...Seriously. A number of years ago I used to bike to work 8 miles approx every day. it was downhill so other than slightly getting my blood pumping (and the occasional wind burn), I didn't have any adverse effects from the ride in. I generally wore a tshirt just for the ride in, then I'd change in the bathroom when I got to work. A couple times I was sweating a little bit, but I basically sat behind a building a couple away with my shirt off for 5-10 minutes until the sweat evaporated, then go in and rub down with a wet towel
The only problem was it was a pain in the ass to get starched shirts to work on a regular basis so I didn't have to carry them in a backpack or something. I ended up stocking them in there a week at a time.
The other benefit of this is you have to work your ass off on the way home, so you don't feel so bad about taking it easy in the morning.
Case in point, I spent a month of this summer in Europe, and had access to a computer twice, let alone access to my mp3 collection at home. I had about 8 gigs of music/podcasts/lectures, and managed to listen to about 2/3 of it while I was on the road (just the flights over and back were 35 hours in airports airplanes)
I also used it as a portable hard drive for my digital camera, as I could connect them directly, and thus never ran out of space on my camera (well, except the day in rome where I grabbed the wrong memory stick, and forgot the adapter in the hotel...)
Granted, this is a "once in a while" type thing, but it was worth the $400 I spent on 30g ipod photo + adapter to not have to buy a bunch of gig sticks and hope I didn't run out or lose any of them.
Now that I'm home, my main computer's m/b freaked out, and so I've been without my music collection except for the music I have on my ipod and on cds. Do I need the 30 gigs? no, but it makes this stuff a whole lot easier./Ex
my two cents... good idea, but lets talk about price...
I can listen to my mp3 player in my car. I can listen to my mp3 player near my computer, when I'm jogging, when I'm at work on break, when I'm trying to tune out other stuff going on. when I'm working around the house, when I'm sunbathing (heh, but some people do it), and basically any time I am not communicating with someone is fair game.
I can watch a tv show.... when I'm at my computer. and when I'm at my computer... And yes, when I'm at my computer. We all know they wouldn't give us a multiple device license, so, errr, yeah, if this required a set top box, I would be able to watch it there instead of my computer.
Meaning it provides me with... oh, probably 3 hours of entertainment before it gets extremely stale. (I have problems going to sleep without noise, so often I pop a dvd into my computer.)
speaking of DVDs, I buy most of my DVDs (2 hour, relatively DRM free, permanent) for (mostly) the 10-15 dollar range... sure, I've got three or four I spent twenty or more dollars on, but the average is about $14.
guessing that a tv show is approximately 20 minutes long (without commercials), it is approximately 1/6 the length of a generic movie.
if they could give me a permanent, transferable medium, I would be happy to pony up, oh, maybe $2-$2.50... except a tv show (at least a popular one) doesn't tell a whole story... and then we get into the whole perceived value of a building block... Frankly even tv shows I love have some extremely bad episodes (MST3k Kitten with a Whip anyone?), and I would want my money back from something that bad...
So then, we get into guaranteeing satisfaction, are we going to do anything if someone doesn't like what they've purchased? At least with a dvd, I can sell it used if it's really that bad, will I be able to sell it back once I get bored with it?
itunes pricing is still a bit high, and most songs I wouldn't pay a quarter for, let alone a buck, but there are a few songs I love, and am willing to buy a cd, rip it myself, and carry it on my mp3 player. at least I can, if I choose to, spend 90% of my day listening to mp3s, rather than just the time when I have nothing better to do with a visual medium/ex
Let me try to explain this (now that noone will ever read this thread)
1) A dentist takes an impression. sends it to the lab 2) Lab takes the drs impression and fills it with "stone"-- either super hard plaster or some other such product-- to make a model 3) Lab makes an impression off of first model, and creates another stone model off of that (to visually compare the resulting models, it allows them to see if there were any obvious problems with the original impression ****** THIS STEP IS WHERE THE RFID TAG IS USED. It is imbedded into the plaster or "stone" model 4) Lab makes the porcelain/metal/whatever restoration, sends it back to the doctor with the original stone model (to show that it's only as good as the model sent) 5) Dr places restoration. Done.
At no point is the RFID tag necessarily sent out of the building it's placed in.
"oh no, they're looking at putting it in our fake teeth"
The problem with this, dental appliances tend to be made in a lot of different colors (at least 15 shades). A good dentist will match a crown or veneer or whatever to your natural tooth color...
The problem is, anything off color behind it Dramatically shows through. There are dental seminars where drs learn NOTHING but color matching. Now all of a sudden the porcelain has different colors and percentages of translucency... Nope, drs would throw a shit fit-- I know, I talk to them daily.
Metal? well, sure, they could put it under metal... except for that whole 44000 psi of pressure on the chip... And that whole "It's buried in metal, it isn't going to transmit unless it's under my chin, IF the chip hasn't already broken...
between Porcelain and metal in a Porcelain fused to metal crown? More likely, but see porcelain, then see metal.
Which leaves us with composites-- You know, the stuff drs use now instead of amalgams for fillings... They flippin' do it on site, they're not going to bother with an RFID tag in the restoration!
I don't know the compressive or tensile strength of a RFID tag, but I can almost guarranty that the mouth is about the worst place you can put it in the human body./Ex
I work for a company dealing with dental products (no names, but I think it'd probably take 3 guesses, seeing as how there are only about 4 out there)
I was working on our consumer customer service line for a couple weeks, and had a call from someone who had gone to thailand to get all of his teeth crowned-- Trying to get that hollywood smile.
The dr didn't seat them right, and so this gentleman was in tremendous pain. Not only had he spent $8k going there to have it done, they did it improperly, then said "too bad for you, We'll do it over, but you'll have to pay again"...
He ended coming back to the good ol' U S of A to have a dr here redo it. They hadn't taken care to keep his teeth isolated and moisture free. He ended up having to go to three different doctors till one took pity on him... The first two docs took a look at the mans xrays and said "not touching with a ten foot pole, there is no way I can do this without opening myself up to lawsuits, and it's not a life threatening thing". They ended up having to (IIRC) completely remove and implant 4 teeth and the rest (24 crowns, plus the implants, I think) had to have the crowns removed and replaced (at $800 per crown and probably $2000 per implant).
Then again, I had second hand stories of brothers and friends and such going overseas to russia, philipines, and random other places with no problem...
and I heard at least two horror stories of US dentists, but at least with the US ones, you have the option of lawsuit if the dr doesn't "make it right" if something is screwed up (and if they're using a decent lab, most doctors get a 1, 3 or 5 year warranty on any porcelain product they put in your mouth.)
All I can say is buyer beware, it may be cheaper, but this gentleman probably only needed $4000 worth of work to begin with, went all out, and it ended up costing him somewhere over $30k/ex
90% of problems with computers happen at start up...
restarting (even ever 30 days) can eventually cause those power supplies to cease supplying power
now, instead of a computer running for years, you have to contend with the possibility of every month, having one of the computers going down, and with that, shutting down LAX till IT can come out to fix it again...
Is that a problem?
Besides, once a computer is up and running, barring any power spikes or anything, you rarely see components stop functioning. If a computer's been running for 6 months, it will continue running, barring any power fluctuations (or having a hard drive die, but MTBF on a drive that isn't spun up much is a lot longer than a power supply that's always on...
MST3k: Girl in gold boots: Randomly in the middle of the movie, they go to a beach (near my house!) and ride a 6 wheeled "buggy"... then back to the movie. why is it in there? who knows.
Wild wild world of batwoman: *shudder* a super group of females, with such fine plot twists as an atomic powered hearing aid, a potion that makes people dance, and... pain. Lots of pain. for the viewers, not the people in the movie.
Gamera: "Gamera is fun to meet, he is made of turtle meat, we believe in gamera!!! (Did you know he is friend to all children?" Big flying turtle. Takes out Kyoto or Tokyo or something.
Sidehackers: Something about riding a motorcycle with a sidecar, trying to popularize it as a sport. I don't think I ever finished it sober--man is it bad.
Manos: Quite probably the worst movie ever made. I love it. There's an interview out there somewhere with the guy who plays torgo (I thought). can't find it, but well worth reading. FYI, two or three people committed suicide within a couple years after the movie was finished-- and the guy who wrote it went back to being a fertilizer sales person, IIRC.
Red Zone Cuba: Just bad. I can't finish it. even when drunk.
Touch of Satan: "It looks like everyone is burning grandmas today"
GOOD MST3k Pod people: "Trumpy, you can do stupid things" War of the Colossal beast-- A must watch (just for the short Mr. B. Natural) Space Mutiny: I don't know many MST3k fans who won't put space mutiny in their top 3 favorites. Beginning of the end: "I'm peter graves"... and crickets on post cards. a truly excruciating episode. well worth watching
Most of those are available on DVD. I highly recommend anything in season 8 for new people to MST3k. Some are available online. You can check out the DAP for more info.
as for non-mst3k bad movies... let look through my dvd collection first.
Death Race 2000: Sylvester Stallone and a bunch of other people race across the country in horribly dumb looking vehicles, trying to kill as many people as possible.
Bubba Ho Tep: I enjoy this movie immensely, but everyone else says it sucks. listen to the commentary, and it'll be a lot better (but watch it once first).
Gigli: *shudder* I want the 600 megs of download back.
Gor: *shudder*. MST3k did an ep called Outlaw or something like that, which is the sequal to this. somehow a friend of mine got the original... *shudder* it burned.
escape from NY: it's bad, but in a good way!
Escape from LA: It's bad, but in a bad way!
Cruel intentions 2: If I had to pick a worst movie ever, it's probably this. (note, I don't own this, I turned on the tv one night, and turned my back on it, and realized that this was on about 3/4 of the way through it.
So to sum it up: worst MST3k: Girl in the gold boots. worst non-mst3k: Cruel intentions 2
(this is just a small sampling, I've seen 80 of the IMDB worst, and almost every single MST3k... some of them are bad, I just don't remember them as it's been a couple years since I collected 'em all)/Ex
Not that I'm quite non-technical-- I lost my interest in computers a long while ago, though technology and technology's sociological effects are very interesting to me.
I quite enjoyed all but the classes I went there specifically to see-- the hardware hacking was pretty much a waste of time, but everything else I went to far exceeded my expectations. I was able to go from one "non-tech" talk to another, without feeling out of place, and struck up conversations with the other three techno-simplists there.
As for the number of girls at Defcon, there were probably 10-15% of the total-- many of them nerds... others obviously there just because their bf's dragged 'em along.
she may feel out of place, but she wouldn't be the only one there...
...So the three who see this after me might read this buuuuut....
this has kinda turned into a "feature request for firefox" post-- Mine isn't about machine learning, but I feel it would make browsing *MUCH* more useful for me.
I want multiple levels of tabs! I want to go to google and search for "medieval socks" and then hit the first ten results into new tabs, look through them, and if I come across something interesting with more links, I want to tab into those, but not have them show up in the main bar-- I want them to show up so I can keep track of how I got somewhere.
other reasons for this-- news sites. I come to slashdot and fark, and read the headlines and select what interests me, open the stories in tabs, then open the articles in under tabs-- Now I can open all the stories, and I don't have to guess which article goes with which story, and if I find interesting links in the comments, I can go there as well without losing what I was doing.
I guess you could incorporate machine learning, into the first type-- you go into site 1, if you spend no time on it and close it, but you spend 15 minutes at site 2, and open up a few links from there, it looks through the others, tries to figure out which is the most interesting to you, then opens up sub-links... yeah, that'd be cool
ahhh, pipe dreams... I'd like this almost enough to figure out how I can do this myself-- but the programming experience I have is... minimal in any real systems, to say the least/ex
Excellent point. Don't ignore the signs! Other signs:
* High or increasing volume of Accounts Payable calls
Hey! every day, calls from credit card companies! Multiple times a day!
* High or increasing volume of Accounts Payable callers
The last one I took was from the lawyer of the "leader" of the hells angels, Sammy Burgess.
* Notices that your health coverage has been suspended/reinstated (because a premium or several were missed then quickly paid)
Yup... Except she didn't bother to tell us about it... Yes, I went to the doctor-- complaining about job related stress... Then two days later I had to tell him to not bill my insurance company, due to it being "renegotiated"...
* LATE CHECKS (run!)
"but I was in (wherever) and I couldn't come over and get your checks!"...
* Reduced janitorial services
Well, in all honesty, they only came once a week, and did a shit-ass job...
* More trash in the parking lot or trash bins are emptied fewer times a week
see above
* Managment approval required on office supplies
"But do you really need more paper? Can't you just recycle old paper?" "Sure, but do you want us to send out quotes for people on the back of test-prints?"
* Personal assistants or secretaries being let go
No... none of that... She stopped paying them, true...
* F'ed Company being added to the 'net filter (old - but a good sign regardless)
Nope, since I "owned" the filters =)
* No more free coffee/sodas/toliet paper
They removed the bottled water "to cut down on waste" and to "stop all the little breaks". Meaning we had to walk across the street to the market to get drinks.
* Being able to find choice parking spaces when there weren't many before (kidding; by this time it should be obvious there are problems
I can think of a few more...
* Company's bank turning down paychecks as "NSF". Having to speak with the bank president (fortunately a family friend) to get your check cashed.
* Company changing banks...
* Dell refusing to sell them any more computers, even on COD basis
* Having new bank shut down checking account, meaning everyone has to be paid in cash.
* keeping three "telecommuting" employees waiting for checks for 3 months, followed by paying them for only a month of work.
* Eh. I don't know any more that's happened... I left about after the paycheck thing...
Well, that and her (boob jobbed butt ugly 22 year old, with a 8 year old brat) daughter announcing in the room where I'm working "I'd rather be fucking right now".
I'm not sure that this is totally on topic, but it kinda has to do with gift cultures and micropayments
Micropayments-- the Exantrius way:
1) pay a certain amount to a "host" (this doesn't work quite right unless you have central hosting-- think sourceforge, or fanfics.net.) You can either do it so that it's what the user wants, or a flat rate, or whatever.
2) take a couple percent (5ish?) for server and bandwidth costs.
3) Every time you visit a "story"/informational page, you rate it (good, bad, indifferent), defaulting to indifferent if you don't choose any. every page you visit gets one "vote" for a bad, 10 votes for an indifferent, and 100 votes for a good.
4) At the end of the month, tally the number of votes from each user-- and find out each share price-- 1 vote == $.0032 or whatever. now place it in the voted's account. this would be per user-- if someone had 10000 votes and $10, their votes would be worth $.001. likewise, someone with 10 votes and $10 would have $1 shares.
5) Hold money in an account for each user. This works best in a closed system-- think a bbs or blog community or something-- probably more like fanfics.net or something with creative or real other value. when the voted makes a certain amount, they can cash out (so you don't have to send $.18 checks to people). say $20. Plus they can use their acct balance to pay their "subscription" fee.
2 ways for service to make money: 1) "skimming off the top"-- as long as it's kept low-- 5% is high, ideally it'd be in the sub 2% range. 2) collect interest on money-- invest it in short term investments or just put it in an interest bearing account.
Ideally though, the system would be set up as non-profit, with the hope that the people that set up the system are decent contributors, so they can make their own money... so make just enough money to pay expenses.
This would work best in a situation where everyone can be a contributor, and noone has "special" priveleges, except maybe a "top N stories" by votes. that means that the guy that runs the site would have to place his work in the system with everyone else.
This is just the most basic idea-- I've actually played around with this, but I'd need a large hunk of data in order to get numbers right... I think people would join a community for a small fee if they had the opportunity to get money back-- this also guarrantees that *ALL* the money goes back to users, and it gives an incentive to not only be an active member of the society, but a good contributing member.
Of course, I would make it all available without registering/paying, but with ads, and no contributing-- no reason to charge people who are just passing through...
Or possibly I'd let them contribute, and have a counter on their front page "If you registered, you would have made this much: $TEXAS"
Unfortunately I'm lazy, and frankly don't particularly care about doing data systems as much as I used to love them... If anyone can put this into effect, I'd love to hear about it...
That was something I always complained about... I went to UCSC in '99-- EVERYONE was CS or CE. Because it was easy money once you got the degree, the teacher had to go extremely slow for the people who don't know computers. I stopped going to class because it was painful to be in the fifth week of the (10 week) class going over the same stuff as the first week-- We had people that couldn't get the hang of/* commenting */.
Unfortunately, most of them made it through to second quarter.
Fortunately, not many of the non computer people made it past second quarter, with the lecturer and his hash of string queues -- Not that it was difficult, it was kinda scary./ex
Yeah, I thought about doing that... I kinda just don't like killing X... I feel like if I have time to play video games, I should do something useful... Like getting my scripts written before the people that already paid me realize it doesn't work.../Ex
well, Thanks anyway for making it run on linux-- My machine is too, erm... *scattered* to run video games under linux... I have to go into windows to get my unemployment fix...
Something about having a desktop of 3840x1440 just disagrees with X and hardware acceleration (well, maybe it's the fact I've got a Radeon and a Geforce4 running a monitor each)
Regardless, someday I'll set it up to run video games, in the meantime, Thanks for the effort./ex/ex
He put in the time to do it, you didn't. If he wants to protect his work-- Which I am sure he put into this list-- then it's his goddamned choice.
It doesn't say he will use the copyright for ill, maybe he just wants to keep his list as a single depository-- doesn't want a million people to copy the list, then add one?...
Indeed, and you pay a monthly fee for it. It's not all that bad of an option, but it's just one of the problems.
Errm, It's free with my cell.
Multiple handsets? There's only one of me, and I live in a very small dank dungeon.
So your wife/sons/daughters/guests don't ever need to talk on the phone?
No Wife, sone or daughter. Guests from time to time, but they're welcome to use my cell. I have a single room that is "my living arrangement" which means the phone is always within reach.
internet access? That's what cable is for.
Cable internet access in my area sucks. First off you have to get basic cable along with it, which adds $40+ onto the price. Then the price of internet access is rather expensive for about 256K down.
Eh, I don't watch cable. I wasn't saying it was the be-all and end-all, just saying that I don't need a phone line for cable. Some people do, and that's fine.
It works perfect for me.
Congratulations. You get a cookie.
Why thanks, but I think you're being sarcastic, and I didn't mean to ruffle feathers. As I said in my first post-- It works quite well for me. Anyone who isn't a twenty something geek with no strings holding them down, well, it starts to not work quite as well.
It works much less perfectly for anyone that actually has a life.
Now that's just complete bullshit. Cellphones still can't replace land-lines for the vast majority of people, and insuating that all those people don't "[have] a life" isn't helping you.
Errr, read that again, the "actually has a life" is meant for people who actually have lives, family, friends, and all that good stuff-- I'm new in my area, and I don't have any of those things. And like I said, In my position, my cell phone was a godsend. Maybe not in yours. In fact I'm very aware that most people cannot replace their home phones with cells-- But I can, and it works for me.
I'm not trying to evangelize, I'm just saying that used properly, a cell phone isn't necessarily hellspawn./Ex
Voice mail. Most phones have it. Multiple handsets? There's only one of me, and I live in a very small dank dungeon. internet access? That's what cable is for.
It works perfect for me. It works much less perfectly for anyone that actually has a life.
prior to being homeless, I had my shared phone number at the first place I lived-- The number went with the other guy. I wasn't ready to plunk down 25/mo on a phone I rarely used (until I was trying to find housing)...
A better solution would be a phone attached to an answering service-- I needed a phone very often during my search for housing-- I was just glad to have it.
You plan sounds like an okay idea provided: A) you have a phone number to begin with (which means you need a place to live, etc.)... B) Congress gave a shit... C) we could trust the guvment to hold our data in as high esteem as we do.
And actually, since most of the people I talked to (family, letting them know I was still alive, a couple friends outside the area) had the same service, with free mobile to mobile, it's cost me 35 bucks a month since I got it-- $10 more than a phone in a room that I'm never at./ex
call forwarding? It's hard to forward a number when you don't have one--That's right, I had no number. Hell, for 3 weeks, I was sleeping in my car because I couldn't get ahold of any of my friends, they'd all disappeared that summer.
Number Portability? Yeah, it's coming. It wasn't around 5 years ago. Now I'm looking at moving again, what number am I going to take?
and a voluntary directory sounds a whole lot like a junk caller's wet dream-- Not to mention the people that don't have my number don't have it for a reason.
Not to flame or anything, but cell's have their uses, especially when you don't have a place to hang your hat...
When I got my cell phone, I was a year into college, and I couldn't find housing-- I ended up couch surfing for six months, followed by living in places for between 1 and 6 months at a time for another two years. If I didn't have a cell phone, I would have had no phone number.
Now that I'm no longer in college, and I live 300 miles away from that area code, it's the number that everyone knows, and so I don't want to give it up.
Just because a lot of people are annoying on them (hang up and drive, and turn it off at dinner/movies/visiting with people), doesn't mean I hate the invention-- I hate it's uses...
Kinda like video games and dance dance revolution./ex
Errr, I jumped thoughts in mid-stream. I was thinking Google ads... Then I was thinking "bag on x10"... then I was thinking "I'm losing my train of thought too often, it's time to go home"...
Then I was thinking "shiny objects are pretty." at that point, I decided I'd face the wrath of my boss and attempt to get the rest of the day off...
and so I went home, and found out there was a babysitter in my house after all... weird./ex
Why not try and advertise something that someone *WANTS* to purchase-- Maybe *THEN* you won't have to evade a protection I put on my computer because I don't want to deal with your crap.
Why is this so hard? Google's apparently doing a pretty good job of it-- Sure you need a lot more customers, but for the love of frank, I don't need any goddamned spy cameras, I don't have a babysitter or a cheating spouse, or for that matter a misbehaving dog./Ex
you may not be aware, but in most states, you have to go through some training to become a security guard. It's not extensive, but it is enough to properly detain someone, *WITHOUT* harming them.
Also, they're in a limited area, in case of Macy's, their store. Once you leave their property (which I believe usually extends to the end of the pavement/parking lot), they have no legal right to detain you... and it would be considered assault if they did, regardless of whether you stole something (of course, if it's grand theft, then it's a citizens arrest with real teeth)...
I didn't RTFA (I'm at work) but I assume that the RIAA Jack-Booted Thugs (JBT hereafter) were *NOT* on property they were hired by the owner or the owner's agent (in case of rental of a building), in which case, it's very much different.
In California, at least, security guards are the only people that can arrest/stop someone for shoplifting. A friend got fired (then quickly rehired for a really stupid reason) by a retail store, because he chased after 3 12 year olds that had stolen game boy advances-- He returned with two of them, and one of the kid's names, and he got fired for it. It's too much of a liability for them, because if the kid says he was hurt by the employee, the kid would get a slap on the wrist, but the company could have been sued for assault...
Check your local laws, but yeah... This is pretty damn illegal, while what macy's does isn't.../ex
Slashdot Mirror
live uphill from work...
The only problem was it was a pain in the ass to get starched shirts to work on a regular basis so I didn't have to carry them in a backpack or something. I ended up stocking them in there a week at a time.
The other benefit of this is you have to work your ass off on the way home, so you don't feel so bad about taking it easy in the morning.
I disagree.
/Ex
Case in point, I spent a month of this summer in Europe, and had access to a computer twice, let alone access to my mp3 collection at home. I had about 8 gigs of music/podcasts/lectures, and managed to listen to about 2/3 of it while I was on the road (just the flights over and back were 35 hours in airports airplanes)
I also used it as a portable hard drive for my digital camera, as I could connect them directly, and thus never ran out of space on my camera (well, except the day in rome where I grabbed the wrong memory stick, and forgot the adapter in the hotel...)
Granted, this is a "once in a while" type thing, but it was worth the $400 I spent on 30g ipod photo + adapter to not have to buy a bunch of gig sticks and hope I didn't run out or lose any of them.
Now that I'm home, my main computer's m/b freaked out, and so I've been without my music collection except for the music I have on my ipod and on cds. Do I need the 30 gigs? no, but it makes this stuff a whole lot easier.
my two cents... good idea, but lets talk about price...
/ex
I can listen to my mp3 player in my car. I can listen to my mp3 player near my computer, when I'm jogging, when I'm at work on break, when I'm trying to tune out other stuff going on. when I'm working around the house, when I'm sunbathing (heh, but some people do it), and basically any time I am not communicating with someone is fair game.
I can watch a tv show.... when I'm at my computer. and when I'm at my computer... And yes, when I'm at my computer. We all know they wouldn't give us a multiple device license, so, errr, yeah, if this required a set top box, I would be able to watch it there instead of my computer.
Meaning it provides me with... oh, probably 3 hours of entertainment before it gets extremely stale. (I have problems going to sleep without noise, so often I pop a dvd into my computer.)
speaking of DVDs, I buy most of my DVDs (2 hour, relatively DRM free, permanent) for (mostly) the 10-15 dollar range... sure, I've got three or four I spent twenty or more dollars on, but the average is about $14.
guessing that a tv show is approximately 20 minutes long (without commercials), it is approximately 1/6 the length of a generic movie.
if they could give me a permanent, transferable medium, I would be happy to pony up, oh, maybe $2-$2.50... except a tv show (at least a popular one) doesn't tell a whole story... and then we get into the whole perceived value of a building block... Frankly even tv shows I love have some extremely bad episodes (MST3k Kitten with a Whip anyone?), and I would want my money back from something that bad...
So then, we get into guaranteeing satisfaction, are we going to do anything if someone doesn't like what they've purchased? At least with a dvd, I can sell it used if it's really that bad, will I be able to sell it back once I get bored with it?
itunes pricing is still a bit high, and most songs I wouldn't pay a quarter for, let alone a buck, but there are a few songs I love, and am willing to buy a cd, rip it myself, and carry it on my mp3 player. at least I can, if I choose to, spend 90% of my day listening to mp3s, rather than just the time when I have nothing better to do with a visual medium
Let me try to explain this (now that noone will ever read this thread)
/Ex
1) A dentist takes an impression. sends it to the lab
2) Lab takes the drs impression and fills it with "stone"-- either super hard plaster or some other such product-- to make a model
3) Lab makes an impression off of first model, and creates another stone model off of that (to visually compare the resulting models, it allows them to see if there were any obvious problems with the original impression ****** THIS STEP IS WHERE THE RFID TAG IS USED. It is imbedded into the plaster or "stone" model
4) Lab makes the porcelain/metal/whatever restoration, sends it back to the doctor with the original stone model (to show that it's only as good as the model sent)
5) Dr places restoration. Done.
At no point is the RFID tag necessarily sent out of the building it's placed in.
"oh no, they're looking at putting it in our fake teeth"
The problem with this, dental appliances tend to be made in a lot of different colors (at least 15 shades). A good dentist will match a crown or veneer or whatever to your natural tooth color...
The problem is, anything off color behind it Dramatically shows through. There are dental seminars where drs learn NOTHING but color matching. Now all of a sudden the porcelain has different colors and percentages of translucency... Nope, drs would throw a shit fit-- I know, I talk to them daily.
Metal? well, sure, they could put it under metal... except for that whole 44000 psi of pressure on the chip... And that whole "It's buried in metal, it isn't going to transmit unless it's under my chin, IF the chip hasn't already broken...
between Porcelain and metal in a Porcelain fused to metal crown? More likely, but see porcelain, then see metal.
Which leaves us with composites-- You know, the stuff drs use now instead of amalgams for fillings... They flippin' do it on site, they're not going to bother with an RFID tag in the restoration!
I don't know the compressive or tensile strength of a RFID tag, but I can almost guarranty that the mouth is about the worst place you can put it in the human body.
I work for a company dealing with dental products (no names, but I think it'd probably take 3 guesses, seeing as how there are only about 4 out there)
/ex
I was working on our consumer customer service line for a couple weeks, and had a call from someone who had gone to thailand to get all of his teeth crowned-- Trying to get that hollywood smile.
The dr didn't seat them right, and so this gentleman was in tremendous pain. Not only had he spent $8k going there to have it done, they did it improperly, then said "too bad for you, We'll do it over, but you'll have to pay again"...
He ended coming back to the good ol' U S of A to have a dr here redo it. They hadn't taken care to keep his teeth isolated and moisture free. He ended up having to go to three different doctors till one took pity on him... The first two docs took a look at the mans xrays and said "not touching with a ten foot pole, there is no way I can do this without opening myself up to lawsuits, and it's not a life threatening thing". They ended up having to (IIRC) completely remove and implant 4 teeth and the rest (24 crowns, plus the implants, I think) had to have the crowns removed and replaced (at $800 per crown and probably $2000 per implant).
Then again, I had second hand stories of brothers and friends and such going overseas to russia, philipines, and random other places with no problem...
and I heard at least two horror stories of US dentists, but at least with the US ones, you have the option of lawsuit if the dr doesn't "make it right" if something is screwed up (and if they're using a decent lab, most doctors get a 1, 3 or 5 year warranty on any porcelain product they put in your mouth.)
All I can say is buyer beware, it may be cheaper, but this gentleman probably only needed $4000 worth of work to begin with, went all out, and it ended up costing him somewhere over $30k
The problem I see...
/Ex
90% of problems with computers happen at start up...
restarting (even ever 30 days) can eventually cause those power supplies to cease supplying power
now, instead of a computer running for years, you have to contend with the possibility of every month, having one of the computers going down, and with that, shutting down LAX till IT can come out to fix it again...
Is that a problem?
Besides, once a computer is up and running, barring any power spikes or anything, you rarely see components stop functioning. If a computer's been running for 6 months, it will continue running, barring any power fluctuations (or having a hard drive die, but MTBF on a drive that isn't spun up much is a lot longer than a power supply that's always on...
FUD,
I should have a vote in this.
/Ex
MST3k:
Girl in gold boots: Randomly in the middle of the movie, they go to a beach (near my house!) and ride a 6 wheeled "buggy"... then back to the movie. why is it in there? who knows.
Wild wild world of batwoman: *shudder* a super group of females, with such fine plot twists as an atomic powered hearing aid, a potion that makes people dance, and... pain. Lots of pain. for the viewers, not the people in the movie.
Gamera: "Gamera is fun to meet, he is made of turtle meat, we believe in gamera!!! (Did you know he is friend to all children?" Big flying turtle. Takes out Kyoto or Tokyo or something.
Sidehackers: Something about riding a motorcycle with a sidecar, trying to popularize it as a sport. I don't think I ever finished it sober--man is it bad.
Manos: Quite probably the worst movie ever made. I love it. There's an interview out there somewhere with the guy who plays torgo (I thought). can't find it, but well worth reading. FYI, two or three people committed suicide within a couple years after the movie was finished-- and the guy who wrote it went back to being a fertilizer sales person, IIRC.
Red Zone Cuba: Just bad. I can't finish it. even when drunk.
Touch of Satan: "It looks like everyone is burning grandmas today"
GOOD MST3k
Pod people: "Trumpy, you can do stupid things"
War of the Colossal beast-- A must watch (just for the short Mr. B. Natural)
Space Mutiny: I don't know many MST3k fans who won't put space mutiny in their top 3 favorites.
Beginning of the end: "I'm peter graves"... and crickets on post cards. a truly excruciating episode. well worth watching
Most of those are available on DVD. I highly recommend anything in season 8 for new people to MST3k. Some are available online. You can check out the DAP for more info.
as for non-mst3k bad movies... let look through my dvd collection first.
Death Race 2000: Sylvester Stallone and a bunch of other people race across the country in horribly dumb looking vehicles, trying to kill as many people as possible.
Bubba Ho Tep: I enjoy this movie immensely, but everyone else says it sucks. listen to the commentary, and it'll be a lot better (but watch it once first).
Gigli: *shudder* I want the 600 megs of download back.
Gor: *shudder*. MST3k did an ep called Outlaw or something like that, which is the sequal to this. somehow a friend of mine got the original... *shudder* it burned.
escape from NY: it's bad, but in a good way!
Escape from LA: It's bad, but in a bad way!
Cruel intentions 2: If I had to pick a worst movie ever, it's probably this. (note, I don't own this, I turned on the tv one night, and turned my back on it, and realized that this was on about 3/4 of the way through it.
So to sum it up:
worst MST3k: Girl in the gold boots.
worst non-mst3k: Cruel intentions 2
(this is just a small sampling, I've seen 80 of the IMDB worst, and almost every single MST3k... some of them are bad, I just don't remember them as it's been a couple years since I collected 'em all)
I was actually at defcon this year--
/Ex
Not that I'm quite non-technical-- I lost my interest in computers a long while ago, though technology and technology's sociological effects are very interesting to me.
I quite enjoyed all but the classes I went there specifically to see-- the hardware hacking was pretty much a waste of time, but everything else I went to far exceeded my expectations. I was able to go from one "non-tech" talk to another, without feeling out of place, and struck up conversations with the other three techno-simplists there.
As for the number of girls at Defcon, there were probably 10-15% of the total-- many of them nerds... others obviously there just because their bf's dragged 'em along.
she may feel out of place, but she wouldn't be the only one there...
and that's all I have to say about that...
...So the three who see this after me might read this buuuuut....
/ex
this has kinda turned into a "feature request for firefox" post-- Mine isn't about machine learning, but I feel it would make browsing *MUCH* more useful for me.
I want multiple levels of tabs! I want to go to google and search for "medieval socks" and then hit the first ten results into new tabs, look through them, and if I come across something interesting with more links, I want to tab into those, but not have them show up in the main bar-- I want them to show up so I can keep track of how I got somewhere.
other reasons for this-- news sites. I come to slashdot and fark, and read the headlines and select what interests me, open the stories in tabs, then open the articles in under tabs-- Now I can open all the stories, and I don't have to guess which article goes with which story, and if I find interesting links in the comments, I can go there as well without losing what I was doing.
I guess you could incorporate machine learning, into the first type-- you go into site 1, if you spend no time on it and close it, but you spend 15 minutes at site 2, and open up a few links from there, it looks through the others, tries to figure out which is the most interesting to you, then opens up sub-links... yeah, that'd be cool
ahhh, pipe dreams... I'd like this almost enough to figure out how I can do this myself-- but the programming experience I have is... minimal in any real systems, to say the least
Heh, Finally a checklist to rate my last job by!
/Ex
Excellent point. Don't ignore the signs! Other signs:
* High or increasing volume of Accounts Payable calls
Hey! every day, calls from credit card companies! Multiple times a day!
* High or increasing volume of Accounts Payable callers
The last one I took was from the lawyer of the "leader" of the hells angels, Sammy Burgess.
* Notices that your health coverage has been suspended/reinstated (because a premium or several were missed then quickly paid)
Yup... Except she didn't bother to tell us about it... Yes, I went to the doctor-- complaining about job related stress... Then two days later I had to tell him to not bill my insurance company, due to it being "renegotiated"...
* LATE CHECKS (run!)
"but I was in (wherever) and I couldn't come over and get your checks!"...
* Reduced janitorial services
Well, in all honesty, they only came once a week, and did a shit-ass job...
* More trash in the parking lot or trash bins are emptied fewer times a week
see above
* Managment approval required on office supplies
"But do you really need more paper? Can't you just recycle old paper?" "Sure, but do you want us to send out quotes for people on the back of test-prints?"
* Personal assistants or secretaries being let go
No... none of that... She stopped paying them, true...
* F'ed Company being added to the 'net filter (old - but a good sign regardless)
Nope, since I "owned" the filters =)
* No more free coffee/sodas/toliet paper
They removed the bottled water "to cut down on waste" and to "stop all the little breaks". Meaning we had to walk across the street to the market to get drinks.
* Being able to find choice parking spaces when there weren't many before (kidding; by this time it should be obvious there are problems
I can think of a few more...
* Company's bank turning down paychecks as "NSF". Having to speak with the bank president (fortunately a family friend) to get your check cashed.
* Company changing banks...
* Dell refusing to sell them any more computers, even on COD basis
* Having new bank shut down checking account, meaning everyone has to be paid in cash.
* keeping three "telecommuting" employees waiting for checks for 3 months, followed by paying them for only a month of work.
* Eh. I don't know any more that's happened... I left about after the paycheck thing...
Well, that and her (boob jobbed butt ugly 22 year old, with a 8 year old brat) daughter announcing in the room where I'm working "I'd rather be fucking right now".
bob *at* drunkmonkey *dot* org
if you care to hear more =)...
I'm not sure that this is totally on topic, but it kinda has to do with gift cultures and micropayments
/ex
Micropayments-- the Exantrius way:
1) pay a certain amount to a "host" (this doesn't work quite right unless you have central hosting-- think sourceforge, or fanfics.net.) You can either do it so that it's what the user wants, or a flat rate, or whatever.
2) take a couple percent (5ish?) for server and bandwidth costs.
3) Every time you visit a "story"/informational page, you rate it (good, bad, indifferent), defaulting to indifferent if you don't choose any. every page you visit gets one "vote" for a bad, 10 votes for an indifferent, and 100 votes for a good.
4) At the end of the month, tally the number of votes from each user-- and find out each share price-- 1 vote == $.0032 or whatever. now place it in the voted's account. this would be per user-- if someone had 10000 votes and $10, their votes would be worth $.001. likewise, someone with 10 votes and $10 would have $1 shares.
5) Hold money in an account for each user. This works best in a closed system-- think a bbs or blog community or something-- probably more like fanfics.net or something with creative or real other value. when the voted makes a certain amount, they can cash out (so you don't have to send $.18 checks to people). say $20. Plus they can use their acct balance to pay their "subscription" fee.
2 ways for service to make money:
1) "skimming off the top"-- as long as it's kept low-- 5% is high, ideally it'd be in the sub 2% range.
2) collect interest on money-- invest it in short term investments or just put it in an interest bearing account.
Ideally though, the system would be set up as non-profit, with the hope that the people that set up the system are decent contributors, so they can make their own money... so make just enough money to pay expenses.
This would work best in a situation where everyone can be a contributor, and noone has "special" priveleges, except maybe a "top N stories" by votes. that means that the guy that runs the site would have to place his work in the system with everyone else.
This is just the most basic idea-- I've actually played around with this, but I'd need a large hunk of data in order to get numbers right... I think people would join a community for a small fee if they had the opportunity to get money back-- this also guarrantees that *ALL* the money goes back to users, and it gives an incentive to not only be an active member of the society, but a good contributing member.
Of course, I would make it all available without registering/paying, but with ads, and no contributing-- no reason to charge people who are just passing through...
Or possibly I'd let them contribute, and have a counter on their front page "If you registered, you would have made this much: $TEXAS"
Unfortunately I'm lazy, and frankly don't particularly care about doing data systems as much as I used to love them... If anyone can put this into effect, I'd love to hear about it...
bob[at]drunkmonkey]dot[org
bp == British Petroleum... or did before they started getting into alternative energies, and thus became just BP rather than British Petroleum
That was something I always complained about... /* commenting */.
/ex
I went to UCSC in '99-- EVERYONE was CS or CE. Because it was easy money once you got the degree, the teacher had to go extremely slow for the people who don't know computers. I stopped going to class because it was painful to be in the fifth week of the (10 week) class going over the same stuff as the first week-- We had people that couldn't get the hang of
Unfortunately, most of them made it through to second quarter.
Fortunately, not many of the non computer people made it past second quarter, with the lecturer and his hash of string queues -- Not that it was difficult, it was kinda scary.
Yeah, I thought about doing that... I kinda just don't like killing X... I feel like if I have time to play video games, I should do something useful... Like getting my scripts written before the people that already paid me realize it doesn't work... /Ex
well, Thanks anyway for making it run on linux-- My machine is too, erm... *scattered* to run video games under linux... I have to go into windows to get my unemployment fix...
/ex /ex
Something about having a desktop of 3840x1440 just disagrees with X and hardware acceleration (well, maybe it's the fact I've got a Radeon and a Geforce4 running a monitor each)
Regardless, someday I'll set it up to run video games, in the meantime, Thanks for the effort.
If he wants to copyright it, it's his call.
/Ex
He put in the time to do it, you didn't. If he wants to protect his work-- Which I am sure he put into this list-- then it's his goddamned choice.
It doesn't say he will use the copyright for ill, maybe he just wants to keep his list as a single depository-- doesn't want a million people to copy the list, then add one?...
Sheesh...
Voice mail. Most phones have it.
/Ex
Indeed, and you pay a monthly fee for it. It's not all that bad of an option, but it's just one of the problems.
Errm, It's free with my cell.
Multiple handsets? There's only one of me, and I live in a very small dank dungeon.
So your wife/sons/daughters/guests don't ever need to talk on the phone?
No Wife, sone or daughter. Guests from time to time, but they're welcome to use my cell. I have a single room that is "my living arrangement" which means the phone is always within reach.
internet access? That's what cable is for.
Cable internet access in my area sucks. First off you have to get basic cable along with it, which adds $40+ onto the price. Then the price of internet access is rather expensive for about 256K down.
Eh, I don't watch cable. I wasn't saying it was the be-all and end-all, just saying that I don't need a phone line for cable. Some people do, and that's fine.
It works perfect for me.
Congratulations. You get a cookie.
Why thanks, but I think you're being sarcastic, and I didn't mean to ruffle feathers. As I said in my first post-- It works quite well for me. Anyone who isn't a twenty something geek with no strings holding them down, well, it starts to not work quite as well.
It works much less perfectly for anyone that actually has a life.
Now that's just complete bullshit. Cellphones still can't replace land-lines for the vast majority of people, and insuating that all those people don't "[have] a life" isn't helping you.
Errr, read that again, the "actually has a life" is meant for people who actually have lives, family, friends, and all that good stuff-- I'm new in my area, and I don't have any of those things.
And like I said, In my position, my cell phone was a godsend. Maybe not in yours. In fact I'm very aware that most people cannot replace their home phones with cells-- But I can, and it works for me.
I'm not trying to evangelize, I'm just saying that used properly, a cell phone isn't necessarily hellspawn.
Much more than this...
(truthfully, it's gotten a little better... A Very Little.)
Voice mail. Most phones have it.
Multiple handsets? There's only one of me, and I live in a very small dank dungeon.
internet access? That's what cable is for.
It works perfect for me. It works much less perfectly for anyone that actually has a life.
prior to being homeless, I had my shared phone number at the first place I lived-- The number went with the other guy. I wasn't ready to plunk down 25/mo on a phone I rarely used (until I was trying to find housing)...
/ex
A better solution would be a phone attached to an answering service-- I needed a phone very often during my search for housing-- I was just glad to have it.
You plan sounds like an okay idea provided: A) you have a phone number to begin with (which means you need a place to live, etc.)... B) Congress gave a shit... C) we could trust the guvment to hold our data in as high esteem as we do.
And actually, since most of the people I talked to (family, letting them know I was still alive, a couple friends outside the area) had the same service, with free mobile to mobile, it's cost me 35 bucks a month since I got it-- $10 more than a phone in a room that I'm never at.
call forwarding? It's hard to forward a number when you don't have one--That's right, I had no number. Hell, for 3 weeks, I was sleeping in my car because I couldn't get ahold of any of my friends, they'd all disappeared that summer.
Number Portability? Yeah, it's coming. It wasn't around 5 years ago. Now I'm looking at moving again, what number am I going to take?
and a voluntary directory sounds a whole lot like a junk caller's wet dream-- Not to mention the people that don't have my number don't have it for a reason.
Not to flame or anything, but cell's have their uses, especially when you don't have a place to hang your hat...
When I got my cell phone, I was a year into college, and I couldn't find housing-- I ended up couch surfing for six months, followed by living in places for between 1 and 6 months at a time for another two years. If I didn't have a cell phone, I would have had no phone number.
/ex
Now that I'm no longer in college, and I live 300 miles away from that area code, it's the number that everyone knows, and so I don't want to give it up.
Just because a lot of people are annoying on them (hang up and drive, and turn it off at dinner/movies/visiting with people), doesn't mean I hate the invention-- I hate it's uses...
Kinda like video games and dance dance revolution.
Errr, I jumped thoughts in mid-stream. I was thinking Google ads... Then I was thinking "bag on x10"... then I was thinking "I'm losing my train of thought too often, it's time to go home"...
/ex
Then I was thinking "shiny objects are pretty." at that point, I decided I'd face the wrath of my boss and attempt to get the rest of the day off...
and so I went home, and found out there was a babysitter in my house after all... weird.
Why not try and advertise something that someone *WANTS* to purchase-- Maybe *THEN* you won't have to evade a protection I put on my computer because I don't want to deal with your crap.
/Ex
Why is this so hard? Google's apparently doing a pretty good job of it-- Sure you need a lot more customers, but for the love of frank, I don't need any goddamned spy cameras, I don't have a babysitter or a cheating spouse, or for that matter a misbehaving dog.
you may not be aware, but in most states, you have to go through some training to become a security guard. It's not extensive, but it is enough to properly detain someone, *WITHOUT* harming them.
/ex
Also, they're in a limited area, in case of Macy's, their store. Once you leave their property (which I believe usually extends to the end of the pavement/parking lot), they have no legal right to detain you... and it would be considered assault if they did, regardless of whether you stole something (of course, if it's grand theft, then it's a citizens arrest with real teeth)...
I didn't RTFA (I'm at work) but I assume that the RIAA Jack-Booted Thugs (JBT hereafter) were *NOT* on property they were hired by the owner or the owner's agent (in case of rental of a building), in which case, it's very much different.
In California, at least, security guards are the only people that can arrest/stop someone for shoplifting. A friend got fired (then quickly rehired for a really stupid reason) by a retail store, because he chased after 3 12 year olds that had stolen game boy advances-- He returned with two of them, and one of the kid's names, and he got fired for it. It's too much of a liability for them, because if the kid says he was hurt by the employee, the kid would get a slap on the wrist, but the company could have been sued for assault...
Check your local laws, but yeah... This is pretty damn illegal, while what macy's does isn't...