Actually, scent is used a LOT in retail. Not just in the perfume counter: you can hire companies to design a signature scent for your store. It's basically a big Glade air freshener, much simpler than this device.
It works for a whole store. It may not work so well in a public place, where movie posters are displayed, but there's a good chance that there's already a smell there. Not all of that popcorn smell comes from the popcorn machine. Really.
A vent certainly helps, but if you've ever opened up a window in a musty room, you'll find that the problem doesn't evaporate immediately.
This proved a big problem for smell-o-vision in theaters, which are REALLY big spaces. They tried installing huge fans, but it was noisy and not effective enough.
Obviously a living room is smaller than a theater, but it's still got a lot of surface for odor molecules to cling to. They tend to be much heavier than air, and often partly ionized, so they cling to fabrics easily. The nose is ridiculously sensitive, and the little bits coming off the fabric will muddy new odors.
You can space it out over time, so that one odor has a chance to dissipate, but that seems kind of counter to the point.
It's an amusing gimmick, but they don't seem to have solved the problems that have plagued scent delivery systems before: odors don't evaporate that quickly. Audio and video disappear the instant you stop creating them, but odors linger. That's a problem of the room, not the device.
Devices like this have been discussed hundreds of times before, and I'm not quite sure what makes this one "practical". I imagine it's some great bit of engineering that lets them carry 10,000 individual scents and deliver them quickly, and I'm sure that's a neat trick.
It might even be handy for some applications in flavor and fragrance labs: punch in a formula, get out a sample instantly rather than having to drag out all of the source materials and mix them up. That's tedious and time-consuming work, and if you have to tweak, you generally have to start over.
In fact, Bitcoin is about as similar to fiat currency as a Chuck-e-Cheese token would be.
At least a token lets me play Skee-ball. Are there any skee-ball machines that take bitcoins?
I guess not, since nobody makes Skee-ball machines with continuous, high-speed Internet connections. I'm taking all of my money out of bitcoin and putting it into Chuck E Cheese tokens. (Well, if I had any, which I sure as hell don't.)
The original TLDs are a quaint historical artifact, from a gentler time on teh intarwebz. It established a few spheres of control, but it wasn't particularly well thought out, but they weren't expecting the kind of land rush in domain names. This was back when they thought that 4 billion IP addresses was an absurdly large number, orders of magnitude more than would ever be needed.
It got famous all at once, and it quickly became apparent that it was mostly absurd. "dot-com" became synonymous with the web, a meaningless semantic particle in 99% of cases.
Still, it's there in every URL, and you can't live without it. I don't blame large companies for trying to do away with it, at least for themselves. I'm glad they've put a high price on it. It at least keeps out the riff-raff.
That's actually no small thing. The great thing about a.edu address is that there's a gatekeeper..cocacola is going to be a small fee out of Coke's budget, and it can't possibly be an attack site or spammer. (Well, unless they've been careless with their servers, but that's not a problem you can solve with DNS.)
Monster Cables are neither military nor space. They're just expensive. I didn't say it had no use; I said that the vast majority of uses were sold to audio- and other-philes who don't know what they're getting.
I don't know about the connectors on your cell phone. Mine are made of copper.
And the people making a living recovering the gold in those connectors from e-waste are in third-world countries.
The fact that gold IS being purchased to plate connectors means that it is not being priced above its real value.
Not necessarily. Gold-plated connectors are substantially overrated. It's valuable in that it does not corrode, but plain copper doesn't corrode all that fast, either. Gold on cables is much like gold jewelry, applied to make people feel good rather than serve a function. Gold could evaporate and we'd get along on copper connectors without anybody noticing in the overwhelming majority of cases.
Another factor: the amount of gold used in connectors is infinitesimal. I'm not a manufacturing engineer, but I suspect it ends up costing them more to put it on the connectors than the value of the gold input. The premium paid is vastly higher than the zillionth of a gram of gold, on a false perception that it's a better cable.
That was a surreal little meme back in 2008, when "it's been cooling for a decade" made the "decade" sound like a round, random figure that could have been anything.
But to have it trotted out as "13 years", a number obviously cherry picked, show a truly bizarre lack of curiosity. It's not just that it evens out over 30 years; it evens out over every period EXCEPT 13 years. Why didn't they use 12 or 14? Because those wouldn't have confirmed the preconceived notion.
I wonder... is the conversion rate dropping because people are smarter, or because the sheer amount of spam has risen?
It would seem that they'd saturated the fundamental market (stupid people) pretty quickly. You can send the stupid people more offers, but even the stupid people are only going to buy so much stuff.
If they'd reached 90% of the stupid people with the first billion emails they sent out, they'd probably have to send 10 billion emails to reach 99% of the stupid people: a 10x rise in spam for a 10% improvement in the market size.
Or maybe it's just a diminishing number of stupid people. That would be a nice thought.
If you include the host domain in the digital signature, you'd be able to prevent people from re-hosting the work (or at least detect it and ignore copies). You'd still need the priority system you suggested to identify THE author (otherwise, as you say, somebody could rip and re-sign the content for a new host).
It's probably too much work for the benefit you'd get, but it might be worth the experiment, and Google is exactly the people to do that experiment. It means a vast amount of crunching, possibly too much once everybody (including every spammer) is signing their pages. Enc
My first thought would be that it must make the moon's orbit quite tilted, but I guess between the axial tilt of the earth and the substantial distances involved, it doesn't require all that much.
So it's just the "night" thing, the fact of the rotation of the earth. Averaged over a year, they would see the same number of eclipses as everyone else.
In fact, I'd have expected them to see fewer eclipses than at the equator, since the moon spends more time near the equator. Is it even possible to get a full solar eclipse at the poles?
I thought I had a pretty good grasp of the mechanics of eclipses, but I never realized that solar eclipses would particularly occur at arctic latitudes more than others.
Rereading the sentence, I think it just means "possible at any time, as opposed to just during the day time, since day is 24 hours long". As opposed to my initial reading, "it makes solar eclipses particularly probable". That's not correct, right? And did anybody else read it that way, or am I just exposing my ignorance (again)?
So... this is really evidence against supersymmetry? That conclusion sounds like a big freaking deal, much bigger than "electrons are round". SUSY is leading candidate for the solution to the hierarchy problem, and I'm not sure what the runner-ups are because SUSY was so far in the lead.
A blank page is different from ordinary web pages. A blank page will require some tool that allows you to type in where you want to go, including the option of typing in a URL. If you're going to have that, it might as well be a big feature of the page, in large text, rather than an inconspicuous and often unlabeled bar at the top.
It's inconspicuous and unlabeled in your current browser because you rarely refer to it. Most of it is meaningless, to you if not to the server. This URL is http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/25/1532246/Mozilla-Labs-the-URL-Bar-Has-To-Go. "Slashdot" and the article title are repeated in the browser's frame bar (and in fact the server probably ignores it). A Slashdot reader can eke out more meaning, but nearly all other users find it impenetrable.
Removing it would give it a cleaner look and show you slightly more of the web page at once without scrolling. 90% of the time, your next web page will be arrived at by clicking a link. The rest of the time, when you want an unrelated page, you bring it up in a new tab/window, which will have a conspicuous place for you to type a URL.
My one remaining concern is that while the URL is mostly meaningless, the domain name is not. It's nice to know for sure that this is "slashdot.org", and that I'm not typing this into a malicious page. I'm glad to be able to glance up and get that information, rather than having to bring it up. But given the various ways of disguising URLs, it may well be better to show me precisely and explicitly just the domain name, rather than having me parse the URL myself (something grandma is unlikely to do).
I don't know where they'd put it, though. Cleaning up the look was the goal, and hiding it means I have to go find it when I need it.
I'm lukewarm on iTunes for syncing, and it's music store interface is simply abysmal: weirdly modal, brutally slow and unresponsive, seemingly obvious features unimplemented or half-assed. Not at all what I've come to expect from Apple.
iTunes started somewhere else, but Apple's had a long time to make it less-bad. They've fixed a few really aggravating bugs, but it's still only meh.
Still... the fact that it download my podcasts on its own time and syncs the iPod just by plugging it in (deleting old ones, more or less, and uploading new ones) is really, really convenient, and keeps me using it.
It doesn't have to save me money. It saves me time, which is even more valuable. In a store with self-checkout machines there are often twice as many lanes open, and I'm not stuck behind somebody with two carts full or arguing over a three-cent different on a box of Life cereal.
I would pay extra for the privilege of not having to deal with that.
They may not be better or more reliable, but they're cheaper. That means that you're not standing in line behind everybody else with their one item that doesn't scan. That could be a huge time savings. Checking out should be an "embarrassingly parallel" problem.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if they could build 'em into 3D glasses...
Actually, scent is used a LOT in retail. Not just in the perfume counter: you can hire companies to design a signature scent for your store. It's basically a big Glade air freshener, much simpler than this device.
It works for a whole store. It may not work so well in a public place, where movie posters are displayed, but there's a good chance that there's already a smell there. Not all of that popcorn smell comes from the popcorn machine. Really.
A vent certainly helps, but if you've ever opened up a window in a musty room, you'll find that the problem doesn't evaporate immediately.
This proved a big problem for smell-o-vision in theaters, which are REALLY big spaces. They tried installing huge fans, but it was noisy and not effective enough.
Obviously a living room is smaller than a theater, but it's still got a lot of surface for odor molecules to cling to. They tend to be much heavier than air, and often partly ionized, so they cling to fabrics easily. The nose is ridiculously sensitive, and the little bits coming off the fabric will muddy new odors.
You can space it out over time, so that one odor has a chance to dissipate, but that seems kind of counter to the point.
It's an amusing gimmick, but they don't seem to have solved the problems that have plagued scent delivery systems before: odors don't evaporate that quickly. Audio and video disappear the instant you stop creating them, but odors linger. That's a problem of the room, not the device.
Devices like this have been discussed hundreds of times before, and I'm not quite sure what makes this one "practical". I imagine it's some great bit of engineering that lets them carry 10,000 individual scents and deliver them quickly, and I'm sure that's a neat trick.
It might even be handy for some applications in flavor and fragrance labs: punch in a formula, get out a sample instantly rather than having to drag out all of the source materials and mix them up. That's tedious and time-consuming work, and if you have to tweak, you generally have to start over.
In fact, Bitcoin is about as similar to fiat currency as a Chuck-e-Cheese token would be.
At least a token lets me play Skee-ball. Are there any skee-ball machines that take bitcoins?
I guess not, since nobody makes Skee-ball machines with continuous, high-speed Internet connections. I'm taking all of my money out of bitcoin and putting it into Chuck E Cheese tokens. (Well, if I had any, which I sure as hell don't.)
The original TLDs are a quaint historical artifact, from a gentler time on teh intarwebz. It established a few spheres of control, but it wasn't particularly well thought out, but they weren't expecting the kind of land rush in domain names. This was back when they thought that 4 billion IP addresses was an absurdly large number, orders of magnitude more than would ever be needed.
It got famous all at once, and it quickly became apparent that it was mostly absurd. "dot-com" became synonymous with the web, a meaningless semantic particle in 99% of cases.
Still, it's there in every URL, and you can't live without it. I don't blame large companies for trying to do away with it, at least for themselves. I'm glad they've put a high price on it. It at least keeps out the riff-raff.
That's actually no small thing. The great thing about a .edu address is that there's a gatekeeper. .cocacola is going to be a small fee out of Coke's budget, and it can't possibly be an attack site or spammer. (Well, unless they've been careless with their servers, but that's not a problem you can solve with DNS.)
Fark also sources it to the Daily Fail, and I suspect that's where the submitter got it. The Daily Fail (and others) got it from the Associated Press.
I'm not sure where the Associated Press got it; it likely came from one of their stringers.
Monster Cables are neither military nor space. They're just expensive. I didn't say it had no use; I said that the vast majority of uses were sold to audio- and other-philes who don't know what they're getting.
I don't know about the connectors on your cell phone. Mine are made of copper.
And the people making a living recovering the gold in those connectors from e-waste are in third-world countries.
The fact that gold IS being purchased to plate connectors means that it is not being priced above its real value.
Not necessarily. Gold-plated connectors are substantially overrated. It's valuable in that it does not corrode, but plain copper doesn't corrode all that fast, either. Gold on cables is much like gold jewelry, applied to make people feel good rather than serve a function. Gold could evaporate and we'd get along on copper connectors without anybody noticing in the overwhelming majority of cases.
Another factor: the amount of gold used in connectors is infinitesimal. I'm not a manufacturing engineer, but I suspect it ends up costing them more to put it on the connectors than the value of the gold input. The premium paid is vastly higher than the zillionth of a gram of gold, on a false perception that it's a better cable.
That was a surreal little meme back in 2008, when "it's been cooling for a decade" made the "decade" sound like a round, random figure that could have been anything.
But to have it trotted out as "13 years", a number obviously cherry picked, show a truly bizarre lack of curiosity. It's not just that it evens out over 30 years; it evens out over every period EXCEPT 13 years. Why didn't they use 12 or 14? Because those wouldn't have confirmed the preconceived notion.
3% is still depressing, but I guess somebody's got to be two sigmas to the left on the bell curve.
I wonder... is the conversion rate dropping because people are smarter, or because the sheer amount of spam has risen?
It would seem that they'd saturated the fundamental market (stupid people) pretty quickly. You can send the stupid people more offers, but even the stupid people are only going to buy so much stuff.
If they'd reached 90% of the stupid people with the first billion emails they sent out, they'd probably have to send 10 billion emails to reach 99% of the stupid people: a 10x rise in spam for a 10% improvement in the market size.
Or maybe it's just a diminishing number of stupid people. That would be a nice thought.
If you include the host domain in the digital signature, you'd be able to prevent people from re-hosting the work (or at least detect it and ignore copies). You'd still need the priority system you suggested to identify THE author (otherwise, as you say, somebody could rip and re-sign the content for a new host).
It's probably too much work for the benefit you'd get, but it might be worth the experiment, and Google is exactly the people to do that experiment. It means a vast amount of crunching, possibly too much once everybody (including every spammer) is signing their pages. Enc
Thanks!
My first thought would be that it must make the moon's orbit quite tilted, but I guess between the axial tilt of the earth and the substantial distances involved, it doesn't require all that much.
So it's just the "night" thing, the fact of the rotation of the earth. Averaged over a year, they would see the same number of eclipses as everyone else.
In fact, I'd have expected them to see fewer eclipses than at the equator, since the moon spends more time near the equator. Is it even possible to get a full solar eclipse at the poles?
I thought I had a pretty good grasp of the mechanics of eclipses, but I never realized that solar eclipses would particularly occur at arctic latitudes more than others.
Rereading the sentence, I think it just means "possible at any time, as opposed to just during the day time, since day is 24 hours long". As opposed to my initial reading, "it makes solar eclipses particularly probable". That's not correct, right? And did anybody else read it that way, or am I just exposing my ignorance (again)?
You must be new here.
Meant to up-mod this, not down mod. Undoing...
Cool. Thanks.
So... this is really evidence against supersymmetry? That conclusion sounds like a big freaking deal, much bigger than "electrons are round". SUSY is leading candidate for the solution to the hierarchy problem, and I'm not sure what the runner-ups are because SUSY was so far in the lead.
A blank page is different from ordinary web pages. A blank page will require some tool that allows you to type in where you want to go, including the option of typing in a URL. If you're going to have that, it might as well be a big feature of the page, in large text, rather than an inconspicuous and often unlabeled bar at the top.
It's inconspicuous and unlabeled in your current browser because you rarely refer to it. Most of it is meaningless, to you if not to the server. This URL is http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/25/1532246/Mozilla-Labs-the-URL-Bar-Has-To-Go. "Slashdot" and the article title are repeated in the browser's frame bar (and in fact the server probably ignores it). A Slashdot reader can eke out more meaning, but nearly all other users find it impenetrable.
Removing it would give it a cleaner look and show you slightly more of the web page at once without scrolling. 90% of the time, your next web page will be arrived at by clicking a link. The rest of the time, when you want an unrelated page, you bring it up in a new tab/window, which will have a conspicuous place for you to type a URL.
My one remaining concern is that while the URL is mostly meaningless, the domain name is not. It's nice to know for sure that this is "slashdot.org", and that I'm not typing this into a malicious page. I'm glad to be able to glance up and get that information, rather than having to bring it up. But given the various ways of disguising URLs, it may well be better to show me precisely and explicitly just the domain name, rather than having me parse the URL myself (something grandma is unlikely to do).
I don't know where they'd put it, though. Cleaning up the look was the goal, and hiding it means I have to go find it when I need it.
I'm lukewarm on iTunes for syncing, and it's music store interface is simply abysmal: weirdly modal, brutally slow and unresponsive, seemingly obvious features unimplemented or half-assed. Not at all what I've come to expect from Apple.
iTunes started somewhere else, but Apple's had a long time to make it less-bad. They've fixed a few really aggravating bugs, but it's still only meh.
Still... the fact that it download my podcasts on its own time and syncs the iPod just by plugging it in (deleting old ones, more or less, and uploading new ones) is really, really convenient, and keeps me using it.
It doesn't have to save me money. It saves me time, which is even more valuable. In a store with self-checkout machines there are often twice as many lanes open, and I'm not stuck behind somebody with two carts full or arguing over a three-cent different on a box of Life cereal.
I would pay extra for the privilege of not having to deal with that.
They may not be better or more reliable, but they're cheaper. That means that you're not standing in line behind everybody else with their one item that doesn't scan. That could be a huge time savings. Checking out should be an "embarrassingly parallel" problem.
Interesting. Thanks.