P in Mozilla sat untouched from 2003 until 2007, so they turned it off for a few releases to see if anyone would notice. When no one complained, they finally yanked it out of the firefox and seamonkey trunks.
The vast majority of websites are never going to file one of these documents, since it is just a bunch of paperwork, and a setup for a lawsuit against yourself.
My questions not answered by this article are:
What does this new system have that P3P does not?
Why is the FTC involved? Does the government have to control every aspect of our lives?
Who is actually going to trust every website out there to abide by these controls? A company that signs and promises not to abuse your data, and then asks for extra privileges are the most likely to abuse it.
If a website does abuse data that they promised not to, how will they be caught? Will they be tried in court as criminals? Copyright infringers are tried as criminals and we all know how that turned out.
The Do not call registry works because it is tied phone numbers, which are static for users, and are the only gateway for phone communication between a user and a solicitor. There is no such vehicle for the internet. If the U.S. government wants to assign web browsing IDs for all users, then it could work. If that ever happens, I'm moving to Cambodia.
When Yahoo! released a wiki-like facebook app (mash.yahoo.com), it wasn't listed here as story. It launched with all kinds of rss feed modules that can be drag and dropped around the profile.
By the way, there are 28 yahoo rss applications on facebook, including news, weather, messenger plugin, and music player. I know I'll be crucified for saying it, but I think that slashdot staff are google whores.
be embarrassing if the hole was just the result of variations in various decades long solar cycles, after all we haven't been observing it for very long. we may have gone environmentally apeshit for no reason with regards to FHCs.
It's impossible to embarrass those who produce bad science. This is the same crowd that said all oil reserves will be completely depleted by 2003, and the same ones who said that 2000 will be the beginning of a deep freeze from which we'll never escape.
The link from man-made CFCs to ozone depletion was tenuous at best. Preliminary investigation into volcanoes shows that the amount of chlorine they spew dwarfs what man produces, and it is lost high in the atmosphere, instead of feet from the ground, yet media has never covered that part of the story.
Face it, panic-inducing reports are always going to be make headline news. Those who make the craziest predictions are going to be the media-darlings. It's never going to change.
I consider myself an environmentalist. I do what I can to be good to this planet, and spend time studying the issues out there. But, it really troubles me to see a lot of the bad science that is repeated over and over without being checked.
Plans for nuclear power in the UK seem to be taking an interesting turn. Greenpeace UK recently looked at...
I stopped reading once I saw the word "Greenpeace".
If you want to post bad science, please get it from a conspiracy site (ie. Hoagland's site). Bad science without conspiracy theories is just too boring.
YUI (BSD License) is a full javascript/ajax toolkit that rivals other such open toolkits out there (prototype, dojo, etc.), but is better documented, and will likely become the standard over the coming year or two.
Yahoo! obviously doesn't release everything they do as open source. That would hurt their competitive advantage, and they often can't justify the amount of time to polish and document everything well enough for outside use. But I challenge you to find any company with as high of a profile as yahoo! that has shared as much as they have with the open source community.
Back to the original story, I think it's great news that Yahoo! has acquired this company. If google and yahoo both give away web-based office suites, people will catch on quickly, and hopefully MS will lose its clawlike grip on the office suite market.
Is it good policy? Why does that matter? A company as big as GameStop pays people to come up with such policies. This manager is not an owner. Even if he did own this one little franchise, he has no authority to make up new policies to a business with GameStop's name on it, especially something as crazy as this.
This man obviously wants to try a new type of sales policy. He has experience as a manager of a local franchise, and he has an idea about how to make it better. He should have quit his job and opened his own store. Trying to make such a big change to a store where his own money is not at stake is ludicrous.
I imagine there exists some sort of prior art from the 80s, but I can't think of any at the moment...
I don't doubt that examples from the 80s exist.
I do remember using "Freetel" in 1995 (my freshman year) for internet telephony. It really wasn't much different from what skype is today, except for the reliability factor. They also did not have any equivalents for "SkypeIn" and "SkypeOut".
I don't know what ever happened to Freetel. Dialpad quickly overtook them.
I also remember some collabrative whiteboard program that could be used with strangers over the internet. It was a cute fascination at the time. Nowdays, microsoft changes big money for people to do the samething in netmeeting.
Back in 1995 my parents bought a very nice home for $250,000 and they are far from poor. I have no idea how a poor person can own a $300k house, unless it is something that is very old and rundown and its the property that is now worth that much, but they probably can't afford the taxes on it.
The heritage article explained it fairly clearly. If you are a wealthy businessman, but have a risk business, your income for any particular year may easily dip below the poverty line. The poverty line does not take into account personal assets.
If I was young and wealthy (like a recently retired NBA player), I'd probably continue to work some type of job. Maybe I'd build custom guitars, or something with my hands that would allow me to put ambition into something, but also something that I could set my own hours, and get away from it if I decided to go on an extended vacation. Such a job would put me under the poverty line.
As America has become more wealthy, a lot of the statistics make even less sense than before.
When Roxor games wanted to make a DDR knock-off, they went to the linux peopule who helpd develop Stepmania. StepMania is a sourceforge project, and has been the basis for almost all dancing-genre games since the original from Konami. Roxor's game, In the Groove is an excellent example of linux found in most arcades.
Chances are, StepUI borrows more from StepMania than the name. StepMail and StepPhoto are other "innovations" by these Redmondites that use StepUI.
My guess is that these Redmondites are actually open source guys/girls in disguise, and they'll surprise they're managers with the source of their inspiration with their bosses after their internship is over. Or, if they decide to stay with the beast, they can use this example to show they aren't afraid to steal ideas, and call it their own:)
Oh no, I'm a DDR freak and I've typed only on dvorak keyboards for the last 8 years.
Now, a slashdot poster says that he's not as geeky as -- those DDR people -- who are almost as bad as those geeks who use dvorak keyboards.
I suddenly realize my chances to ever get a girlfriend are actually negative.
Actually, negative probabilities doesn't even make sense. As a nerd, I should know that. My probability to have a girlfriend is certainly positive, but it has an imaginary component to it. How complex!
Quote from the article:
[blockquote]
We spent some time trying to understand why the consumer panelists rated the JVC Consumer unit so highly. It had the lowest objective on-screen resolution of all of the units, because of internal signal processing (see Fine Detail Artifacts, above), but a number of consumer panelists commented on how sharp it looked. It turns out that the copious artifacts and significant edge enhancement produced so much artificial texture in the image (more than any of the other units) that some panelists interpreted it as an indication of the set's superior sharpness. All of the Video Experts recognized this effect, and it's the primary reason why they gave this unit the lowest score of the Shoot-Out. One possible explanation for the consumer ratings is that JVC is simply giving consumers exactly what they think they want. [/blockquote]
That result right there is why you want lay people looking at this stuff.
The 6 panel sessions that he had included different types of people. Each panel reported their own complete set of scores. If you want, you can look only at the scores from the "video experts". But comparing the scores of these people with the scores given by high-school and university students is interesting.
The majority of people that view my HD setup (LCD projector on a white screen) are in fact students, or young college grads with tech careers. I know to not put much stock in what they say. This shoot-out gives me more confirmation that the average consumer, or even your average salesclerk in your local electronics retail store has no idea what to look for when evaluating display units.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought that was the whole point of this. If it passes the threshold, then there is no "monopoly on a prime band.. yada yada".
Getting the band for unlimited use for your company's product would be a goldmine, especially for 4.638 billion, just under the threshold.
But, if you bid more than 4.638 billion, I'm not sure what you get. You can't promise your customers that their phones will work, because you don't know what kind of science-fair type phone their neighbors may be using.
Even with a bid more than 4.638 billion, you can still control what plans the customers buy for use on the network, but you can't control the hardware. I'm anxious to see how it turns out.
I was a big fan of MST3k at one time, so I jumped at the chance to buy one of the new shows. All other fans (or previous fans) should do the same. The rest of this comment contains my reactions to the first episode.
I'm a little a disappointed with the new format. Adding new props (as silhouettes) was a great idea, but I don't think they were executed very well. The "freeze frames" should probably not be used for more than about 5 seconds, or you will lose the interest of the viewers. I don't know what the solution should be for this. Maybe the lights should come on, maybe the silhouetted characters should retreat to another stage (like in the original episodes), or maybe a selection of digital stills from the film should be animated in a pseudo-dance video during these breaks.
"Oozing Skull" had horrible sound (some dialog was lost), and was too slowly paced to keep many fans in it. I know this is characteristic of many of the horrible movies you find, but it makes it very hard to make an entertaining show. There are many great B-movies from the 70s that are faster paced, and would probably work better for your new format. Is it possible to use them? If you can ever get "Death Race 2000", I will be very happy :)
Stephen Hawking's presence was a great idea. Can he be a recurring guest? I'd really like to see him join in with the riffing, instead of awkwardly waltzing around the stage while everyone stares at him. I really think that some story line needs to be added, to give purpose to the silhouette characters. The story line certainly should be something that would allow for frequent celebrity appearances. If you're able to hire another cast member (outsiders aren't all bad), you should definitely find one with impression skills.
I'm very excited that you and the others are back at it again. It's clear that you have a number of updated production techniques in the first episode, and the imagination that made the original MST3k great is still there. I doubt that enough people will fork over money on a regular basis to keep it going (unless you can find a way to talk fans into getting some kind of subscription package), but I think that the concept of riffing off of B-movies is sure money-maker, if only done correctly. I'm quite excited about what you (and the rest of the crew) is able to produce. :)
Last year, 5 banks opened up in Entropia Universe, each with a minimum of $100,000 capital for making loans. You can check your in-game items into a safety deposit box at such a cyber-bank, and receive a credit line (in real dollars), using the in-game item as collateral.
Each bank is sanctioned by MindArk (the software company that made the game), and is allowed to set any policies that they want regarding interest rates, etc. MindArk auctioned off the 5 licenses for these banks for a total of $404,000 in May of last year.
I enjoy mixing my gaming life with my real life, but this has gone a little too far for even me.
You don't have to visit it to break the law. Just looking at the address of it makes you an infringer!
Most corporations have strict policies about not allowing proprietary information travel along any external transmission lines. A company like Prudential would certainly use an office suite for documents containing customer info, so they would never be able to switch completely to google apps. I'm pretty sure that transferring such customer data to google would even be against the law.
I don't even use google docs for personal use, unless I plan to make the file public. I can't imagine someone considering using it for corporate use.
Because of the way that Eve billing works, it highly encourages you to have more than one account. Many of the players that I met were playing 2 accounts at a time (one for mining, one guarding with firepower). Those that didn't have two machines usually used one pc with two monitors.
Please don't get Eve mixed up with some of the other lesser MMO worlds out there. Project Entropia, Runescape, PoxNora, Guild Wars, etc are just filled with prepubescents who can't convince their parents to pay for a subscription MMO. Eve online is pretty much the other end of the spectrum.
Fixing your boot.ini will hardly be a problem for the majority of Eve players. Sure, a few people may leave the game because of this, but those people will probably have other reasons to leave, and will point to the boot.ini screw-up as just "the last straw".
FigurePrint Demo
This blog says that you'll also get a special in-game pet. Those who don't play WoW don't understand how much value people put on such things. Many people buy blizzcon tickets ($100) each year just to collect the in-game pet from that year.
Many sites don't allow their images to be loaded from foreign sites (often referred to as hot-linking). They do this to protect their bandwidth. I often find myself making a clone of the image on my own server, and then posting that in my image. imgred.com will do this for you, saving a lot of time.
I can't understand why people would use tinyurl on their own site. I'm always wary of such links, because I never have any idea where they lead. But, I could see people using imgred on their own sites to save on their own bandwidth. That seems to be a much bigger concern.
- Hand deliver cryptography keys to other party
- Encrypt all sensitive messages prior to delivery
- Trust other party to never share the encryption method
Today, with public keys, we can generally skip step 1. The other party can send you their public keys through unencrypted email, or on a public bulletin board, and using them will be fine, as long the mailservices between you didn't tamper with those public keys during transmission.Everyone (even your mom) knows that steps 2 and 3 are non-negotiable.
So, why would anyone think that sending a private message through facebook would really be private? With encryption as cheap and easy as it today, I think that this is a non-concern. There's no guarantee that facebook won't sell your information to the highest bidder. The same goes if you use gmail or MSN hotmail for email. There is no practical reason that anyone should need to "trust" such companies to keep your information private. That responsibility is yours and yours alone.
When it comes to security, you have to expect that it's war outside your firewall, and all varieties of people are going to be trying to get in. No one is responsible for your security mistakes except for you. I hate the government, but if they manage to root my system, I'll tip my hat to them. If they manage to root the system of a terrorist, I'll bow in deep respect.
Someone needs to attempt to hack the computers of known terrorists. I know that vigilante justice is trying. I don't know why we would restrict the government from trying too.
P3P lets a create a all-encompassing privacy plan for their browser, and only websites that comply with particular levels of user privacy, and sign their sites as doing so, are able to set and read cookies in the way that the user specifies. The standard was created by W3C, and even had support initially from IE and Mozilla.
The code for P3P in Mozilla sat untouched from 2003 until 2007, so they turned it off for a few releases to see if anyone would notice. When no one complained, they finally yanked it out of the firefox and seamonkey trunks.
The vast majority of websites are never going to file one of these documents, since it is just a bunch of paperwork, and a setup for a lawsuit against yourself.
My questions not answered by this article are:
The Do not call registry works because it is tied phone numbers, which are static for users, and are the only gateway for phone communication between a user and a solicitor. There is no such vehicle for the internet. If the U.S. government wants to assign web browsing IDs for all users, then it could work. If that ever happens, I'm moving to Cambodia.
When Yahoo! released a wiki-like facebook app (mash.yahoo.com), it wasn't listed here as story. It launched with all kinds of rss feed modules that can be drag and dropped around the profile.
By the way, there are 28 yahoo rss applications on facebook, including news, weather, messenger plugin, and music player. I know I'll be crucified for saying it, but I think that slashdot staff are google whores.
The link from man-made CFCs to ozone depletion was tenuous at best. Preliminary investigation into volcanoes shows that the amount of chlorine they spew dwarfs what man produces, and it is lost high in the atmosphere, instead of feet from the ground, yet media has never covered that part of the story.
Face it, panic-inducing reports are always going to be make headline news. Those who make the craziest predictions are going to be the media-darlings. It's never going to change.
I consider myself an environmentalist. I do what I can to be good to this planet, and spend time studying the issues out there. But, it really troubles me to see a lot of the bad science that is repeated over and over without being checked.
If you want to post bad science, please get it from a conspiracy site (ie. Hoagland's site). Bad science without conspiracy theories is just too boring.
YUI (BSD License) is a full javascript/ajax toolkit that rivals other such open toolkits out there (prototype, dojo, etc.), but is better documented, and will likely become the standard over the coming year or two.
Yahoo! obviously doesn't release everything they do as open source. That would hurt their competitive advantage, and they often can't justify the amount of time to polish and document everything well enough for outside use. But I challenge you to find any company with as high of a profile as yahoo! that has shared as much as they have with the open source community.
Back to the original story, I think it's great news that Yahoo! has acquired this company. If google and yahoo both give away web-based office suites, people will catch on quickly, and hopefully MS will lose its clawlike grip on the office suite market.
This man obviously wants to try a new type of sales policy. He has experience as a manager of a local franchise, and he has an idea about how to make it better. He should have quit his job and opened his own store. Trying to make such a big change to a store where his own money is not at stake is ludicrous.
The article appears to be slashdotted. According to wikipedia, he would have turned 59 next month.
By the way, if you want to help with such an effort, you should download a piece, convert to lilypond, and then upload to Mutopiaproject.org
I do remember using "Freetel" in 1995 (my freshman year) for internet telephony. It really wasn't much different from what skype is today, except for the reliability factor. They also did not have any equivalents for "SkypeIn" and "SkypeOut".
I don't know what ever happened to Freetel. Dialpad quickly overtook them.
I also remember some collabrative whiteboard program that could be used with strangers over the internet. It was a cute fascination at the time. Nowdays, microsoft changes big money for people to do the samething in netmeeting.
Of course, microsoft was sued, and ended up losing the court case:
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5133588.html
History just repeats itself.
If I was young and wealthy (like a recently retired NBA player), I'd probably continue to work some type of job. Maybe I'd build custom guitars, or something with my hands that would allow me to put ambition into something, but also something that I could set my own hours, and get away from it if I decided to go on an extended vacation. Such a job would put me under the poverty line.
As America has become more wealthy, a lot of the statistics make even less sense than before.
When Roxor games wanted to make a DDR knock-off, they went to the linux peopule who helpd develop Stepmania. StepMania is a sourceforge project, and has been the basis for almost all dancing-genre games since the original from Konami. Roxor's game, In the Groove is an excellent example of linux found in most arcades.
Chances are, StepUI borrows more from StepMania than the name. StepMail and StepPhoto are other "innovations" by these Redmondites that use StepUI.
My guess is that these Redmondites are actually open source guys/girls in disguise, and they'll surprise they're managers with the source of their inspiration with their bosses after their internship is over. Or, if they decide to stay with the beast, they can use this example to show they aren't afraid to steal ideas, and call it their own :)
Now, a slashdot poster says that he's not as geeky as -- those DDR people -- who are almost as bad as those geeks who use dvorak keyboards.
I suddenly realize my chances to ever get a girlfriend are actually negative.
Actually, negative probabilities doesn't even make sense. As a nerd, I should know that. My probability to have a girlfriend is certainly positive, but it has an imaginary component to it. How complex!
The 6 panel sessions that he had included different types of people. Each panel reported their own complete set of scores. If you want, you can look only at the scores from the "video experts". But comparing the scores of these people with the scores given by high-school and university students is interesting.
The majority of people that view my HD setup (LCD projector on a white screen) are in fact students, or young college grads with tech careers. I know to not put much stock in what they say. This shoot-out gives me more confirmation that the average consumer, or even your average salesclerk in your local electronics retail store has no idea what to look for when evaluating display units.