Wow, Jesus (James Caviezal) is is not a number but a free man. FYI, Caviezal was struck by lightning during the filming of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ". Kind of like getting eaten by that big bouncing ball...
In an airplane, the time between when I realize that things are not as they should be and the time when I won't be thinking anymore could be measured in minutes. That is a pretty chilling thought for me...
Don't worry! Most of the time, you never know what hit you in an airplane catastrophe. If the aircraft breaks up at 35,000 feet (as a result of a mid-air collision, fuel tank explosion, terrorist attack, etc.), you're none the wiser. You'll probably be killed by flying debris within a second, and if you survive the break-up, you'll have the oxygen boil out of your blood a few seconds after that.
Much more frequently, you'll hit a mountain while flying in zero visibility. Zero seconds to worry.
A large portion of accidents occur when the plane lands. Tail or wing strike, skidding off the runway, etc. These calamities are likely to occur even more rapidly than a car crash. You probably won't be able to complete the sentence "Oh shi----!"
Or maybe your plane is overweight and can't get enough power to take-off properly. In this case, you've got 20 seconds max to contemplate your fate. And it will probably take you 10 seconds realize that it is really happening. "Why is it taking so long to take off? Is the plane really flipping upside down? Is this REALLY happening?? Oh, oh, yes, it is..."
Being in a plane that plummets to the ground for a minute or two isn't that likely. When seated on your flight, you should really be aware that your life could be snuffed out without warning at any minute.
Freight prices have not gone up in years
on
Big Rigs Go High Tech
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I've been getting full semis delivered to me from Ohio to Minnesota for exactly $1050. This price has not changed in the past 4 years.
Just the other day, I had a competing trucking company come in and quote out the job. Their quote was... $1050.
The price of diesel fuel has quadrupled in this time.
I can not believe that technology is making the difference here. I think truckers are getting screwed.
I know there were some threats of a trucking strike a month or two ago that came to nothing. I would not be surprised to see this happen, and if it did, the country would be brought to its knees.
Truckers may not be able to pronounce "Illinois" real well, but they did adopt CB Radios back in the 1970s. That was the closest thing to the Internet until... the Internet.
In case your memory is short: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaammaHevT0
Monetra is credit card processing software that runs on Linux, FreeBSD, OS X, etc. It's pretty easy to interface with the Monetra server and process credit card transactions from your own code.
I had just discovered the awesome 'split' feature in Tiger's Terminal about two months ago. Click on the icon in the upper right portion of the terminal window, and a bar appears. You can drag the bar to split your terminal in two. The upper portion is the scrollback, and shows your terminal history. The bottom portion is your 'live' terminal. It's awesome, and it saves me from having to open two different terminals in many cases!
Of course, after upgrading to Leopard, this innovative feature has been removed! I couldn't believe it!
Now I'm back to opening up two Terminal windows...:(
One of the best things about the Squeezebox is the open source SlimServer app that powers it. Written in Perl, it runs on any operating system. How can Logitech take that away? It's even conceivable that, if Logitech destroys the Squeezebox, somebody else can create a hardware box that will run on Slimserver.
I think re-engineering Slimerserver would be difficult, expensive and stupid. Logitech will keep it. That's the core of the Linux Squeezebox compatibility right there.
Yeah, just try searching the forums when you only update once a year. It's not the second post anymore. The answer is probably in there/somewhere/, but you'll spend a day and a half searching for it with phpBB's crappy search facilities.
If you don't update frequently, almost 100% of the updates fail. And the cause of the failure is probably incredibly obscure, and nobody has ever experienced the problem before.
The KDE team is one to talk about cooperation! From the earlier story today, it seems like the KDE team can't even cooperate with Apple on KHTML/Safari...
I own a business, and I love open source software. It has been very useful to me.
I have also spent the past two years developing an application to run my retail/mail order business. I have been able to phase out my proprietary ERP software, and I have asked myself... "should I open source this project?"
Unfortunately, I can't think of a rational reason to do so. Open sourcing the project would allow it to develop faster. But it would also remove my competitive advantage -- it would be like giving my competitors a well-tuned piece of software to make running their business easier.
I've spent an enormous amount of time trying to think of *rational* reasons to open source the project. I'd love the thought of waking up in the morning and reviewing patch submissions from dozens of competent programmers around the world. But wouldn't it be better to, um, hire some programmers to work on the project, and then sell licenses to use it?
It would be better *for society* if the project were open sourced. It would be better *for me* if the project were proprietary.
What kind of business model can you have that allows you to make a living off of writing open source software?
You can "sell support." If you open source a project, and it is successful, then you (the developer and creator of the project) would be undoubtedly the world's number one expert on this software. Businesses wishing to deploy this software would be willing to pay YOU the developer to help install this software. When they had a problem, they would call YOU the developer to fix it. You can charge them nice hourly rates for your consulting.
But a lot of businesses don't trust the open source software model, and I still think you'd be better off if you sold them licenses to use the software *and* sold them support.
If you have a client-server architecture, maybe you could open source one half of the project. Consider open sourcing the server portion of an ERP system. If the project were successful, you would have a huge head start over all your competitors in providing a properietary, for-profit client. But you would need to be specialists in human interface development.
Maybe you could do the reverse, and open source the client. Unlike the Microsoft model, provide a server with a very well-known public API so anyone can develop a client. Provide your client "free-of-charge" under an open source license. Submit a bunch of press releases about how your company is exploiting open source software.
Unfortunately, then you have reduced open source to nothing more than a publicity stunt.
I *hate* to say it, but the best way to really move a project like this forward might be to *close* source the project. You can certainly lowball the competition if you want, but for a mission-critical business application like this, what is really the advantage of open source? A company that earns a profit on the innovation is probably the best model for providing funding for this project.
If you want to do the socially responsible thing AND make a profit, maybe you could investigate dual-licensing. Not-for-profit arts organizations could use your software under a GPL license (and I bet there are TONS of them that would take you up on this). If a commercial for-profit MOVIE THEATER wanted to use your software, on its merits, then sell them a license. You might get the best of both worlds -- essentially for-profit businesses would be subsidizing not-for-profits. AND your developers could earn a living.
Stop nitpicking about units! I have it on good authority that the author of this story made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs, so he is a quite an expert on these matters.
I am definitely rooting against Blockbuster. Don't forget, Blockbuster has been known for censoring movies -- editing them to make them more palatable for family viewing. Try renting a movie like 'Y Tu Mama Tambien' from Blockbuster or Walmart. You will end up seeing a version that has been edited for content.
Maybe I'm 'misunderestimating' the maturity of the average American, but I think that as long as Blockbuster and Walmart have crappy policies like this, there will be a nice niche for the comparatively corageous Netflix.
Thanks a LOT. Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU for releasing open source drivers for the CLE266 chipset nearly two years after I first started purchasing these boards for use in my business.
Thanks for making me struggle for those years trying to install various proprietary, binary drivers on my "unsupported" Gentoo Linux workstations. Thanks for suggesting that I just use the abysmally slow VESA drivers for over a year on your forum. And thanks for letting me spend countless hours downloading the lastest Xorg tree from CVS so I could install reverse-engineered 2D-only drivers that finally made my systems functional, even if the more advanced features of your hardware have never, ever worked right.
I've also spent a lot of time investigating alternatives to your product, and I can say that at long last I've got a functioning, low-power, compact, ULTRA-QUIET Unix workstation, and all the hardware actually works. Yes, my new Mac Mini is a revelation, and I am about to deploy these new boxes throughout my shop.
Well, VIA, thanks for all the memories! My old Mini-ITX boards will soon start showing up on eBay, just in time for some new chump to try and install Linux on them using your new open source drivers. Maybe in another 2 years, when nobody really cares anymore, you'll release drivers for the accelerated MPEG hardware!
I have installed Linux on a dozen Mini-ITX boards during the past two years. I love the low power consumption, and the low price.
But, by just about any standard (MPEG playback, video performance, processor speed, form factor size), the Mac Mini beats the Mini-ITX hands down. Okay, I put nicer hard drives in the Mini-ITX boxes than I get in the Mac Mini.
After using both systems as desktop PCs, I can say that the Mac Mini feels like a Ferrari, while the Mini-ITX boxes feel like a Ford Focus. Apart from the fact I actually *like* the Gnome desktop better than OS X, I can still use the Mini to run all of my favorite Unix apps. And, unlike the VIA Mini-ITX boards, where there's a ton of hardware that I can't get to work right (CLE-266 chipset with MPEG decoding), everything on the Mac Mini JUST WORKS.
I don't know. I'm thinking my days running Mini-ITX boxes is over. The Mac Mini has really won my heart, and I can't see why anyone wouldn't consider it for their small form-factor computing needs.
I'm a bit tempted by the promise of a Linux distro tailor-made for the EPIAs, but I kind of have a distro (OS X) tailor made for my current-favorite SFF box.
I don't know about gpdf (don't use it), but in xpdf, when you hit the print button, in the "Print with command box", just add a '-#' (without quotes) followed by the number of copies you want. It is a standard option to the lpr command and CUPS obeys it as well.
I just tried xpdf and you are right. I shouldn't have lumped xpdf in with gpdf, sorry. If gpdf has a way to print multiple copies, they have sure hidden it well.
I could deal with the bloat if the damn thing is more stable than Acrobat 5. It is one of the only closed-source desktop apps I use regularly in running my business. (The only reason I use it over xpdf or gpdf is because Acrobat allows me to print multiple copies of documents, where gpdf/xpdf do not! Does nobody print multiple copies of PDFs but me?)
It also happens to be the one app that routinely destroys the desktop. I often have to ssh into the desktop boxes because Acrobat has seized all input and won't let go. My employees frequently abandon virtual desktops because the Acrobat splash screen won't go away and they don't know how to kill it. (Have to show them how to use xkill I guess).
Acrobat 5 doesn't integrate well with the Linux desktop. It has a rude habit of grabbing keyboard input at unexpected times -- I have trouble switching virtual desktops using certain window managers because Acrobat always receives the F1 key, not the window manager.
The Acrobat 5 Firefox plugin is nasty -- if you drag your mouse pointer into the main window while the Acrobat plugin is running, it seizes all keyboard input; you can't even type anything into the location bar until you drag the mouse pointer back up to the Firefox menu bar.
While writing this message I launched Acrobat Reader 5 to remind myself of what the problems were, and within two minutes it locked up and I had to kill the beast by remotely logging in from another computer.
So if Acrobat 7 solves any of these problems, I'll probably use it gladly, bloat and all. Come on, Adobe! I swear that if you wrote quality Linux desktop apps, people would use them. They might even *pay for them* (ahem, Photoshop... ahem, Illustrator).
Don't you guys get it? You're not supposed to just point out the mistakes, you're supposed to *explain how they are not really mistakes at all.* Then, you write into the letter page of your favorite Marvel comic book and claim your No Prize!
I came into work one day, turned my computer on, and got the terrifying message "COULD NOT LOAD OPERATING SYSTEM, INSERT DISK IN DRIVE A AND TRY AGAIN." The computer's main hard drive kept making an audible "click-click, click-click, click-click." The drive was toast.
Fortunately, I regularly backed up all my data to a second hard drive in the machine. I opened up the case, pulled out the backup drive to set the "MASTER" jumper, and booted the computer off of an old MS-DOS floppy disk. All of my data -- years worth of accounting data and a large desktop publishing project -- was still alive!
I disconnected the drive from the computer, and set it on the desk. I was planning to run up to CompUSA, buy a new hard drive, and reinstall the operating system and applications.
As I was rummaging around my desk looking for my car keys, I heard a loud clunk. I had just knocked my backup hard drive onto the concrete floor! I cringed, and this time when I hooked up the drive and booted the MS-DOS floppy, I was not so lucky.
I spent the next month re-entering accounting data and re-creating my project. It was by far the most disheartening way to lose all that data, and all that work.
I use tapes now. Sometimes I knock them off the counter, and they always work afterwards...
I have been developing an algorithm that scans images and can detect whether there is a nipple in the image. If this were incorporated into an http filter, you could get rid of porn and possibly notify parents when nipple-laden images were being downloaded.
The only technical problem at present is that I can not discern between human nipples and animal nipples, so some images of cow udders and the like register false positives. Nevertheless, I think this is a very important algorithm.
I have considered selling this to the Justice Department, as Atty General Ashcroft has expressed an interest in this kind of software. However, I feel this is too important to be closed. I am happy to say the project will be listed at Sourceforge soon, and released under the GPL!!!
Talking to someone on a cell phone is not exactly like talking to someone in person.
For example, I work in retail. This happens very frequently: somebody comes in and asks for assistance. While you are helping them, their cell phone rings. They answer it, and talk, sometimes for 10 minutes or more. As a salesperson, I am expected to just hang on waiting for them to finish, which I do. Although I would not express this (as I am trying to make a sale), it is very irritating to waste somebody's valuable time like this.
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Wow, Jesus (James Caviezal) is is not a number but a free man. FYI, Caviezal was struck by lightning during the filming of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ". Kind of like getting eaten by that big bouncing ball...
In an airplane, the time between when I realize that things are not as they should be and the time when I won't be thinking anymore could be measured in minutes. That is a pretty chilling thought for me...
Don't worry! Most of the time, you never know what hit you in an airplane catastrophe. If the aircraft breaks up at 35,000 feet (as a result of a mid-air collision, fuel tank explosion, terrorist attack, etc.), you're none the wiser. You'll probably be killed by flying debris within a second, and if you survive the break-up, you'll have the oxygen boil out of your blood a few seconds after that.
Much more frequently, you'll hit a mountain while flying in zero visibility. Zero seconds to worry.
A large portion of accidents occur when the plane lands. Tail or wing strike, skidding off the runway, etc. These calamities are likely to occur even more rapidly than a car crash. You probably won't be able to complete the sentence "Oh shi----!"
Or maybe your plane is overweight and can't get enough power to take-off properly. In this case, you've got 20 seconds max to contemplate your fate. And it will probably take you 10 seconds realize that it is really happening. "Why is it taking so long to take off? Is the plane really flipping upside down? Is this REALLY happening?? Oh, oh, yes, it is..."
Being in a plane that plummets to the ground for a minute or two isn't that likely. When seated on your flight, you should really be aware that your life could be snuffed out without warning at any minute.
I've been getting full semis delivered to me from Ohio to Minnesota for exactly $1050. This price has not changed in the past 4 years.
Just the other day, I had a competing trucking company come in and quote out the job. Their quote was... $1050.
The price of diesel fuel has quadrupled in this time.
I can not believe that technology is making the difference here. I think truckers are getting screwed.
I know there were some threats of a trucking strike a month or two ago that came to nothing. I would not be surprised to see this happen, and if it did, the country would be brought to its knees.
Truckers may not be able to pronounce "Illinois" real well, but they did adopt CB Radios back in the 1970s. That was the closest thing to the Internet until... the Internet.
In case your memory is short: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaammaHevT0
Monetra is credit card processing software that runs on Linux, FreeBSD, OS X, etc. It's pretty easy to interface with the Monetra server and process credit card transactions from your own code.
I had just discovered the awesome 'split' feature in Tiger's Terminal about two months ago. Click on the icon in the upper right portion of the terminal window, and a bar appears. You can drag the bar to split your terminal in two. The upper portion is the scrollback, and shows your terminal history. The bottom portion is your 'live' terminal. It's awesome, and it saves me from having to open two different terminals in many cases!
:(
Of course, after upgrading to Leopard, this innovative feature has been removed! I couldn't believe it!
Now I'm back to opening up two Terminal windows...
Macs are really going to stink if Apple changes their default operating system to ZFS. ZFS is a file system.
One of the best things about the Squeezebox is the open source SlimServer app that powers it. Written in Perl, it runs on any operating system. How can Logitech take that away? It's even conceivable that, if Logitech destroys the Squeezebox, somebody else can create a hardware box that will run on Slimserver.
I think re-engineering Slimerserver would be difficult, expensive and stupid. Logitech will keep it. That's the core of the Linux Squeezebox compatibility right there.
Yeah, just try searching the forums when you only update once a year. It's not the second post anymore. The answer is probably in there /somewhere/, but you'll spend a day and a half searching for it with phpBB's crappy search facilities.
If you don't update frequently, almost 100% of the updates fail. And the cause of the failure is probably incredibly obscure, and nobody has ever experienced the problem before.
John Cleese did not write this. It is an urban myth.
You can tell, because it is not funny.
The KDE team is one to talk about cooperation! From the earlier story today, it seems like the KDE team can't even cooperate with Apple on KHTML/Safari...
I own a business, and I love open source software. It has been very useful to me.
I have also spent the past two years developing an application to run my retail/mail order business. I have been able to phase out my proprietary ERP software, and I have asked myself... "should I open source this project?"
Unfortunately, I can't think of a rational reason to do so. Open sourcing the project would allow it to develop faster. But it would also remove my competitive advantage -- it would be like giving my competitors a well-tuned piece of software to make running their business easier.
I've spent an enormous amount of time trying to think of *rational* reasons to open source the project. I'd love the thought of waking up in the morning and reviewing patch submissions from dozens of competent programmers around the world. But wouldn't it be better to, um, hire some programmers to work on the project, and then sell licenses to use it?
It would be better *for society* if the project were open sourced. It would be better *for me* if the project were proprietary.
What kind of business model can you have that allows you to make a living off of writing open source software?
You can "sell support." If you open source a project, and it is successful, then you (the developer and creator of the project) would be undoubtedly the world's number one expert on this software. Businesses wishing to deploy this software would be willing to pay YOU the developer to help install this software. When they had a problem, they would call YOU the developer to fix it. You can charge them nice hourly rates for your consulting.
But a lot of businesses don't trust the open source software model, and I still think you'd be better off if you sold them licenses to use the software *and* sold them support.
If you have a client-server architecture, maybe you could open source one half of the project. Consider open sourcing the server portion of an ERP system. If the project were successful, you would have a huge head start over all your competitors in providing a properietary, for-profit client. But you would need to be specialists in human interface development.
Maybe you could do the reverse, and open source the client. Unlike the Microsoft model, provide a server with a very well-known public API so anyone can develop a client. Provide your client "free-of-charge" under an open source license. Submit a bunch of press releases about how your company is exploiting open source software.
Unfortunately, then you have reduced open source to nothing more than a publicity stunt.
I *hate* to say it, but the best way to really move a project like this forward might be to *close* source the project. You can certainly lowball the competition if you want, but for a mission-critical business application like this, what is really the advantage of open source? A company that earns a profit on the innovation is probably the best model for providing funding for this project.
If you want to do the socially responsible thing AND make a profit, maybe you could investigate dual-licensing. Not-for-profit arts organizations could use your software under a GPL license (and I bet there are TONS of them that would take you up on this). If a commercial for-profit MOVIE THEATER wanted to use your software, on its merits, then sell them a license. You might get the best of both worlds -- essentially for-profit businesses would be subsidizing not-for-profits. AND your developers could earn a living.
Stop nitpicking about units! I have it on good authority that the author of this story made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs, so he is a quite an expert on these matters.
I am definitely rooting against Blockbuster. Don't forget, Blockbuster has been known for censoring movies -- editing them to make them more palatable for family viewing. Try renting a movie like 'Y Tu Mama Tambien' from Blockbuster or Walmart. You will end up seeing a version that has been edited for content.
Maybe I'm 'misunderestimating' the maturity of the average American, but I think that as long as Blockbuster and Walmart have crappy policies like this, there will be a nice niche for the comparatively corageous Netflix.
Dear VIA,
Thanks a LOT. Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU for releasing open source drivers for the CLE266 chipset nearly two years after I first started purchasing these boards for use in my business.
Thanks for making me struggle for those years trying to install various proprietary, binary drivers on my "unsupported" Gentoo Linux workstations. Thanks for suggesting that I just use the abysmally slow VESA drivers for over a year on your forum. And thanks for letting me spend countless hours downloading the lastest Xorg tree from CVS so I could install reverse-engineered 2D-only drivers that finally made my systems functional, even if the more advanced features of your hardware have never, ever worked right.
I've also spent a lot of time investigating alternatives to your product, and I can say that at long last I've got a functioning, low-power, compact, ULTRA-QUIET Unix workstation, and all the hardware actually works. Yes, my new Mac Mini is a revelation, and I am about to deploy these new boxes throughout my shop.
Well, VIA, thanks for all the memories! My old Mini-ITX boards will soon start showing up on eBay, just in time for some new chump to try and install Linux on them using your new open source drivers. Maybe in another 2 years, when nobody really cares anymore, you'll release drivers for the accelerated MPEG hardware!
Smash the thing to bits! What's wrong with that?
I have installed Linux on a dozen Mini-ITX boards during the past two years. I love the low power consumption, and the low price.
But, by just about any standard (MPEG playback, video performance, processor speed, form factor size), the Mac Mini beats the Mini-ITX hands down. Okay, I put nicer hard drives in the Mini-ITX boxes than I get in the Mac Mini.
After using both systems as desktop PCs, I can say that the Mac Mini feels like a Ferrari, while the Mini-ITX boxes feel like a Ford Focus. Apart from the fact I actually *like* the Gnome desktop better than OS X, I can still use the Mini to run all of my favorite Unix apps. And, unlike the VIA Mini-ITX boards, where there's a ton of hardware that I can't get to work right (CLE-266 chipset with MPEG decoding), everything on the Mac Mini JUST WORKS.
I don't know. I'm thinking my days running Mini-ITX boxes is over. The Mac Mini has really won my heart, and I can't see why anyone wouldn't consider it for their small form-factor computing needs.
I'm a bit tempted by the promise of a Linux distro tailor-made for the EPIAs, but I kind of have a distro (OS X) tailor made for my current-favorite SFF box.
I just tried xpdf and you are right. I shouldn't have lumped xpdf in with gpdf, sorry. If gpdf has a way to print multiple copies, they have sure hidden it well.
You can't even print multiple copies of a document using xpdf/gpdf.
I could deal with the bloat if the damn thing is more stable than Acrobat 5. It is one of the only closed-source desktop apps I use regularly in running my business. (The only reason I use it over xpdf or gpdf is because Acrobat allows me to print multiple copies of documents, where gpdf/xpdf do not! Does nobody print multiple copies of PDFs but me?)
It also happens to be the one app that routinely destroys the desktop. I often have to ssh into the desktop boxes because Acrobat has seized all input and won't let go. My employees frequently abandon virtual desktops because the Acrobat splash screen won't go away and they don't know how to kill it. (Have to show them how to use xkill I guess).
Acrobat 5 doesn't integrate well with the Linux desktop. It has a rude habit of grabbing keyboard input at unexpected times -- I have trouble switching virtual desktops using certain window managers because Acrobat always receives the F1 key, not the window manager.
The Acrobat 5 Firefox plugin is nasty -- if you drag your mouse pointer into the main window while the Acrobat plugin is running, it seizes all keyboard input; you can't even type anything into the location bar until you drag the mouse pointer back up to the Firefox menu bar.
While writing this message I launched Acrobat Reader 5 to remind myself of what the problems were, and within two minutes it locked up and I had to kill the beast by remotely logging in from another computer.
So if Acrobat 7 solves any of these problems, I'll probably use it gladly, bloat and all. Come on, Adobe! I swear that if you wrote quality Linux desktop apps, people would use them. They might even *pay for them* (ahem, Photoshop... ahem, Illustrator).
Don't you guys get it? You're not supposed to just point out the mistakes, you're supposed to *explain how they are not really mistakes at all.* Then, you write into the letter page of your favorite Marvel comic book and claim your No Prize!
Thank God Sam Raimi makes all these mistakes. If he spent all his time worrying about continuity issues, his movies might not be half as entertaining.
Would you want Stanley Kubrick to make a Spider Man movie? Think about it...
I came into work one day, turned my computer on, and got the terrifying message "COULD NOT LOAD OPERATING SYSTEM, INSERT DISK IN DRIVE A AND TRY AGAIN." The computer's main hard drive kept making an audible "click-click, click-click, click-click." The drive was toast.
Fortunately, I regularly backed up all my data to a second hard drive in the machine. I opened up the case, pulled out the backup drive to set the "MASTER" jumper, and booted the computer off of an old MS-DOS floppy disk. All of my data -- years worth of accounting data and a large desktop publishing project -- was still alive!
I disconnected the drive from the computer, and set it on the desk. I was planning to run up to CompUSA, buy a new hard drive, and reinstall the operating system and applications.
As I was rummaging around my desk looking for my car keys, I heard a loud clunk. I had just knocked my backup hard drive onto the concrete floor! I cringed, and this time when I hooked up the drive and booted the MS-DOS floppy, I was not so lucky.
I spent the next month re-entering accounting data and re-creating my project. It was by far the most disheartening way to lose all that data, and all that work.
I use tapes now. Sometimes I knock them off the counter, and they always work afterwards...
I have been developing an algorithm that scans images and can detect whether there is a nipple in the image. If this were incorporated into an http filter, you could get rid of porn and possibly notify parents when nipple-laden images were being downloaded.
The only technical problem at present is that I can not discern between human nipples and animal nipples, so some images of cow udders and the like register false positives. Nevertheless, I think this is a very important algorithm.
I have considered selling this to the Justice Department, as Atty General Ashcroft has expressed an interest in this kind of software. However, I feel this is too important to be closed. I am happy to say the project will be listed at Sourceforge soon, and released under the GPL!!!
Talking to someone on a cell phone is not exactly like talking to someone in person.
For example, I work in retail. This happens very frequently: somebody comes in and asks for assistance. While you are helping them, their cell phone rings. They answer it, and talk, sometimes for 10 minutes or more. As a salesperson, I am expected to just hang on waiting for them to finish, which I do. Although I would not express this (as I am trying to make a sale), it is very irritating to waste somebody's valuable time like this.