Copy-and-paste a User ID into a login form: "System Unavailable!" The paste function added some extra whitespace.
Enter a dollar figure into a form, with a comma for the thousands separator: "An unexpected error occurred!"
Fill in a credit card of phone number with dashes or other punctuation: you guessed it!
Capitalize (or not) a username: "Username or password is incorrect."
Today's software applications and web applications really suffer from terrible input filtering, spitting out nonsense errors or complaining about invalid input, when it's really a matter of simply filtering out the unwanted data. Heard of RegEx?
If you want to see a lot more realtime solar imagery, go to the SOHO web site. This is a satellite installed at the Lagrange point between the Earth and the Sun. It's bristling with sensors, all dedicated to watching the Sun.
Our eyes do have three color sensors, and these are designed to respond to a broad spectrum to cover all wavelengths in-between these colors. Consider a pure yellow wavelength. Both red and green sensors in our eyes respond to this light, giving us the impression of yellow.
The problem with R,G,B light sources arises with reflective materials, which don't reflect just R,G,B light. A material that reflects a yellow wavelength of light will look bright yellow under a continuous-spectrum light source, such as an incandescent light, but will appear a dark, muddy color under even the brightest R,G,B light source.
This is why artists and other professionals will only use incandescent light sources in their work. Flourescent and plasma sources have an irregular spectrum to them, and cause weird color distortions in the subjects being illuminated. When an efficient light source comes out that has a smooth spectrum, they might reconsider. Incandescent lights have a nice spectrum, but they are hot!
/*... the rest is comments and a copy of the GPL */
I don't think this is too far off the mark. Evolution is not an optimized process, and a lot of the unused and useless "code" would be "commented out". There is no need to clean out these unused pieces, because it's not getting in the way, and some of it will invariably come in handy sometime in the future.
It's taken millions of years for complex life to evolve -- that's a lot of commented out code.
The Exabyte 5 GB tape backup unit used the same tapes and mechanism found in 8MM analog camcorders. I wouldn't be surprised to see this happen with the new media, also.
That's nice, but what's the point? Unless you are exchanging data with someone else on that backbone, you're never going to get even close to using that bandwidth. The Internet is just too slow. It's like hooking up your standard outdoor tap to a firehose.
History repeats itself. Does anybody remember the floppy 45's that used to be found in magazines? You had to carefully tear them out and put them on a record player to listen to them.
These were laminated into the strangest places, like the back of a cereal box. You actually had to cut it out of the (empty!) box to use it.
Note the "#304" in the address. This is most likely a P.O. box, or a Mailboxes Etc. box (or similar) both of which are frequently used by scammers to look legit while remaining hard to trace.
"ActiveX" is just another name for "plug in" in Windows. It's also called "COM+", "COM", "OLE", "DDE", and now, it seems, ".NET". What you call it just depends on when you got into Windows development and started seeing Microsoft's buzzwords. Sure, there are slight differences, but the name just changes when MS decides to add something new.
It's a nice solution, but web developers will have to wait a few years before they can really use it. How many people on slow modem connections are really going to download the latest several-megabyte version of a browser just to get SVG? Many are still using version 3 or lower of the top two browsers.
Eventually, cheap, pre-configured boxes that have a built-in screen or sit on top of the TV will become the established platform of choice for those who just want to surf the net. If you doubt this, take a look at all of those AOL users who went for the easy, underpowered solution. Once a good piece of cheap hardware becomes available, consumers will start buying, and plug-ins will really start to break.
I am working with a company that is facing this problem. Right now, we are just too small to develop for more than one platform. Our plug-in is built only for the Wintel systems, and we will write it for others once we have the resources. The reason, of course, is that most of our target customers are using PC's with Windows.
We looked at Java and Javascript as a possible cross-platform solution, but it just couldn't handle the primary function of our product. We were forced to use ActiveX and restrict our development to Windows. Yes, ActiveX is supported on the Mac, but we don't have the manpower to develop for both.
Our company is still aiming for the set-top box, wireless device, and non-PC markets, so a cross-platform solution eventually will be mandatory for our business. This is on the "back burner" until we get our Wintel solution established well enough to divert resources elswhere.
Light can't bend. The entire 3-D image must have the device's aperture in back of it to be visible from any viewpoint. If any point of the image moves beyond the aperture frame, it will be cut off by the frame. This is a very disconcerting effect, since the frame seems to be in back of the image, yet the image is being cut off by that frame.
You are really looking at something inside the device, but the optics trick your eyes into seeing it outside. You can only see those parts of the object that are visible through the aperature frame.
This is a dual-concave-mirror system that projects a "virtual image" above the opening of the device. You can only see parts of the object that have a direct line-of-sight to the exposed area of the device's aperture. The image of the object is really reflected light coming from the mirrors within the device, so if you can't see the mirror, you can't see the object.
This restricts the device to showing objects just above its surface, and restricting the viewing angle so the object isn't cut off by the frame. The optics require that the device be a lot larger than the image displayed. It's a neat effect, but we don't have true "Star Wars" type holograms yet.
You can buy CD-R's that will play on older CD players. These are certain brands (Sony) or those labelled as "for audio use". I have a new portable that won't play "blue" CD-R discs; it just crashes and I have to yank out the batteries. It will work with "green", "gold", and "silver" discs.
Obviously, computers are the tool that is helping us accelerate our technological advancement, but this isn't really mentioned. As technology advances, computers become more powerful, helping to advance technology even further. This becomes an endless, self-accelerating loop. Computers already aid us in researching and designing our technology. The tools available are becoming more powerful at the same accelerating rate.
Allow me to go way out on a limb and expand upon this a bit (ok, a lot)...
Soon enough, computers will become mostly self-programming, easily helping us solve many problems such as nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, superconductivity, complex magnetic manipulation, etc. at an increasingly fast pace. In an over-simplification of the process, we will just ask the system what we want and guide it through the R&D process.
As for the user interface, it will become more and more "close" to our own conciousness, until the technology actually becomes a part of us. "Your wish is my command" will become reality. This seems dangerous, but we have kept other emerging, "dangerous" techologies under control many times in our history, and can do so again. I expect this process to be rough, as were any of the past "revolutions".
To go into more detail on this: our conciousness is severely limited. Excuse the CPU metaphors, but our concious mind only has around six to ten registers, only one processor, and task-switching speeds measured only in the Hertz. Note that I'm talking about the "aware" concious portion of our minds, not the vast unconcious mind. For example, how many car accidents have been caused because the driver was talking on a cell phone? They overloaded their awareness, which is much too easy to do.
The unconcious mind is extremely powerful, but our conciousness does not have direct access to it. We have to make a "request", the answer which is presented to us in one (or more) of the "registers". This process can take from a fraction of a second to many minutes to hours (how often has an answer to a long-ago-asked question popped into your head as you're driving home?)
Eventually technology will enhance this. The stand-alone computer will be a thing of the past. We will have direct access to vast computing power integrated directly into our brains. Think of it as an upgrade. Our thinking process will be similar, but will be more powerful to a staggering degree compared to our current limits.
This will give us more "scratch space" to work on vastly complicated problems within our immediate awareness. We will have better multitasking abilities allowing us to keep our attention on multiple things at once. The already huge "unconcious" section of our minds will extend beyond the confines of our skull into what is currently the Internet.
We can't begin to imagine where this will take us. It promises to be an exciting ride!
(Oh yeah, once we get through this, don't be surprised if someone else out there decides to say, "Hello, welcome to the neighborhood.")
This is exactly the kind of article I've been looking for - a complete summary on all of the legal stuff that webcasters have to deal with. Every webcaster should save it, bookmark it, or print it out onto dead trees.
Isn't there a proposed bill in the works that promises to make this all easier for internet radio? Or is that just for fair "personal use" of music stored on the internet?
One additional requirement of DMCA: if you do take song requests, you have to wait at least an hour before broadcasting it.
Send a Message: Vote, Vote, Vote for who you want!
on
Should You Vote?
·
· Score: 1
If you don't like your choices between the two parties, remember that this is not a two-party system! You can write in whoever you want from whatever party you favor. There is no excuse not to vote.
Boycotting the booth will not make an impact. If you want to show your dissatisfaction with the two major parties, vote for someone else. If enough people write in a candidate, it will send a clear message.
Sure, your write-in candidate probably doesn't stand a chance. You may think that you are throwing away your vote. No, definitely not! You are making your opinion known, which is a heck of a lot better than joining the apathetic majority who just don't care and don't vote. Go to the booth and make an impact!
This company has a product, along with a few patents, centered around drag-and-drop shopping. An image of the product contains all information necessary, and the drag&drop operation simply uses the native OS capabilities. The image is just a file, and can be moved around and handled just like any other file. It isn't restricted to a certain web page or Flash app, but can be moved and shared between any number of applications. When the item is finally dropped on our application, the transaction takes place.
Our patents cover the file format and processes involved (that's why I can talk so freely about it without getting in trouble.) Yes, I work for this company, and am partially responsible for a couple of these patents, but my feelings on software patents are still mixed.
Any large volume liquid cannot flash immediately into gas, even in a vacuum. This is especially true in super-large volumes as there would have had to be on Mars to create these channels.
When a liquid is exposed to temperatures and pressures that won't support it any more, it starts to boil away. As it does so, it cools down. If there is enough liquid, it reaches its condensing or "triple" point, where the boiling suddenly slows or stops. Whether the liquid continues to boil or freeze depends on how much energy is getting into it from the surrounding environment. If it stays liquid, it can last quite a while in a hostile environment -- long enough to carve channels.
One thing I noticed about the Mars pictures of channels: there are no collection areas. The channels start from nowhere, and go into nowhere. There should be lakes or pools where the channels start or where they end. This suggests that the liquid disappeared relatively quickly before it could collect.
Does anybody remember that Texas Instruments tried this a few years ago? They had the spinning screen inside a closed container upon which they projected an image. It didn't go over very well, since it needs a good sized, noisy motor to keep that disc spinning, along with the necessary motion of the optics. Who wants to work with a display that sounds like a laser printer, and breaks down just as much?
You can spay the:Cat and still use the software. Get a momentary pushbutton switch and connect it to those points on the board. Mount it where it will fit onto the case. Most are round, so all you have to do is find a good spot and drill a hole.
An always-on/push-off button would allow you to use it as a normal barcode scanner, but pushing the button while scanning would bring up DC's software.
This poses some interesting problems, along with some possibilities as well.
First of all, you can't point it. It has to point straight up! But what do you want for the price? They might be able to make a movable target like the one on the Arecibo dish, but then you still only get a few degrees of pointability. For the price, though, you could build lots of them and plant them at different latitudes, essentially getting full-sky coverage as the Earth turns. Now all we need is a little artificial gravity...
Mercury is toxic and it evaporates. They mentioned a "resin coating" in the article. Perhaps this solves the evaporation problem. How do they keep miniscule air currents from causing even the littlest ripple? The platform is spinning, which will cause some air turbulence.
Hey, I wonder if "adaptive optics" could be applied to this? It is a flexible surface. How could this be done? Electric currents and magnetic fields, perhaps?
Slashdot Mirror
Copy-and-paste a User ID into a login form: "System Unavailable!" The paste function added some extra whitespace.
Enter a dollar figure into a form, with a comma for the thousands separator: "An unexpected error occurred!"
Fill in a credit card of phone number with dashes or other punctuation: you guessed it!
Capitalize (or not) a username: "Username or password is incorrect."
Today's software applications and web applications really suffer from terrible input filtering, spitting out nonsense errors or complaining about invalid input, when it's really a matter of simply filtering out the unwanted data. Heard of RegEx?
That comment is mine. Sorry, forgot to log in! (lame)
If you want to see a lot more realtime solar imagery, go to the SOHO web site. This is a satellite installed at the Lagrange point between the Earth and the Sun. It's bristling with sensors, all dedicated to watching the Sun.
Our eyes do have three color sensors, and these are designed to respond to a broad spectrum to cover all wavelengths in-between these colors. Consider a pure yellow wavelength. Both red and green sensors in our eyes respond to this light, giving us the impression of yellow.
The problem with R,G,B light sources arises with reflective materials, which don't reflect just R,G,B light. A material that reflects a yellow wavelength of light will look bright yellow under a continuous-spectrum light source, such as an incandescent light, but will appear a dark, muddy color under even the brightest R,G,B light source.
This is why artists and other professionals will only use incandescent light sources in their work. Flourescent and plasma sources have an irregular spectrum to them, and cause weird color distortions in the subjects being illuminated. When an efficient light source comes out that has a smooth spectrum, they might reconsider. Incandescent lights have a nice spectrum, but they are hot!
I don't think this is too far off the mark. Evolution is not an optimized process, and a lot of the unused and useless "code" would be "commented out". There is no need to clean out these unused pieces, because it's not getting in the way, and some of it will invariably come in handy sometime in the future.
It's taken millions of years for complex life to evolve -- that's a lot of commented out code.
The Exabyte 5 GB tape backup unit used the same tapes and mechanism found in 8MM analog camcorders. I wouldn't be surprised to see this happen with the new media, also.
That's nice, but what's the point? Unless you are exchanging data with someone else on that backbone, you're never going to get even close to using that bandwidth. The Internet is just too slow. It's like hooking up your standard outdoor tap to a firehose.
History repeats itself. Does anybody remember the floppy 45's that used to be found in magazines? You had to carefully tear them out and put them on a record player to listen to them.
These were laminated into the strangest places, like the back of a cereal box. You actually had to cut it out of the (empty!) box to use it.
Note the "#304" in the address. This is most likely a P.O. box, or a Mailboxes Etc. box (or similar) both of which are frequently used by scammers to look legit while remaining hard to trace.
"ActiveX" is just another name for "plug in" in Windows. It's also called "COM+", "COM", "OLE", "DDE", and now, it seems, ".NET". What you call it just depends on when you got into Windows development and started seeing Microsoft's buzzwords. Sure, there are slight differences, but the name just changes when MS decides to add something new.
It's a nice solution, but web developers will have to wait a few years before they can really use it. How many people on slow modem connections are really going to download the latest several-megabyte version of a browser just to get SVG? Many are still using version 3 or lower of the top two browsers.
Eventually, cheap, pre-configured boxes that have a built-in screen or sit on top of the TV will become the established platform of choice for those who just want to surf the net. If you doubt this, take a look at all of those AOL users who went for the easy, underpowered solution. Once a good piece of cheap hardware becomes available, consumers will start buying, and plug-ins will really start to break.
I am working with a company that is facing this problem. Right now, we are just too small to develop for more than one platform. Our plug-in is built only for the Wintel systems, and we will write it for others once we have the resources. The reason, of course, is that most of our target customers are using PC's with Windows.
We looked at Java and Javascript as a possible cross-platform solution, but it just couldn't handle the primary function of our product. We were forced to use ActiveX and restrict our development to Windows. Yes, ActiveX is supported on the Mac, but we don't have the manpower to develop for both.
Our company is still aiming for the set-top box, wireless device, and non-PC markets, so a cross-platform solution eventually will be mandatory for our business. This is on the "back burner" until we get our Wintel solution established well enough to divert resources elswhere.
Light can't bend. The entire 3-D image must have the device's aperture in back of it to be visible from any viewpoint. If any point of the image moves beyond the aperture frame, it will be cut off by the frame. This is a very disconcerting effect, since the frame seems to be in back of the image, yet the image is being cut off by that frame.
You are really looking at something inside the device, but the optics trick your eyes into seeing it outside. You can only see those parts of the object that are visible through the aperature frame.
This is a dual-concave-mirror system that projects a "virtual image" above the opening of the device. You can only see parts of the object that have a direct line-of-sight to the exposed area of the device's aperture. The image of the object is really reflected light coming from the mirrors within the device, so if you can't see the mirror, you can't see the object.
This restricts the device to showing objects just above its surface, and restricting the viewing angle so the object isn't cut off by the frame. The optics require that the device be a lot larger than the image displayed. It's a neat effect, but we don't have true "Star Wars" type holograms yet.
Obviously, computers are the tool that is helping us accelerate our technological advancement, but this isn't really mentioned. As technology advances, computers become more powerful, helping to advance technology even further. This becomes an endless, self-accelerating loop. Computers already aid us in researching and designing our technology. The tools available are becoming more powerful at the same accelerating rate.
Allow me to go way out on a limb and expand upon this a bit (ok, a lot)...
Soon enough, computers will become mostly self-programming, easily helping us solve many problems such as nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, superconductivity, complex magnetic manipulation, etc. at an increasingly fast pace. In an over-simplification of the process, we will just ask the system what we want and guide it through the R&D process.
As for the user interface, it will become more and more "close" to our own conciousness, until the technology actually becomes a part of us. "Your wish is my command" will become reality. This seems dangerous, but we have kept other emerging, "dangerous" techologies under control many times in our history, and can do so again. I expect this process to be rough, as were any of the past "revolutions".
To go into more detail on this: our conciousness is severely limited. Excuse the CPU metaphors, but our concious mind only has around six to ten registers, only one processor, and task-switching speeds measured only in the Hertz. Note that I'm talking about the "aware" concious portion of our minds, not the vast unconcious mind. For example, how many car accidents have been caused because the driver was talking on a cell phone? They overloaded their awareness, which is much too easy to do.
The unconcious mind is extremely powerful, but our conciousness does not have direct access to it. We have to make a "request", the answer which is presented to us in one (or more) of the "registers". This process can take from a fraction of a second to many minutes to hours (how often has an answer to a long-ago-asked question popped into your head as you're driving home?)
Eventually technology will enhance this. The stand-alone computer will be a thing of the past. We will have direct access to vast computing power integrated directly into our brains. Think of it as an upgrade. Our thinking process will be similar, but will be more powerful to a staggering degree compared to our current limits.
This will give us more "scratch space" to work on vastly complicated problems within our immediate awareness. We will have better multitasking abilities allowing us to keep our attention on multiple things at once. The already huge "unconcious" section of our minds will extend beyond the confines of our skull into what is currently the Internet.
We can't begin to imagine where this will take us. It promises to be an exciting ride!
(Oh yeah, once we get through this, don't be surprised if someone else out there decides to say, "Hello, welcome to the neighborhood.")
Isn't there a proposed bill in the works that promises to make this all easier for internet radio? Or is that just for fair "personal use" of music stored on the internet?
One additional requirement of DMCA: if you do take song requests, you have to wait at least an hour before broadcasting it.
http://radio.quickbuy.com/ - Alternative Rock and Electronic Music
Boycotting the booth will not make an impact. If you want to show your dissatisfaction with the two major parties, vote for someone else. If enough people write in a candidate, it will send a clear message.
Sure, your write-in candidate probably doesn't stand a chance. You may think that you are throwing away your vote. No, definitely not! You are making your opinion known, which is a heck of a lot better than joining the apathetic majority who just don't care and don't vote. Go to the booth and make an impact!
http://www.quickbuy.com/
Our patents cover the file format and processes involved (that's why I can talk so freely about it without getting in trouble.) Yes, I work for this company, and am partially responsible for a couple of these patents, but my feelings on software patents are still mixed.
When a liquid is exposed to temperatures and pressures that won't support it any more, it starts to boil away. As it does so, it cools down. If there is enough liquid, it reaches its condensing or "triple" point, where the boiling suddenly slows or stops. Whether the liquid continues to boil or freeze depends on how much energy is getting into it from the surrounding environment. If it stays liquid, it can last quite a while in a hostile environment -- long enough to carve channels.
One thing I noticed about the Mars pictures of channels: there are no collection areas. The channels start from nowhere, and go into nowhere. There should be lakes or pools where the channels start or where they end. This suggests that the liquid disappeared relatively quickly before it could collect.
"Do you have a call, or are you just cleaning your ear?"
"Ever since I bought that new CD, my phone bill has been outrageous."
"My cat played with my watch last night, and called Albania."
"Hello, 911? My finger is stuck in my ear!"
"What? Speak up! I can't hear you through my gloves."
"Wow. That looked really stupid. My phone, pager, and PDA all went off at the same time."
"No, I *can't* write something down..."
"You think people looked weird at the wearables convention--you should've seen the cellular expo."
Does anybody remember that Texas Instruments tried this a few years ago? They had the spinning screen inside a closed container upon which they projected an image. It didn't go over very well, since it needs a good sized, noisy motor to keep that disc spinning, along with the necessary motion of the optics. Who wants to work with a display that sounds like a laser printer, and breaks down just as much?
You can spay the :Cat and still use the software. Get a momentary pushbutton switch and connect it to those points on the board. Mount it where it will fit onto the case. Most are round, so all you have to do is find a good spot and drill a hole.
An always-on/push-off button would allow you to use it as a normal barcode scanner, but pushing the button while scanning would bring up DC's software.
Liquid can't be sustained in a vacuum. It will boil away. Liquid is a phenomenon of pressured environments.
This poses some interesting problems, along with some possibilities as well.
First of all, you can't point it. It has to point straight up! But what do you want for the price? They might be able to make a movable target like the one on the Arecibo dish, but then you still only get a few degrees of pointability. For the price, though, you could build lots of them and plant them at different latitudes, essentially getting full-sky coverage as the Earth turns. Now all we need is a little artificial gravity...
Mercury is toxic and it evaporates. They mentioned a "resin coating" in the article. Perhaps this solves the evaporation problem. How do they keep miniscule air currents from causing even the littlest ripple? The platform is spinning, which will cause some air turbulence.
Hey, I wonder if "adaptive optics" could be applied to this? It is a flexible surface. How could this be done? Electric currents and magnetic fields, perhaps?