A bid will extend the auction by ~10 minutes if received in the last 10 minutes. Voila, no more sniping.
That's good, but I think that an even better idea would be to not reveal any bids until the bidding is over. In the case of tie max bids, the first bid submitted wins.
However, ebay will not do this (and I imagine that the sellers don't want them to) because being able to see a low bid gives a person hope and makes them bid on something they wouldn't otherwise bid on. When you log onto ebay and see that Spiderman #1 comic and the current bid is $3.50 then you think to yourself, "holy crap! I'd pay $100 for that!" and you bid - and you get sniped at $101. But if the bids were all a secret, then you might think to yourself, "that's going to sell for $500 easy, I'm out" and then maybe it would actually go for $3.50.
2145. It was after the gene wars. Mankind huddled in the dark on baron continents, fighting each other for tiny scraps of meat. But there was a hero; one with a memory of the before time and the scrapers, and the courage to make the dangerous journey to the artica where, the ancient scrolls hinted, the salvation of mankind might be found.
For over a decade, he and his brave knights fought against danger and fortune to make their way to the artica. Many died. Much was lost. But one day, our intrepid hero arrived home, in his tiny, all-but-dead village. He carried in his hand, a single vile.
"this is all that has survived of my trip" he explained. "though the artica contained many wonders, our journey was hard, and most of our cargo was lost. We managed to save this one plant. It shall be the foundation of a new human culture. We shall plant it and tend it, and we shall teach our children to cherish it. This plant is a gift from our distant ancestors. It's name" (he turns the vile on its side so that he can read the inscription) "is, Kudzu"
It will be interesting to look back in a few decades and see how different the US and Europe will be because of their different approaches to the Internet. in the US, the Internet will be a place for businesses that can pay the carrier cartels. In Europe, the Internet will be a place (more like what we in the US have today) where ideas are exchanged freely.
Using cryptographic signatures to verify that an email is really from your friend, before you trust its contents, simply isn't an option.
well, the email *was* from his friend. His friend was infected. If his friend was using a standalone email client and using cryptographic signatures, then most likely, his friend would have entered his password for PGP or whatever, and that password would be stored in memory, and then when the virus took over his account and started sending mail, the virus would sign the mail.
So in this particular instance, I don't see how a standalone client would help things.
fixed-length strings. If you wanted to store a five-character string in a variable declared as a 10-character string, you had to pad it out manually with spaces.
what?? I don't remember any of that from Borland Turbo Pascal!
At any rate, Pascal was designed by one of the greatest computer scientists and it did its job well. It taught good structured programming practices and got us away from the goto statement. Once you learned from program, you're *supposed* to move on to a more powerful language. The people who, for whatever reason, didn't move on - those are the people who complain. I'm not speaking to you here, but to people who say "omg pascal sucks because of X" well, it's supposed to do X because it's a teaching language. If X bothers you then you're way past the point where you need to move away from pascal.
Imagine that you're the emperor of the universe. You get to decide what school we're going to send these 100 kids to. You have two options:
Option A, we send the 100 kids to school A. 50 of them will learn to read. 50 of them will not.
Option B, we send the 100 kids to school B. 75 of them will learn to read. 25 of them will not. All 100 of them will learn the four tenets of Buddhism.
So, which school do you send them to? What is better for them? If you reject option B out of hand, you strike me as very intolerant and shortsighted. OMFG! The horror! Someone might have an opinion that differs from yours! OMFG! We can't have that!!
Personally, I'm an atheist. I'm just not threatened by people who believe in spaghetti monsters or whatever. What matters to me is that in addition to believing in spaghetti monsters, they also have the educational background to make our society work. The situation that we have right now is *worse* than belief in spaghetti monsters.
If you're worried about evolution not being taught, let me put your mind at ease. For vouchers to work, there would have to be yearly standardized tests, and any school where kids are not being taught evolution would not be allowed to take vouchers. Such a school would go out of business. What this means is, it would absolutely impossible for a school to refuse to teach evolution. What this means is, I could guarantee you that no matter what school a kid went to, they would receive an education that met a certain standard - guaranteed. But I know, that doesn't "put your mind at ease" because I know that the real problem here isn't your deep heart-felt concern for our educational system, the real problem is your intolerance (of people who are wrong).
I imagine you as the pilot of an airplane with engine trouble. The copilot (that's me) points out that we could land at Microsoft International Airport, but you angrily shake your head. "HELL NO! I'M NOT LANDING AT NO MICROSOFT NOTHING! FORGET IT! THAT'S OUT OF THE QUESTION!!" And while you're hemming and hawing and screaming about your own bright shining self righteousness the plane crashes. Congratulations. Great job.
The US public education system is an abject failure. That's a fact. And you wont even consider solving the problem.
How about this. What if we instituted vouchers along with the requirement, "for a school to receive voucher money, it cannot teach any kind of religious course."
I bet you'd oppose that too. And that basically proves my point.
lets say, you get one guy in the neighborhood to teach 6 kids, and you each pay him the $10k
A more realistic comparison to public school: 20 kids in a class = $200,000 a year. You could easily rent a building, hire a custodial staff, buy all the books and other materials, and still have more than 100k left over to pay the teacher.
For high-school, you need a history teacher, a science teacher, etc. But there are still at least 20 kids per teacher, so the ratios still hold up.
I stand by my statement. It should be possible to educate a kid for 10K. A big part of the problem is bureaucratic overhead that you get with any large government operation. We could take care of that with privatization (but again, as soon as I bring that up, many people stop reading). The other big problem is parents that dont care and kids that are just stupid. We could take care of that by abandoning this notion of "no child left behind." We as a society need to accept that not everyone has the same gifts. Everyone is entitled to the same opportunity - the opportunity to attend school, but nobody is entitled to an outcome, that is something you have to earn.
And hey, that's the current situation anyway. Many kids go all the way through highschool and cant read. The only difference between the current situation and what I'm suggesting is that we stop spending money on those kids.
Indeed. The *average* educational expendeture per student in the US is currently above $10,000 per year. As amazing as this sounds, it's actually cheaper to go to college - if you look at just tuition, the average cost of college is under 10K. Yet I'm sure we'd all agree that colleges do a better job than public schools. Why is that?? I believe it is because colleges have to compete with each other.
Think of what you personally could do for your own child for $10,000 a year. I'm certain you could find a way to give him or her a quality education for that much money. Yet somehow, the public school system can't seem to make that happen. According to them, they need still more money. It's crazy.
But the best part is, we are not going to fix it. We're not. Because we don't want to. If I even say the word voucher, some large portion of the people viewing this post will immediately stop reading. They don't even want to try. The only thing they are willing to try is "let's give the schools more money." Yeah, let's keep doing that year after year and see if anything changes. Ten years from now, we'll have this discussion again. The average cost per student will be $50,000 a year, and I'll ask, "what should we do to fix this" and the answer will be, "we have to give the schools more money omg!!"
hey want to hear something cool (or maybe pathetic) - I *still* have an active compuserve account. It's only 2.95 a month so I figured, what the hell. They are owned by AOL and I don't even have the software, but I can still send and recieve email through POP and SMTP.
Yeah, I was on compuserve on a 2400 baud modem attached to an apple IIgs way back in like 1992. I used to hang out in the anime chat room, "the usual restaurant" it was called. Ah, those were the days.
The minimum shown there is based on a three-sigma variance - there's only an 0.03% chance the comet fragment will come closer than that. So, one in ten thousand. Don't lose any sleep over it.
That was a summary of a single episode. Here is a summary of the entire series:
First couple of episode: OMFG THIS IS AN AWESOME GIANT ROBOT ANIME!!11oneone
Next dozen or so episode: actually, we can stretch this out a lot farther if we make it an underage sex comedy, because there aren't nearly enough of those.
Last few episode: ok ok sorry, we'll get serious. there, look, we killed someone. isn't that cool?
Final episode: whatever. it was all a dream. we don't even care anymore.
Fans: w-t-f ??? we are going murder you!
Movie: fine, he's a movie. Just pretend that the last episode never happened and watch this movie.
All the work that has to go into keeping the browser afloat is time that could have been better spent on making Vista work
There's just one guy at Microsoft. He works on IE on tuesday's and thursdays and works on Vista on Mondays and Fridays. (hump day is spent playing Halo 2)
I mean, think about it. Microsoft's address is "One Microsoft Way"
I'm not kidding. That's their address. A bit pretentious don't you think? But Apple names their's "infinite loop" A programming joke. How cool is that?
If Linus started his own company, it would probably be located on "Virus Patch Lane"
With the google search appliance, you're supposed to point it at your company's intranet, then it starts indexing the pages it finds and gives you a web page (let's call this "google search appliance web page") from which you do your searches.
That's the way it's supposed to work. But if you want to, you can point the google search appliance at google.com, and have it index that.
Then you go to google.com and give it the address of the "google search appliance web page" so that google starting indexing *your* appliance.
And that is guaranteed to tear a whole in the fabric of spacetime, ending the universe as we know it.
Slashdot Mirror
A bid will extend the auction by ~10 minutes if received in the last 10 minutes. Voila, no more sniping.
That's good, but I think that an even better idea would be to not reveal any bids until the bidding is over. In the case of tie max bids, the first bid submitted wins.
However, ebay will not do this (and I imagine that the sellers don't want them to) because being able to see a low bid gives a person hope and makes them bid on something they wouldn't otherwise bid on. When you log onto ebay and see that Spiderman #1 comic and the current bid is $3.50 then you think to yourself, "holy crap! I'd pay $100 for that!" and you bid - and you get sniped at $101. But if the bids were all a secret, then you might think to yourself, "that's going to sell for $500 easy, I'm out" and then maybe it would actually go for $3.50.
That's my thinking anyway.
the flap could come loose in supersonic combat.
there's a circumsicion joke there somewhere
2145. It was after the gene wars. Mankind huddled in the dark on baron continents, fighting each other for tiny scraps of meat. But there was a hero; one with a memory of the before time and the scrapers, and the courage to make the dangerous journey to the artica where, the ancient scrolls hinted, the salvation of mankind might be found.
For over a decade, he and his brave knights fought against danger and fortune to make their way to the artica. Many died. Much was lost. But one day, our intrepid hero arrived home, in his tiny, all-but-dead village. He carried in his hand, a single vile.
"this is all that has survived of my trip" he explained. "though the artica contained many wonders, our journey was hard, and most of our cargo was lost. We managed to save this one plant. It shall be the foundation of a new human culture. We shall plant it and tend it, and we shall teach our children to cherish it. This plant is a gift from our distant ancestors. It's name" (he turns the vile on its side so that he can read the inscription) "is, Kudzu"
Obwan: that search engine is our last hope
Yoda: no, there is another
(later)
Yoda: google... page rank is strong with you... pass on what you have indexed... there... is... another... search engi(ugh)
It will be interesting to look back in a few decades and see how different the US and Europe will be because of their different approaches to the Internet. in the US, the Internet will be a place for businesses that can pay the carrier cartels. In Europe, the Internet will be a place (more like what we in the US have today) where ideas are exchanged freely.
So, if I read a ten, fifteen, maybe thirty-year-old book, can I submit quotes from it as news, too?
Well, maybe Hawking himself submitted this, and it just took him this long to... type... it... with... his... little... clicker... thing...
store all the queries from every google user in the world...
hopefully the database is normalized so that data like "natalie portman +grits" isn't duplicated.
create table querycontent (queryid int, querytext text) go
create table queryinstance (queryid, userid, timestamp datetime) go
insert querycontent values (1,'natalie portman +grits')
insert queryinstance values (1,'Betabug',getDate())
.
.
insert queryinstance values (1,'Betabug',getDate())
.
.
insert queryinstance values (1,'Betabug',getDate())
and so on.
Using cryptographic signatures to verify that an email is really from your friend, before you trust its contents, simply isn't an option.
well, the email *was* from his friend. His friend was infected. If his friend was using a standalone email client and using cryptographic signatures, then most likely, his friend would have entered his password for PGP or whatever, and that password would be stored in memory, and then when the virus took over his account and started sending mail, the virus would sign the mail.
So in this particular instance, I don't see how a standalone client would help things.
fixed-length strings. If you wanted to store a five-character string in a variable declared as a 10-character string, you had to pad it out manually with spaces.
what?? I don't remember any of that from Borland Turbo Pascal!
At any rate, Pascal was designed by one of the greatest computer scientists and it did its job well. It taught good structured programming practices and got us away from the goto statement. Once you learned from program, you're *supposed* to move on to a more powerful language. The people who, for whatever reason, didn't move on - those are the people who complain. I'm not speaking to you here, but to people who say "omg pascal sucks because of X" well, it's supposed to do X because it's a teaching language. If X bothers you then you're way past the point where you need to move away from pascal.
Apple got its dominate position by creating a effective and user freindly UI to a useful and stylish bit of hardware.
bingo.
Imagine that you're the emperor of the universe. You get to decide what school we're going to send these 100 kids to. You have two options:
Option A, we send the 100 kids to school A. 50 of them will learn to read. 50 of them will not.
Option B, we send the 100 kids to school B. 75 of them will learn to read. 25 of them will not. All 100 of them will learn the four tenets of Buddhism.
So, which school do you send them to? What is better for them? If you reject option B out of hand, you strike me as very intolerant and shortsighted. OMFG! The horror! Someone might have an opinion that differs from yours! OMFG! We can't have that!!
Personally, I'm an atheist. I'm just not threatened by people who believe in spaghetti monsters or whatever. What matters to me is that in addition to believing in spaghetti monsters, they also have the educational background to make our society work. The situation that we have right now is *worse* than belief in spaghetti monsters.
If you're worried about evolution not being taught, let me put your mind at ease. For vouchers to work, there would have to be yearly standardized tests, and any school where kids are not being taught evolution would not be allowed to take vouchers. Such a school would go out of business. What this means is, it would absolutely impossible for a school to refuse to teach evolution. What this means is, I could guarantee you that no matter what school a kid went to, they would receive an education that met a certain standard - guaranteed. But I know, that doesn't "put your mind at ease" because I know that the real problem here isn't your deep heart-felt concern for our educational system, the real problem is your intolerance (of people who are wrong).
I imagine you as the pilot of an airplane with engine trouble. The copilot (that's me) points out that we could land at Microsoft International Airport, but you angrily shake your head. "HELL NO! I'M NOT LANDING AT NO MICROSOFT NOTHING! FORGET IT! THAT'S OUT OF THE QUESTION!!" And while you're hemming and hawing and screaming about your own bright shining self righteousness the plane crashes. Congratulations. Great job.
The US public education system is an abject failure. That's a fact. And you wont even consider solving the problem.
How about this. What if we instituted vouchers along with the requirement, "for a school to receive voucher money, it cannot teach any kind of religious course."
I bet you'd oppose that too. And that basically proves my point.
and "theocrat" is the code word for, "I am an elitist prick."
lets say, you get one guy in the neighborhood to teach 6 kids, and you each pay him the $10k
A more realistic comparison to public school: 20 kids in a class = $200,000 a year. You could easily rent a building, hire a custodial staff, buy all the books and other materials, and still have more than 100k left over to pay the teacher.
For high-school, you need a history teacher, a science teacher, etc. But there are still at least 20 kids per teacher, so the ratios still hold up.
I stand by my statement. It should be possible to educate a kid for 10K. A big part of the problem is bureaucratic overhead that you get with any large government operation. We could take care of that with privatization (but again, as soon as I bring that up, many people stop reading). The other big problem is parents that dont care and kids that are just stupid. We could take care of that by abandoning this notion of "no child left behind." We as a society need to accept that not everyone has the same gifts. Everyone is entitled to the same opportunity - the opportunity to attend school, but nobody is entitled to an outcome, that is something you have to earn.
And hey, that's the current situation anyway. Many kids go all the way through highschool and cant read. The only difference between the current situation and what I'm suggesting is that we stop spending money on those kids.
How? Private schools cost more than that.
what? no way! The private schools where I live are all under $5k. They're small, but they do well on standardized tests.
Indeed. The *average* educational expendeture per student in the US is currently above $10,000 per year. As amazing as this sounds, it's actually cheaper to go to college - if you look at just tuition, the average cost of college is under 10K. Yet I'm sure we'd all agree that colleges do a better job than public schools. Why is that?? I believe it is because colleges have to compete with each other.
Think of what you personally could do for your own child for $10,000 a year. I'm certain you could find a way to give him or her a quality education for that much money. Yet somehow, the public school system can't seem to make that happen. According to them, they need still more money. It's crazy.
But the best part is, we are not going to fix it. We're not. Because we don't want to. If I even say the word voucher, some large portion of the people viewing this post will immediately stop reading. They don't even want to try. The only thing they are willing to try is "let's give the schools more money." Yeah, let's keep doing that year after year and see if anything changes. Ten years from now, we'll have this discussion again. The average cost per student will be $50,000 a year, and I'll ask, "what should we do to fix this" and the answer will be, "we have to give the schools more money omg!!"
hey want to hear something cool (or maybe pathetic) - I *still* have an active compuserve account. It's only 2.95 a month so I figured, what the hell. They are owned by AOL and I don't even have the software, but I can still send and recieve email through POP and SMTP.
Yeah, I was on compuserve on a 2400 baud modem attached to an apple IIgs way back in like 1992. I used to hang out in the anime chat room, "the usual restaurant" it was called. Ah, those were the days.
I feel sorry for the remaining guy.
My guess is, the remaining guy is the manager, who is making 500k - ($8,500 * 12)
The best one yet is where the target link went to a website, and through some javascript, put an image over the URL bar!
I call bullshit on that.
The minimum shown there is based on a three-sigma variance - there's only an 0.03% chance the comet fragment will come closer than that. So, one in ten thousand. Don't lose any sleep over it.
That was a summary of a single episode. Here is a summary of the entire series:
First couple of episode: OMFG THIS IS AN AWESOME GIANT ROBOT ANIME!!11oneone
Next dozen or so episode: actually, we can stretch this out a lot farther if we make it an underage sex comedy, because there aren't nearly enough of those.
Last few episode: ok ok sorry, we'll get serious. there, look, we killed someone. isn't that cool?
Final episode: whatever. it was all a dream. we don't even care anymore.
Fans: w-t-f ??? we are going murder you!
Movie: fine, he's a movie. Just pretend that the last episode never happened and watch this movie.
I'd heard of BlueSecurity before, but hadn't looked into it much. I'm now going to look closely at it and probably sign up.
Same here. I'll run the bluesecurity client in a VM just in case, I'm going to run it. Fuck the spammers. Fuck them right in the ear.
And from last week's show:
CHLOE: I'll have to sneek in through the subnet.
GAY HOMELAND SECURITY GUY: I'll have to use a machine-coded matrix, but I should be able to track her through the binary.
I like 24, but it really cracks me up.
All the work that has to go into keeping the browser afloat is time that could have been better spent on making Vista work
There's just one guy at Microsoft. He works on IE on tuesday's and thursdays and works on Vista on Mondays and Fridays. (hump day is spent playing Halo 2)
I mean, think about it. Microsoft's address is "One Microsoft Way"
I'm not kidding. That's their address. A bit pretentious don't you think? But Apple names their's "infinite loop" A programming joke. How cool is that?
If Linus started his own company, it would probably be located on "Virus Patch Lane"
With the google search appliance, you're supposed to point it at your company's intranet, then it starts indexing the pages it finds and gives you a web page (let's call this "google search appliance web page") from which you do your searches.
That's the way it's supposed to work. But if you want to, you can point the google search appliance at google.com, and have it index that.
Then you go to google.com and give it the address of the "google search appliance web page" so that google starting indexing *your* appliance.
And that is guaranteed to tear a whole in the fabric of spacetime, ending the universe as we know it.