Cool, thanks... I've done a bit more testing and it only seems to affect Windows Media Player; VideoLAN works fine with all the video acceleration enabled. Of course, this bug kinda defeats the whole purpose of keeping around an old Windows computer to watch streaming Netflix:P
We've more or less exhausted the interesting things in our queue though, so maybe it's time to cancel and spend more time watching crap with DemocracyPlayer or Miro or whatever it's called now.
Anyone have a link to the bug? I haven't been able to google anything on "Windows Media Player freezing on Windows 7," there are too many other unrelated crash | freeze | hang matches to sift through:P My guess is that it has something to do with DRM and lack of TCM or whatever support on the old P4 CPU or drivers.
Considering that chip is rated to run at 3Ghz and you can OC only around 5 - 15% at room temperature, I'm pretty impressed by >200%. Also that the chipset held up while the CPU was running that as well.
Wonder what kind of power requirements that would translate to... Current leak becomes a significant loss above 3Ghz (which is pretty much why no one really makes 4Ghz+ chips), do the low temperatures keep those leakages under control, or does it just keep the hemorrhaging from making the system unstable? Also would be interesting to see what kind of chiller you'd need to keep a constant supply of liquid N2 flowing...
So the torrent sites have a bunch open activation keys... downside is that they expire a bit earlier than the ones you get from MS... I think July instead of August.
Anyway, I screwed around with trying to get Windows 7 working through official channels, but lost the trail shortly after validating my Windows Live! account, so I ended up throwing on a torrent'd copy instead.
My old WinXP laptop that we use for Netflix streaming suddenly caught the VirtualMonde trojan, and I haven't had a lot of luck with various removal programs. So I actually had a reason to try out the Win7 Beta on a spare partition.
I've never actually touched Vista, so I don't have firsthand experience with all of the annoyances that everyone complained about. So far I sorta like the Win7 Beta (the default background is actually a Betta fish, which is cute). Even on my older laptop (Dell Inspiron 8500) it would let me install the old WinXP drivers from the Dell site, and it only failed to recognize a few pieces of hardware out of the box (the NVidia card and the wifi modem).
I'm still trying to figure out how to make the taskbar smaller... I have all the icons down to 32x32 except for the "Start" menu icon which is still stuck at 64x64
The main problem is that the system freezes completely when I try to play a movie or open a picture. I suspect it's twiddling with the video card wrong, but I have yet to find the old menu to disable overlays in Windows Media Player. So I have failed to get it to serve its original purpose as a Netflix viewer, and we still have to boot back to the infected WinXP for that. I can keep the VirtualMonde popup ads under control if I run Spybot S&D for an hour or two after each reboot before opening up a browser. But haven't found any tool that can remove VirtualMonde completely, and it seems to have disabled Windows Update and the firewall.
Anyway, I'll probably toy around with it for a little while longer, and then install ubuntu again and see if I can get Netflix streaming working under that using wine or maybe WinXP under VirtualBox (so I can reset it from a snapshot when viruses hit).
Thought the/. crowd would enjoy this anecdote:P To be fair, this is the first virus I've found on my Windows box in several years, and probably the longest I've gone without having to reinstall to make it usable (I used to reinstall Windows every 6 months or so, and this image is between 1-2 years old).
In contrast, I've reinstalled my main Debian box 2-3 times over the past decade as I upgraded hardware and RAID configurations. But I've still held on to my original home directory and certain/etc files (some of my dotfiles date back to 1999) and of course with dpkg/aptitude it doesn't take forever to rebuild+reinstall the rest of the application environment around it like it does on Windows.
The DAs would probably get in trouble if some third party found out that they knew about a crime that they didn't prosecute to the fullest extent. It's that whole full accountability thing. Bureaucracy can be a bitch.
So I wouldn't dismiss them as being evil, just part of the machine:/
OK, this is a terrible troll... but stuff like this is coming. There are already certain places (like DC-area school administration) where being white is definitely a career-limiting move.
Anyway, I embrace the coming changes with open arms. Equal opportunity is a form of racism, but it is necessary to restore a balance of power. A country's leadership, doctors, lawyers, etc. should reflect the cultural distribution of the populace. Eventually the pendulum will swing the other way... just have to keep perspective on when to achieve a good balance.
My take is that the whitehouse.gov servers are run by the government and have to conform to DoD security guidelines, which have only relatively recently included Linux configurations for certain commercial distributions such as Redhat. So they probably don't have the freedom to redo the servers with whatever they could cobble together with talented volunteers for the campaign.
Anyway, we'll eventually see whether all this talk of change only runs skin deep.
Just casual observations as a Kaiser Permanente member...
It looks like most of their records are digital already. I suppose the biggest roadblocks are patient confidentiality and government privacy regulations. So I'm assuming Obama's plan would/should focus on security more than anything else.
There are some interesting details with how KP handles things:
* All email correspondence goes through their own secure webmail servers. They only send you notices like "You have new email on our servers, log in to our secure servers to read it" to unencrypted mail on external email accounts.
* The data appears to be tied to a particular medical centers, so when we moved from one center to another, they had to transfer our record over. So apparently things are compartmentalized, so any random doctor can't look up information on every KP patient, just ones assigned to their medical center (and maybe their department). I'm not sure if that means each center has its own database server, but I'd assume not... it'd make more sense if they had two or more data centers in different cities with some redundancy and mirroring between them.
* Accounts for my spouse and kids can be linked to mine so I can make appointment requests and stuff for them, but it seems like it's still possible for them to hide their own medical appointments and records from me if they wanted to, I think. At least until I get a bill in the mail for things not covered by insurance:P
* There are not really any useful medical records available via the online interface, other than your email trail with doctors/nurses. It would be neat to be able to log in and download the kids' growth records and ultrasound pics. But if you really want stuff like that, you still need to get it from the doctor during a visit.
* You memorize your MRN (medical record number) real fast, because just about everyone you talk to (whether in person or on the phone) asks for it. They don't seem to "cache" it so they can start talking to you by name, nor do they transfer your MRN to the next person in the chain. OK, I guess the doctor, when you finally get to one, talks to you by name.
* Doesn't seem to have sped up any part of the process... it typically takes about 3 hours to do a visit, between checking in with registration, seeing the nurse, seeing the doctor, checking into the pharmacist, and then picking up a prescription.
Overall, I'm actually pretty happy with the service, because my family mostly tries to avoid going to the doctor so it doesn't bother me that they mostly avoid seeing me. But it could stand to be a bit more efficient. Having digital records doesn't seem to have help or hurt much in either respect.
And there I was spending so much time trying to figure out how to create links in Facebook to all of the better social networking sites that I actually use and have meaningful posts on.
The best I could come up with was a "note" to add links to my LJ, Slashdot, OKCupid (it's more than just a dating site, dammit, or at least it used to be a lot geekier), etc. profiles. Of course, no one visiting my Facebook profile can actually see the note unless they're explicitly looking for it.
It doesn't really help your Facebook friends find your useful blogs, though.
Anyway, if someone could help me find a guide to mashup Gallery2 with LiveJournal, Flickr, YouTube, etc., I'd appreciate it. My goal is to have most of the posting of my blog entries, pictures, and video with geolocation tagging hosted on my personal Linux server, but then automatically uploaded / posted to the various external sites to leverage their community, comments, etc.
I bought an AM2+ motherboard recently with a near bottom-of-the-line Athlon 64 X2 dual core. This is exactly the news I've been waiting for. In a few years I'll be able to double my cores and maybe modestly increase my CPU clockspeed from 2.2Ghz to maybe 2.8Ghz, hopefully while not increasing the TDP beyond 85W. Oh, and it would have been cheaper (and eventually faster) than buying a top of the line system now.
AMD is perfect for the people like me who love saving a couple hundred bucks every few years by living just behind the bleeding edge. And if they weren't around to compete with Intel I doubt we'd see any progress from them./had an AMD chip in each of my main computers (except laptops) since '97
Word... I wish someone would concentrate on making a decent PDA again.
The reason Palm was initially successful was that the designers created something intended to compete with a pad of paper or daytimer. Now that they've been trying to compete with mobile computers, media players, and smartphones, they haven't really emerged as a market discriminator.
I do like the sound of the way their "synergy" UI sorta hearkens back to the day where their interface was designed around the user and not around the application. Hopefully that contribution alone will find its way into other UIs.
I've long wanted to see a European version of Left4Dead, where all the zombies are replaced by sex-crazed orgy-goers and you have to satiate them with your various handheld "toys". There would be surprisingly little reprogramming necessary for such a mod...
FTA: * Does it run Linux? Maybe, but only according to rumors.
* Will existing PalmOS apps run on it? Hard to tell from their mangled wording, but probably not. However, it seems like their new WebOS SDK/might/ make it somewhat simple to recompile for the new platform.
So, as a Palm addict, it seems like I still have a long time to try to keep my ailing TX working until I can find a suitable platform to upgrade to. (So far, the main contender for me is the Nokia N810, which runs Linux and actually has a Palm Garnet emulation environment available for it)
Yeah, we have a few of these at work. They take a bit of getting used to (e.g. they work best if you hold your wrist steady and move it around from your elbow)
So I've only played with the Wii a little bit, but I think I like the gyromouse more. The gyroscopic sensors are much more sensitive. With the Wii, I ended up just flicking the thing as if it was just another button. The IR on the Wii is necessary for precise control, but it doesn't seem very precise or sensitive compared to the Gyromouse. On the other hand, I suspect the gyromouse uses more energy to keep the hi fidelity gyros spun up (it has a button that you need to depress whenever you want it to be active).
Anyway, more people are familiar with remotes and even laser pointers than with mice, so I think the wii-mote style controllers have a good chance of actually eventually winning out. Unlike several other human interface devices that were supposed to replace the mouse.
When I went to school (admittedly it was college), all the computers in the labs were refreshed to a standard image on logout (they used Ghost or something). So the students pretty much had the freedom to install and run whatever they liked, and whenever they logged out, it would go back to a clean slate.
You could probably do something similar with their macbooks. I'd say it's really important not to intentionally lock anything out.
You do have to monitor and control the network, however, to prevent them from engaging in malicious online behavior.
Since you can monitor what they're doing remotely, I'd say that's good enough. You don't need any additional shackles. If they're stupid enough to do break the rules and do porn or gambling on their school computers, you'll be able to catch them and discipline them. Grades 6-12 is a perfect time to teach them responsibility.
Anyway, you want to spend most of your time figuring out the right way of applying these tools so they're not simply paper weights or distractions or impediments to the teachers' own teaching styles. Set up your moodle site so kids and teachers can use it to automate homework, testing, and grading.
Thanks for the insightful post... it helps us understand why the financial system failed... we can actually grasp that pretty well.
My original question is actually a lot simpler, though... what happened to the money given to the homesellers? I understand that the homebuyers and the banks who lent to them are royally screwed, because they overpaid for their assets. Say for example, they paid $500k for a house that was really worth $250k. But that financial transaction took place, and the person who sold the house is running around with an "extra" $250k in their pocket. Don't tell me they all managed to squander it by buying new even bigger and more overvalued houses (say $1m for a house now worth only $500k)... even then there's still someone running around with even more "extra" cash in their pocket. Someone likened the housing market to a pyramid scheme:>
Anyway, we're having taxpayers pay to save the "losers" of the crazy homebuying transactions, but what happened to all the "winners"?
I like your points, please run them through a spell-checker (firefox has a built-in one):>
To add to your argument, when are the feds going to raise interest rates again? You kinda lay blame on the banks for not doing their core business, but they have not been able to make (so much) money off of traditional loans when interest rates have artificially been set so low. The feds have been pushing down rates to try to "boost" the economy... however the housing bubble was created and fed because these low "sub-prime" (aka junk) mortgages were encouraging people to buy houses like crazy (and everyone knew it was crazy, but the money was "too good"). Since the banks couldn't make money off of traditional interest terms, they came up with all of these other foolish interest-only schemes that were predicated on the "fact" that real-estate is a pretty safe investment, at least when it's not being tinkered with so much:P
Anyway, like you mention, I don't see much hope for any kind of economic recovery in the financial sector until interest rates go back towards "normal" levels (I am not an economist, but I'd surmise that would mean between 2x-3x of the ~3% inflation rate). Until then, anything they do is just fun and games until the rest of the world realizes what kind of smoke and mirrors our economy is currently propped up on:P
One thing I never understood about this bailout of the housing market is where did all this money go? Sure, lots of people way overpaid for their homes, but shouldn't that money still be in the economy in the hands of the people who sold the homes? Surely not all of them blew their entire profit from the transaction by moving into new houses that they couldn't afford...
I believe that the purpose of life is to reduce entropy. Think about it, all these replicating life forms that take heat from stars and relatively basic forms matter, and transform it into something more complex and interesting on a smaller scale.
OK, to avoid violating the second law of thermodynamics, I'll say that the purpose of life is to reduce *local* entropy.
I hate to say it, but business / economics might be a viable career path for her.
Our high school co-valedictorians (from a Science & Technology Magnet school, no less) were twin Russian sisters who blew away everyone with their math prowess and did very well on their science classes. They ended up going to Harvard and Yale (so they wouldn't have to compete with each other for class rank) and both ended up taking jobs on Wall Street and pulling in 7-digit salaries.
Not sure how they're doing now, but I'm sure they've saved enough during the short time over the bubble years to enjoy a nice early retirement and pursue whatever they want now.
My sister in law, on the other hand, was very strong in math and studied economics in Boston to run off and help some of the poorest countries in the world get on their feet by leveraging microfinance programs. She's been on a few 1-2 year assignments in Uganda and Sierra Leone and really enjoyed it (parasites aside). As a bonus, she probably never has to donate blood ever again.
Anyway, pursuing economics is probably a worthy and rewarding pursuit for those people who are good at math but turned off to science and engineering for some reason.
Right now we don't have a "real" democracy in the same way the ancient Greeks practiced it... the U.S. has a representative democracy where we elect a few people to make all of our decisions for us. I don't think this is a bad idea considering the scalability issues. However, the Web 2.0 age could allow people to have more direct input and metrics in the decisions they really care about, and not just give up their choice to whatever their elected representative feels on that one particular issue.
The easiest way to give the control back to the people would be to give them some control over how their taxes are allocated. Right now, we pay a certain percentage of our income in taxes, and the government decides how much to budget for each department. Wouldn't it be great if you could actually "earmark" your tax dollars? Don't want to support the war in Iraq? Want a certain percentage of your taxes to go support the Dept. of Education or NASA space exploration instead? This would be a great way of directly measuring people's priorities, and give people the sense that the work they do to make money does not go towards what they consider "waste".
Right now, we sort of have an indirect way of controlling where our tax money goes... you can make tax-deductible contributions to certain charities, or at best you can feed up to $2500 or so to a Political Action Committee to lobby your elected representatives for you. Both of those methods strike me as rather inefficient.
The government can start small... giving people control over a small percentage of their taxes and gradually increase it as the new balance of power is worked out. Also, maybe they could limit it to a fixed amount per capita, so the people who pay lots of tax don't get a disproportionate amount of control.
Anyway, I'd like to have more control over where my tax dollars go, and increase competitiveness within the government organizations to show that they put the money to good use.
The classic example was of Giraffe's evolving long necks by stretching to reach the leaves of tall trees, etc.
But I guess I'm not surprised that the researchers don't want to associate with former theories that have already faced some effort to remove mention from textbooks.
I believe these kinds of incinerators have been use in Japan for quite a while.
"Conventional" low temperature incinerators result in incomplete combustion, which can release a lot of ash and toxic chemicals. Raise the temperature higher to where things turn from noxious gases to plasma, and there's a good chance that your end products will be simpler, safer primary molecules. Recapturing some of the energy as the exhaust cools down is a good practice.
Somewhat similar rules apply to building a good campfire. When you're just starting the fire, the combustion is incomplete and you end up with lots of smoke and flying embers. Once you get a good fire going, the core glows red hot and releases less open flame and smoke as the wood burns more efficiently and completely.
Slashdot Mirror
Cool, thanks... I've done a bit more testing and it only seems to affect Windows Media Player; VideoLAN works fine with all the video acceleration enabled. Of course, this bug kinda defeats the whole purpose of keeping around an old Windows computer to watch streaming Netflix :P
We've more or less exhausted the interesting things in our queue though, so maybe it's time to cancel and spend more time watching crap with DemocracyPlayer or Miro or whatever it's called now.
Anyone have a link to the bug? I haven't been able to google anything on "Windows Media Player freezing on Windows 7," there are too many other unrelated crash | freeze | hang matches to sift through :P My guess is that it has something to do with DRM and lack of TCM or whatever support on the old P4 CPU or drivers.
Considering that chip is rated to run at 3Ghz and you can OC only around 5 - 15% at room temperature, I'm pretty impressed by >200%. Also that the chipset held up while the CPU was running that as well.
Wonder what kind of power requirements that would translate to... Current leak becomes a significant loss above 3Ghz (which is pretty much why no one really makes 4Ghz+ chips), do the low temperatures keep those leakages under control, or does it just keep the hemorrhaging from making the system unstable? Also would be interesting to see what kind of chiller you'd need to keep a constant supply of liquid N2 flowing...
So the torrent sites have a bunch open activation keys... downside is that they expire a bit earlier than the ones you get from MS... I think July instead of August.
Anyway, I screwed around with trying to get Windows 7 working through official channels, but lost the trail shortly after validating my Windows Live! account, so I ended up throwing on a torrent'd copy instead.
My old WinXP laptop that we use for Netflix streaming suddenly caught the VirtualMonde trojan, and I haven't had a lot of luck with various removal programs. So I actually had a reason to try out the Win7 Beta on a spare partition.
I've never actually touched Vista, so I don't have firsthand experience with all of the annoyances that everyone complained about. So far I sorta like the Win7 Beta (the default background is actually a Betta fish, which is cute). Even on my older laptop (Dell Inspiron 8500) it would let me install the old WinXP drivers from the Dell site, and it only failed to recognize a few pieces of hardware out of the box (the NVidia card and the wifi modem).
I'm still trying to figure out how to make the taskbar smaller... I have all the icons down to 32x32 except for the "Start" menu icon which is still stuck at 64x64
The main problem is that the system freezes completely when I try to play a movie or open a picture. I suspect it's twiddling with the video card wrong, but I have yet to find the old menu to disable overlays in Windows Media Player. So I have failed to get it to serve its original purpose as a Netflix viewer, and we still have to boot back to the infected WinXP for that. I can keep the VirtualMonde popup ads under control if I run Spybot S&D for an hour or two after each reboot before opening up a browser. But haven't found any tool that can remove VirtualMonde completely, and it seems to have disabled Windows Update and the firewall.
Anyway, I'll probably toy around with it for a little while longer, and then install ubuntu again and see if I can get Netflix streaming working under that using wine or maybe WinXP under VirtualBox (so I can reset it from a snapshot when viruses hit).
Thought the /. crowd would enjoy this anecdote :P To be fair, this is the first virus I've found on my Windows box in several years, and probably the longest I've gone without having to reinstall to make it usable (I used to reinstall Windows every 6 months or so, and this image is between 1-2 years old).
In contrast, I've reinstalled my main Debian box 2-3 times over the past decade as I upgraded hardware and RAID configurations. But I've still held on to my original home directory and certain /etc files (some of my dotfiles date back to 1999) and of course with dpkg/aptitude it doesn't take forever to rebuild+reinstall the rest of the application environment around it like it does on Windows.
Hey, you're not supposed to complain about the lack of Slashdot poll options :>
Plus, just about every memo and edict issued by the Barack Administration is an administration policy.
Plus, they mentioned ".gov websites" :P
But I am not a semantics nazi, I just want to play scoreboard :>
So, one point for "Technology Policy" ? The rest are still 0?
The DAs would probably get in trouble if some third party found out that they knew about a crime that they didn't prosecute to the fullest extent. It's that whole full accountability thing. Bureaucracy can be a bitch.
So I wouldn't dismiss them as being evil, just part of the machine :/
OK, this is a terrible troll... but stuff like this is coming. There are already certain places (like DC-area school administration) where being white is definitely a career-limiting move.
Anyway, I embrace the coming changes with open arms. Equal opportunity is a form of racism, but it is necessary to restore a balance of power. A country's leadership, doctors, lawyers, etc. should reflect the cultural distribution of the populace. Eventually the pendulum will swing the other way... just have to keep perspective on when to achieve a good balance.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/open-source-force-behind-obama-campaign
My take is that the whitehouse.gov servers are run by the government and have to conform to DoD security guidelines, which have only relatively recently included Linux configurations for certain commercial distributions such as Redhat. So they probably don't have the freedom to redo the servers with whatever they could cobble together with talented volunteers for the campaign.
Anyway, we'll eventually see whether all this talk of change only runs skin deep.
Just casual observations as a Kaiser Permanente member...
It looks like most of their records are digital already. I suppose the biggest roadblocks are patient confidentiality and government privacy regulations. So I'm assuming Obama's plan would/should focus on security more than anything else.
There are some interesting details with how KP handles things:
* All email correspondence goes through their own secure webmail servers. They only send you notices like "You have new email on our servers, log in to our secure servers to read it" to unencrypted mail on external email accounts.
* The data appears to be tied to a particular medical centers, so when we moved from one center to another, they had to transfer our record over. So apparently things are compartmentalized, so any random doctor can't look up information on every KP patient, just ones assigned to their medical center (and maybe their department). I'm not sure if that means each center has its own database server, but I'd assume not... it'd make more sense if they had two or more data centers in different cities with some redundancy and mirroring between them.
* Accounts for my spouse and kids can be linked to mine so I can make appointment requests and stuff for them, but it seems like it's still possible for them to hide their own medical appointments and records from me if they wanted to, I think. At least until I get a bill in the mail for things not covered by insurance :P
* There are not really any useful medical records available via the online interface, other than your email trail with doctors/nurses. It would be neat to be able to log in and download the kids' growth records and ultrasound pics. But if you really want stuff like that, you still need to get it from the doctor during a visit.
* You memorize your MRN (medical record number) real fast, because just about everyone you talk to (whether in person or on the phone) asks for it. They don't seem to "cache" it so they can start talking to you by name, nor do they transfer your MRN to the next person in the chain. OK, I guess the doctor, when you finally get to one, talks to you by name.
* Doesn't seem to have sped up any part of the process... it typically takes about 3 hours to do a visit, between checking in with registration, seeing the nurse, seeing the doctor, checking into the pharmacist, and then picking up a prescription.
Overall, I'm actually pretty happy with the service, because my family mostly tries to avoid going to the doctor so it doesn't bother me that they mostly avoid seeing me. But it could stand to be a bit more efficient. Having digital records doesn't seem to have help or hurt much in either respect.
And there I was spending so much time trying to figure out how to create links in Facebook to all of the better social networking sites that I actually use and have meaningful posts on.
The best I could come up with was a "note" to add links to my LJ, Slashdot, OKCupid (it's more than just a dating site, dammit, or at least it used to be a lot geekier), etc. profiles. Of course, no one visiting my Facebook profile can actually see the note unless they're explicitly looking for it.
Anyway, I highly recommend this post to anyone else who's trying to mash up their various social networking sites:
http://zarfmouse.livejournal.com/264655.html
It doesn't really help your Facebook friends find your useful blogs, though.
Anyway, if someone could help me find a guide to mashup Gallery2 with LiveJournal, Flickr, YouTube, etc., I'd appreciate it. My goal is to have most of the posting of my blog entries, pictures, and video with geolocation tagging hosted on my personal Linux server, but then automatically uploaded / posted to the various external sites to leverage their community, comments, etc.
I bought an AM2+ motherboard recently with a near bottom-of-the-line Athlon 64 X2 dual core. This is exactly the news I've been waiting for. In a few years I'll be able to double my cores and maybe modestly increase my CPU clockspeed from 2.2Ghz to maybe 2.8Ghz, hopefully while not increasing the TDP beyond 85W. Oh, and it would have been cheaper (and eventually faster) than buying a top of the line system now.
AMD is perfect for the people like me who love saving a couple hundred bucks every few years by living just behind the bleeding edge. And if they weren't around to compete with Intel I doubt we'd see any progress from them. /had an AMD chip in each of my main computers (except laptops) since '97
Word... I wish someone would concentrate on making a decent PDA again.
The reason Palm was initially successful was that the designers created something intended to compete with a pad of paper or daytimer. Now that they've been trying to compete with mobile computers, media players, and smartphones, they haven't really emerged as a market discriminator.
I do like the sound of the way their "synergy" UI sorta hearkens back to the day where their interface was designed around the user and not around the application. Hopefully that contribution alone will find its way into other UIs.
I've long wanted to see a European version of Left4Dead, where all the zombies are replaced by sex-crazed orgy-goers and you have to satiate them with your various handheld "toys". There would be surprisingly little reprogramming necessary for such a mod...
To him, it's the "Oyster Hunting Game"
It's all in the parenting, I suppose. /plays with audio off
I tried for some time last night to sift out Palm Pre details that Slashdot might actually find interesting, but no strong leads.
The PC Mag article was the only one I could find that touches on anything beyond the press release materials from CES:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2338482,00.asp
FTA:
* Does it run Linux? Maybe, but only according to rumors.
* Will existing PalmOS apps run on it? Hard to tell from their mangled wording, but probably not. However, it seems like their new WebOS SDK /might/ make it somewhat simple to recompile for the new platform.
So, as a Palm addict, it seems like I still have a long time to try to keep my ailing TX working until I can find a suitable platform to upgrade to. (So far, the main contender for me is the Nokia N810, which runs Linux and actually has a Palm Garnet emulation environment available for it)
Yeah, we have a few of these at work. They take a bit of getting used to (e.g. they work best if you hold your wrist steady and move it around from your elbow)
So I've only played with the Wii a little bit, but I think I like the gyromouse more. The gyroscopic sensors are much more sensitive. With the Wii, I ended up just flicking the thing as if it was just another button. The IR on the Wii is necessary for precise control, but it doesn't seem very precise or sensitive compared to the Gyromouse. On the other hand, I suspect the gyromouse uses more energy to keep the hi fidelity gyros spun up (it has a button that you need to depress whenever you want it to be active).
Anyway, more people are familiar with remotes and even laser pointers than with mice, so I think the wii-mote style controllers have a good chance of actually eventually winning out. Unlike several other human interface devices that were supposed to replace the mouse.
When I went to school (admittedly it was college), all the computers in the labs were refreshed to a standard image on logout (they used Ghost or something). So the students pretty much had the freedom to install and run whatever they liked, and whenever they logged out, it would go back to a clean slate.
You could probably do something similar with their macbooks. I'd say it's really important not to intentionally lock anything out.
You do have to monitor and control the network, however, to prevent them from engaging in malicious online behavior.
Since you can monitor what they're doing remotely, I'd say that's good enough. You don't need any additional shackles. If they're stupid enough to do break the rules and do porn or gambling on their school computers, you'll be able to catch them and discipline them. Grades 6-12 is a perfect time to teach them responsibility.
Anyway, you want to spend most of your time figuring out the right way of applying these tools so they're not simply paper weights or distractions or impediments to the teachers' own teaching styles. Set up your moodle site so kids and teachers can use it to automate homework, testing, and grading.
Thanks for the insightful post... it helps us understand why the financial system failed... we can actually grasp that pretty well.
My original question is actually a lot simpler, though... what happened to the money given to the homesellers? I understand that the homebuyers and the banks who lent to them are royally screwed, because they overpaid for their assets. Say for example, they paid $500k for a house that was really worth $250k. But that financial transaction took place, and the person who sold the house is running around with an "extra" $250k in their pocket. Don't tell me they all managed to squander it by buying new even bigger and more overvalued houses (say $1m for a house now worth only $500k) ... even then there's still someone running around with even more "extra" cash in their pocket. Someone likened the housing market to a pyramid scheme :>
Anyway, we're having taxpayers pay to save the "losers" of the crazy homebuying transactions, but what happened to all the "winners"?
I like your points, please run them through a spell-checker (firefox has a built-in one) :>
To add to your argument, when are the feds going to raise interest rates again? You kinda lay blame on the banks for not doing their core business, but they have not been able to make (so much) money off of traditional loans when interest rates have artificially been set so low. The feds have been pushing down rates to try to "boost" the economy... however the housing bubble was created and fed because these low "sub-prime" (aka junk) mortgages were encouraging people to buy houses like crazy (and everyone knew it was crazy, but the money was "too good"). Since the banks couldn't make money off of traditional interest terms, they came up with all of these other foolish interest-only schemes that were predicated on the "fact" that real-estate is a pretty safe investment, at least when it's not being tinkered with so much :P
Anyway, like you mention, I don't see much hope for any kind of economic recovery in the financial sector until interest rates go back towards "normal" levels (I am not an economist, but I'd surmise that would mean between 2x-3x of the ~3% inflation rate). Until then, anything they do is just fun and games until the rest of the world realizes what kind of smoke and mirrors our economy is currently propped up on :P
One thing I never understood about this bailout of the housing market is where did all this money go? Sure, lots of people way overpaid for their homes, but shouldn't that money still be in the economy in the hands of the people who sold the homes? Surely not all of them blew their entire profit from the transaction by moving into new houses that they couldn't afford...
I believe that the purpose of life is to reduce entropy. Think about it, all these replicating life forms that take heat from stars and relatively basic forms matter, and transform it into something more complex and interesting on a smaller scale.
OK, to avoid violating the second law of thermodynamics, I'll say that the purpose of life is to reduce *local* entropy.
I hate to say it, but business / economics might be a viable career path for her.
Our high school co-valedictorians (from a Science & Technology Magnet school, no less) were twin Russian sisters who blew away everyone with their math prowess and did very well on their science classes. They ended up going to Harvard and Yale (so they wouldn't have to compete with each other for class rank) and both ended up taking jobs on Wall Street and pulling in 7-digit salaries.
Not sure how they're doing now, but I'm sure they've saved enough during the short time over the bubble years to enjoy a nice early retirement and pursue whatever they want now.
My sister in law, on the other hand, was very strong in math and studied economics in Boston to run off and help some of the poorest countries in the world get on their feet by leveraging microfinance programs. She's been on a few 1-2 year assignments in Uganda and Sierra Leone and really enjoyed it (parasites aside). As a bonus, she probably never has to donate blood ever again.
Anyway, pursuing economics is probably a worthy and rewarding pursuit for those people who are good at math but turned off to science and engineering for some reason.
Right now we don't have a "real" democracy in the same way the ancient Greeks practiced it... the U.S. has a representative democracy where we elect a few people to make all of our decisions for us. I don't think this is a bad idea considering the scalability issues. However, the Web 2.0 age could allow people to have more direct input and metrics in the decisions they really care about, and not just give up their choice to whatever their elected representative feels on that one particular issue.
The easiest way to give the control back to the people would be to give them some control over how their taxes are allocated. Right now, we pay a certain percentage of our income in taxes, and the government decides how much to budget for each department. Wouldn't it be great if you could actually "earmark" your tax dollars? Don't want to support the war in Iraq? Want a certain percentage of your taxes to go support the Dept. of Education or NASA space exploration instead? This would be a great way of directly measuring people's priorities, and give people the sense that the work they do to make money does not go towards what they consider "waste".
Right now, we sort of have an indirect way of controlling where our tax money goes... you can make tax-deductible contributions to certain charities, or at best you can feed up to $2500 or so to a Political Action Committee to lobby your elected representatives for you. Both of those methods strike me as rather inefficient.
The government can start small... giving people control over a small percentage of their taxes and gradually increase it as the new balance of power is worked out. Also, maybe they could limit it to a fixed amount per capita, so the people who pay lots of tax don't get a disproportionate amount of control.
Anyway, I'd like to have more control over where my tax dollars go, and increase competitiveness within the government organizations to show that they put the money to good use.
Shocked and surprised to see no mention of this in relation to Larmarck's early theory of evolution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism
The classic example was of Giraffe's evolving long necks by stretching to reach the leaves of tall trees, etc.
But I guess I'm not surprised that the researchers don't want to associate with former theories that have already faced some effort to remove mention from textbooks.
I believe these kinds of incinerators have been use in Japan for quite a while.
"Conventional" low temperature incinerators result in incomplete combustion, which can release a lot of ash and toxic chemicals. Raise the temperature higher to where things turn from noxious gases to plasma, and there's a good chance that your end products will be simpler, safer primary molecules.
Recapturing some of the energy as the exhaust cools down is a good practice.
Somewhat similar rules apply to building a good campfire. When you're just starting the fire, the combustion is incomplete and you end up with lots of smoke and flying embers. Once you get a good fire going, the core glows red hot and releases less open flame and smoke as the wood burns more efficiently and completely.