I prefer the risc architecture. I like the idea of keeping things simple and efficient which is alot like structured programming. VLIW does not follow this ethic.
Now wait a second there. Today's "RISC" implementations aren't exactly RISC anymore and are horribly complex (ever look at the modern MIPS?).
The entire point of the RISC revival in the early 80's was moving the complexity of the hardware into the compiler and was a backlash against CISC solutions that were so complex they spanned multiple chips.
The second "RISC" chips implemented superscalar and out-of-order executions was the day pure RISC died. The chips started doing things that the compiler didn't issue instructions for.
It could be said that EPIC is closer to the RISC philosophy than current RISC chips. While you can't control the processor exactly, you can at least hint at branching and caching. The complexity has moved to the compiler, where it belongs (if you subscribe to the RISC philosophy).
But anyway, kids need to be kept away from pornographic sites - that's clear.
The hell it is. The human body is nothing to be ashamed of and there is nothing "wrong" with nudity or sex. If seeing pictures of a person naked caused any real harm to children, then a good 25% of the damn US should show signs of it shouldn't they? Or do you actually believe that the first time the average boy sees a naked girl is when they turn 18?
Ignorance of sex is far worse than exposure to it. You are just forcing your child to learn about it from someone else in an uncontrolled setting.
In the library, that's the job of the library. Parents should be able to view the library as a trusted place to leave their kids.
The library is not a day care center. The government is not a surrogate father. A parent's responsibility does not end when a child is in a "public" place.
Would you leave your child alone in any other government building and expect others to take care of him?
What needs to happen is that computers need to be available to kids which do have censorware installed but there also needs to be either a room that only adults are allowed into where computers free of censorware are available OR, upon issuing a library card, adults receive a password and user name to disable the censorware.
No, what needs to happen is that parents should stop being their child's friend and start being their damned parent. You don't want your child looking at certain things? Teach them that it isn't ok to do so!
I mean, I assume most parents told their children at one point or another that jumping out of windows wasn't good for them.
Call me crazy, but I think this "communication" thing shows some promise.
I don't want kids to look at naughty sites but I want people without Internet access to enjoy the fun of porno-babes as much as I do
Damn it. Look. Believe it or not, there are actually parents out there that don't mind their children looking at naked people. I know that sounds amazing, but it is quite true. What gives you the right to enforce your misguided sense of morality on them?
Since time has been proven to continue into infinity, why do we state that the universe 'started' 13.7 billion years ago? What was happening 13.8 billion years ago in the space we currently occupy? Surely the Big Bang was a result of some other cosmic event, since time could stretch infinitely into the past as well as the future.
Space and time are linked together. Without space, there is no time. There was nothing before the big bang because there was no "before." The big bang was an explosion of matter and spacetime.
The universe couldn't have been born without being first conceived...
Quantum physics says that something can indeed be created out nothing; so yes... the current theory is that the universe popped out of nothing some 13 billion years ago. Of course 13 billion years isn't exactly the age since time is relative, so the universe as a whole doesn't actually have one "age," but that's another matter altogether.
The situation for people working in the US seems to be quite bad, at least to me. Isn't it time you guys start a proper union and start raising some hell?
No. Unions may work for many professions, but the programming isn't one of them.
Programming is a highly skilled trade and there are wide degrees of competence in the field as well as pay levels. It is also a field where some people will never be as skilled as others, regardless of experience. Having a Union try to dictate the amount of money I make based on my time on the job so they can make sure even the most incompetent of programmers gets a "good" salary is silly.
I mean seriously, if you can get a job being a programmer and make anywhere from $60,000 (mediocre) to $200,000 (ubergod) per year (Silicon Valley rates), then surely you can negotiate your own damn contract.
And how much paid vacation time I get per year? 6 weeks. How many weeks do you get in the states? And yes, I am only 26.
The price you pay for having a salary more than 2x higher than your counterparts in other parts of the world is that you have to take... get this... unpaid vacations.
Most jobs I've worked for had a standard 3 weeks paid vacation time (15 business days.) If I wanted to take another 3 weeks off unpaid then I have to forfeit about 6% of my yearly wage.
Now, I'm pretty sure that I probably make 6% more than the vast majority of people who get 6 weeks paid vacation time at my skill level. I could be mistaken, but I doubt it.
Heck, I've been thinking of negotiating any future employment contracts so I get no paid vacation time and instead an increase in my base salary, since there have been times where I've only taken no vacations at all. Of course, I like my work, so maybe I'm weird.
802.11b is a Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS) technology with three full channels (most of the 11 overlap two channels.)
Each full channel is able to handle 11 Mbps. Since your access point only operates on one channel, your maximum throughput is 11 Mbps, period. Each wireless connection gets a portion of that using DSSS to keep interference between multiple wireless clients down.
Realistically, you get about 6 Mbps per access point. If you try transferring a file between two computers on the same access point, you'll see about 3 Mbps as it is essentially a half-duplex connection.
Well, let's see. If you stream music to your computer at 128 Kbps, you will use up 4 GB in about 72 hours (slightly less with metric GB common for bandwidth).
Redesigning SMTP to add encryption, identification, and authentication, is not a big problem. Deploying the new protocol is.
We should not have to undertake an effort that will disrupt business nationwide for months, if not years, just to avoid passing a law.
The SMTP protocol has been updated over the years many times in a backwards compatible way. Not only that, but encryption and authentication have been in SMTP for years via TLS.
Identification has been available in many forms for a while via S/MIME or PGP. Of course, you could go the easy route and simply move messages from people that aren't in your address book to a folder where you can authorize them or not. For the "average" person who only gets mail from their friends, this works fine.
Look, if we wanted to modify SMTP in a method that created a trust hierarchy whereby each server would add to their received line a simple signature that could be authenticated, we could without breaking the protocol.
The problem has nothing to do with SMTP. The problem is the rest of the infrastructure simply doesn't exist and it is not trivial to build one.
Are you going to build a white-list with public keys from mail servers you trust explicitly? Who is going to maintain this list? How does someone get added to it? How much is it going to cost to get added? Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
If you go the individual identify route then the same questions apply. Who is going to maintain a list of individual identities? What happens when a user loses his key? What about the privacy issues? Cost? Complexity?
Consider the following. We all access the internet from a fixed and typicaly small number of physical and virtual locations. Were we to map the internet as a whole, starting from any given location the map would look like an expanding cone.
Actually, it wouldn't due to the multihomed nature of most networks.
Since spam messages are sent by the millions and it is fairly easy to determine what messages are likely to BE spam why not set up a filtering system on the routers that determines the rough content of a message based on both its Spam Precentage and the number of identical messages sent.
I.E. If the router sees 500,000 messages of nearly identical content with a 89% spam rating it blocks all of them. If it sees 44 messages with a 23% spam content it lets them through.
First, routers are meant to do one thing, route traffic. They do not have the memory or CPU power to do much more than that.
Second, "identical" and "near-identical" messages are very different things. It is fairly cheap (processor/memory wise) to determine if two messages are identical. It is quite another task to determine if they are nearly identical.
Third, there are many instances where identical or nearly identical messages sent out in bulk are not spam. Mailing lists like bugtraq or linux-kernel have very large subscriber lists, but are are not spam. If the head of IBM sends a message to all his employees, it is not spam. If my car insurance company sends out a bunch of messages warning people once a month that their policy will expire if payment isn't received, it is most definitely, not spam.
BIND makes no distinction between root servers and anything else. It follows a simple query path:
me -> root server: IN A www.foo.com.? root server -> me: foo.com. IN NS ns1.foo.com. root server -> me: ns1.foo.com. IN A a.b.c.d me -> ns1.foo.com: IN A www.foo.com? ns1.foo.com: www.foo.com. IN A b.c.d.e ns1.foo.com: www.foo.com. IN NS ns1.foo.com.
Root servers *do* resolve some IPs. If you make a query for any DNS listed as a primary/secondary for a domain on a root server, you will get an IP in response.
Say you want to lookup ns1.foo.com:
me -> root server: IN A ns1.foo.com.? root server -> me: ns1.foo.com. IN A a.b.c.d root server -> me: foo.com. IN NS ns1.foo.com. root server -> me: ns1.foo.com. IN A a.b.c.d
Yes, the root server will actually duplicate the IN A record. Yes it wastes a few bytes. No one cares.
No kidding... What kind of bullshit article is this? Anyone who has ever looked at a lock and has been asked to make a master key knows this. It isn't exactly rocket science to file down each section of a key.
Besides, who needs to when you can either: a)break down the door or b) get a simple tension wrench (ie: screwdriver) + pick or if you don't mind obliterating the lock c) get a lock pick gun.
I just don't understand why this article was printed when it says itself that this method has been known by locksmiths for years.
Sure... WalkSF was one of the groups that actively tried to ban the Segway. They have a nice little list of why the segway should be banned in their eyes. They cite a the director of the CDC saying inactivity causes health problems as a reason to ban the Segway.
*SIGH*. More tripe. If they really wanted to ban it because it was a "rich man's toy", then why aren't they trying to take away other "rich man's toys"? SF is a City *full* of "rich man's toy
You misunderstood me. It was discriminated against because it was a rich man's toy, not banned due to it. It just made banning it easier.
Any ban on wheelchairs in any American city would quickly be declared in violation with the American Disability Act. It has nothing to do with SF PCness as you suggest...
No, a ban on motorized wheelchairs that go faster than 11 mph on the sidewalk should have very little affect on the ADA.
Since I have been hit by one of these damn things (or one like it), I can tell you that if an elderly person got hit by one of these things, they would suffer just as much injury as someone riding a Segway (ie, fall down, break something.)
12 mph isn't exactly a speed demon. The worst that'd do is knock you down and unlike a bike, it can't roll over you after doing so. Worst injury I can imagine is maybe a broken hip by an elderly woman.
On the other hand, the same can be said of someone running down the street. Many people can hit 12 mph while running, especially downhill.
Are they going to ban skateboards, roller blades, and inline electric scooters as well? Seaways are supposed to be safer then these things.
All of these are banned on San Francisco sidewalks.
Bleh, fucking lame ass government stifling innovation because of imagined phantoms. Lets keep things exactly the way they are, and then we don't have to worry about the unknown, nothing to fear (except for car crashes...)
The best reason for the ban to exist is due to the number of people on the sidewalk themselves in a number of areas. You can't walk without bumping into people in some places, so a Segway wouldn't be particularly safe.
I hate this preemptive rulemaking bullshit. If something causes a problem out of proportion to it's benefit then ban it. Certainly they shouldn't be banned until they have been shown to be dangerous!
San Francisco is very liberal (read: Big Brother loving) and therefore believes that they know what's best for people before they know it themselves.
The city is quite interesting actually. It has a large number of hippies. They accepted the gay community with open arms when they came in. They accepted the Chinese community with open arms when they came in. Now they are nearly going to war with the yuppies that are coming in due to the vast difference in core values. Very interesting to watch.
Yes, San Francisco banned this device. We have some very liberal board of supervisors running the city government here that defined the word 'bleeding heart.' Granted, some of the reasons for the ban aren't too bad, but some of them are very big brother.
The problem is that everyone is worried that the elderly walking down the sidewalk would be injured by one of these things.
There is also the whole pro-walking thing which lobbied pretty hard against it. They believe this device would cause everyone to get fat.
The price of the device didn't help its case either. Being a liberal city, a $4000 device is seen as a rich man's toy and rich men should be spending their money on social problems such as the homeless problem, not toys. This viewpoint is pretty common here unfortunately.
Bikes have been banned for quite some time on the sidewalk and for anyone who has biked down Market St. knows, it isn't particularly safe to be in the road either.
Rollerblades have also been banned on the sidewalk for some time. I've seen people try to go down the road on them and it isn't pretty given the general quality of the roads themselves.
Powered scooters are getting more and more common. They seem the safest of any one-person mode of transport simply because they can keep up with traffic. They are obviously banned on sidewalks, but have no real problems with the street from what I've seen.
Powered wheelchairs however have not been banned even though they seem to cause a whole lot more injury than anything else. That would hurt the disabled however, so it isn't even considered.
On the other hand, you have to realize that the sidewalks are litterly *packed* with people in many parts of the city. The segway would have caused problems simply because it is impossible to walk without bumping into someone.
Why is this under your rights online? Do we not like this system for some reason?
It seems like a perfectly sane system. Distributed login, no personal information swapping between services and even a global logout. All the specifications appear to be published as far as I can tell.
I'm pretty surprised there hasn't been any progress creating an Open Source implementation of the specification. Kinda disappointing.
It is true that the cost to develop, package, ship, advertise, and support a product is signifcantly less than the retail price of the product itself.
However, you must realize that if you get something that you were going to buy without having to pay for it, they have lost revenue. It doesn't matter if they put 90% margins on their software. They have lost the money they would have made and used to subsidize other projects. Since really only the Windows and Office groups are even profitable, that does indeed affect their bottom line.
Now, it won't hurt like outlaying actual currency, but it will still hurt quite a bit.
I'll tell you the market. The market is people who want to eliminate needless hardware and centralize the interface for various components in a multi-room (or single) environment.
If you can stick a high enough end digital output device on a PC (because no one trusts DAC's in an electromagnetically noisy PC) and make it realiable enough to store my DVD collection, my CD collection and integrate into my TV to give me PVR-like functionality while at the same time delivering content that is on-par with my originals (ie., no MP3, but AAC is ok), then I'd be the happiest person in the world.
The problem a lot of people have is multi-room installations aren't particularly transparent. I want to be upstairs watching TV in my bedroom and pull up a TV program I recorded yesterday using the interface in my living room. Only, I don't want to know where it is stored. Hell, I don't care. The same goes for my DVD collection, my CD collection, my, uh, "picture" collection.
Then there is all the other functionality I would like. Pulling down movies from the Internet (legally available of course), audio books and what not. Hooking into my security system to record what is on my security camera and letting me access it. Controlling lights, drapes, etc. to save electricity.
The thing is, you can do a lot of this stuff right now. It just is all done by these little independent pieces of hardware that don't talk to eachother nicely and are rather expensive independently.
Of course that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Verified with Windows XP and IE 6.0. The connections appears perfectly valid.
It actually appears to open multiple connections sometimes (first time I hit a site it appears for most.)
I'd say this story is bogus. NAT's would really hate this behavior, so I can't imagine it speeding anything up.
Re:Light Speed Relative?
on
E ~ mc^2
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· Score: 4, Informative
A blackhole warps space and time around it. Light travels in a straight line, but since the space it is traveling over is warped, it enters the black hole.
The light itself does not speed up or slow down. From outside the blackhole, light is moving away from an observer at the speed of light. From inside the blackhole, light is moving towards you at the speed of light.
You have to remember that "speed" is a function of distance and time. Time is not constant, but from any frame of reference (you for instance) however, the "speed" of light is.
E-paper created by MIT a couple years ago is basically what you describe, but uses negatively charged black particles suspended in laminated plastic. Apparently they can transfer it to pretty much any surface including real paper.
They spun off a company called E-ink which sells their products to a couple retail chains for changable signs. There is a description of the technology here.
I'm pretty sure this was covered by slashdot (or maybe wired) a couple years back.
(And Yes, microdrives can carry a fair amount, but a) they're quote expensive and b) maybe the bad apples get more news, but there seem to be a lot of complaints re: reliability. An ipod-size 10 or 20GB drive, that would be something, could carry several movies, days worth of audio, important files you don't want lost when the burglars invade your unoccupied home, etc.)
You do realize that solid-state 1 GB CF cards have been on the market for some time now right?
There have also been announcements for 3 GB Type II CF cards from Pretec.
Granted, they will be pretty expensive at first, but they shouldn't have the reliability issues. I wouldn't be surprised if a 10 GB CF card came out in a couple years.
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I prefer the risc architecture. I like the idea of keeping things simple and efficient which is alot like structured programming. VLIW does not follow this ethic.
Now wait a second there. Today's "RISC" implementations aren't exactly RISC anymore and are horribly complex (ever look at the modern MIPS?).
The entire point of the RISC revival in the early 80's was moving the complexity of the hardware into the compiler and was a backlash against CISC solutions that were so complex they spanned multiple chips.
The second "RISC" chips implemented superscalar and out-of-order executions was the day pure RISC died. The chips started doing things that the compiler didn't issue instructions for.
It could be said that EPIC is closer to the RISC philosophy than current RISC chips. While you can't control the processor exactly, you can at least hint at branching and caching. The complexity has moved to the compiler, where it belongs (if you subscribe to the RISC philosophy).
There are quite a few things that are quite useful that you can't do today because of lack of storage:
1) Rip your DVDs (media server) (approx 5 GB/DVD on average, new BluRay DVDs much more)
2) Record HDTV (next gen PVR) (7.2 GB/hour max for ATSC)
3) Record every channel on your cable at once (45 GB/hour approx with 100 channels at 1 Mbps)
4) Store all my DV cam footage on my hard drive (11 GB/hour)
So yes, today if I had a 1 TB drive, I could very well make use of it as could many others.
Ignorance of sex is far worse than exposure to it. You are just forcing your child to learn about it from someone else in an uncontrolled setting.The library is not a day care center. The government is not a surrogate father. A parent's responsibility does not end when a child is in a "public" place.
Would you leave your child alone in any other government building and expect others to take care of him?No, what needs to happen is that parents should stop being their child's friend and start being their damned parent. You don't want your child looking at certain things? Teach them that it isn't ok to do so!
I mean, I assume most parents told their children at one point or another that jumping out of windows wasn't good for them.
Call me crazy, but I think this "communication" thing shows some promise.Damn it. Look. Believe it or not, there are actually parents out there that don't mind their children looking at naked people. I know that sounds amazing, but it is quite true. What gives you the right to enforce your misguided sense of morality on them?
Since time has been proven to continue into infinity, why do we state that the universe 'started' 13.7 billion years ago? What was happening 13.8 billion years ago in the space we currently occupy? Surely the Big Bang was a result of some other cosmic event, since time could stretch infinitely into the past as well as the future.
Space and time are linked together. Without space, there is no time. There was nothing before the big bang because there was no "before." The big bang was an explosion of matter and spacetime.
The universe couldn't have been born without being first conceived...
Quantum physics says that something can indeed be created out nothing; so yes... the current theory is that the universe popped out of nothing some 13 billion years ago. Of course 13 billion years isn't exactly the age since time is relative, so the universe as a whole doesn't actually have one "age," but that's another matter altogether.
The situation for people working in the US seems to be quite bad, at least to me. Isn't it time you guys start a proper union and start raising some hell?
No. Unions may work for many professions, but the programming isn't one of them.
Programming is a highly skilled trade and there are wide degrees of competence in the field as well as pay levels. It is also a field where some people will never be as skilled as others, regardless of experience. Having a Union try to dictate the amount of money I make based on my time on the job so they can make sure even the most incompetent of programmers gets a "good" salary is silly.
I mean seriously, if you can get a job being a programmer and make anywhere from $60,000 (mediocre) to $200,000 (ubergod) per year (Silicon Valley rates), then surely you can negotiate your own damn contract.
And how much paid vacation time I get per year? 6 weeks. How many weeks do you get in the states? And yes, I am only 26.
The price you pay for having a salary more than 2x higher than your counterparts in other parts of the world is that you have to take... get this... unpaid vacations.
Most jobs I've worked for had a standard 3 weeks paid vacation time (15 business days.) If I wanted to take another 3 weeks off unpaid then I have to forfeit about 6% of my yearly wage.
Now, I'm pretty sure that I probably make 6% more than the vast majority of people who get 6 weeks paid vacation time at my skill level. I could be mistaken, but I doubt it.
Heck, I've been thinking of negotiating any future employment contracts so I get no paid vacation time and instead an increase in my base salary, since there have been times where I've only taken no vacations at all. Of course, I like my work, so maybe I'm weird.
802.11b is a Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS) technology with three full channels (most of the 11 overlap two channels.)
Each full channel is able to handle 11 Mbps. Since your access point only operates on one channel, your maximum throughput is 11 Mbps, period. Each wireless connection gets a portion of that using DSSS to keep interference between multiple wireless clients down.
Realistically, you get about 6 Mbps per access point. If you try transferring a file between two computers on the same access point, you'll see about 3 Mbps as it is essentially a half-duplex connection.
Well, let's see. If you stream music to your computer at 128 Kbps, you will use up 4 GB in about 72 hours (slightly less with metric GB common for bandwidth).
Redesigning SMTP to add encryption, identification, and authentication, is not a big problem. Deploying the new protocol is.
We should not have to undertake an effort that will disrupt business nationwide for months, if not years, just to avoid passing a law.
The SMTP protocol has been updated over the years many times in a backwards compatible way. Not only that, but encryption and authentication have been in SMTP for years via TLS.
Identification has been available in many forms for a while via S/MIME or PGP. Of course, you could go the easy route and simply move messages from people that aren't in your address book to a folder where you can authorize them or not. For the "average" person who only gets mail from their friends, this works fine.
Look, if we wanted to modify SMTP in a method that created a trust hierarchy whereby each server would add to their received line a simple signature that could be authenticated, we could without breaking the protocol.
The problem has nothing to do with SMTP. The problem is the rest of the infrastructure simply doesn't exist and it is not trivial to build one.
Are you going to build a white-list with public keys from mail servers you trust explicitly? Who is going to maintain this list? How does someone get added to it? How much is it going to cost to get added? Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
If you go the individual identify route then the same questions apply. Who is going to maintain a list of individual identities? What happens when a user loses his key? What about the privacy issues? Cost? Complexity?
Consider the following. We all access the internet from a fixed and typicaly small number of physical and virtual locations. Were we to map the internet as a whole, starting from any given location the map would look like an expanding cone.
Actually, it wouldn't due to the multihomed nature of most networks.
Since spam messages are sent by the millions and it is fairly easy to determine what messages are likely to BE spam why not set up a filtering system on the routers that determines the rough content of a message based on both its Spam Precentage and the number of identical messages sent.
I.E. If the router sees 500,000 messages of nearly identical content with a 89% spam rating it blocks all of them. If it sees 44 messages with a 23% spam content it lets them through.
First, routers are meant to do one thing, route traffic. They do not have the memory or CPU power to do much more than that.
Second, "identical" and "near-identical" messages are very different things. It is fairly cheap (processor/memory wise) to determine if two messages are identical. It is quite another task to determine if they are nearly identical.
Third, there are many instances where identical or nearly identical messages sent out in bulk are not spam. Mailing lists like bugtraq or linux-kernel have very large subscriber lists, but are are not spam. If the head of IBM sends a message to all his employees, it is not spam. If my car insurance company sends out a bunch of messages warning people once a month that their policy will expire if payment isn't received, it is most definitely, not spam.
Uh, no.
BIND makes no distinction between root servers and anything else. It follows a simple query path:
me -> root server: IN A www.foo.com.?
root server -> me: foo.com. IN NS ns1.foo.com.
root server -> me: ns1.foo.com. IN A a.b.c.d
me -> ns1.foo.com: IN A www.foo.com?
ns1.foo.com: www.foo.com. IN A b.c.d.e
ns1.foo.com: www.foo.com. IN NS ns1.foo.com.
Root servers *do* resolve some IPs. If you make a query for any DNS listed as a primary/secondary for a domain on a root server, you will get an IP in response.
Say you want to lookup ns1.foo.com:
me -> root server: IN A ns1.foo.com.?
root server -> me: ns1.foo.com. IN A a.b.c.d
root server -> me: foo.com. IN NS ns1.foo.com.
root server -> me: ns1.foo.com. IN A a.b.c.d
Yes, the root server will actually duplicate the IN A record. Yes it wastes a few bytes. No one cares.
No kidding... What kind of bullshit article is this? Anyone who has ever looked at a lock and has been asked to make a master key knows this. It isn't exactly rocket science to file down each section of a key.
Besides, who needs to when you can either: a)break down the door or b) get a simple tension wrench (ie: screwdriver) + pick or if you don't mind obliterating the lock c) get a lock pick gun.
I just don't understand why this article was printed when it says itself that this method has been known by locksmiths for years.
Could you please post your reference?
Sure... WalkSF was one of the groups that actively tried to ban the Segway. They have a nice little list of why the segway should be banned in their eyes. They cite a the director of the CDC saying inactivity causes health problems as a reason to ban the Segway.
*SIGH*. More tripe. If they really wanted to ban it because it was a "rich man's toy", then why aren't they trying to take away other "rich man's toys"? SF is a City *full* of "rich man's toy
You misunderstood me. It was discriminated against because it was a rich man's toy, not banned due to it. It just made banning it easier.
Any ban on wheelchairs in any American city would quickly be declared in violation with the American Disability Act. It has nothing to do with SF PCness as you suggest...
No, a ban on motorized wheelchairs that go faster than 11 mph on the sidewalk should have very little affect on the ADA.
Since I have been hit by one of these damn things (or one like it), I can tell you that if an elderly person got hit by one of these things, they would suffer just as much injury as someone riding a Segway (ie, fall down, break something.)
12 mph isn't exactly a speed demon. The worst that'd do is knock you down and unlike a bike, it can't roll over you after doing so. Worst injury I can imagine is maybe a broken hip by an elderly woman.
On the other hand, the same can be said of someone running down the street. Many people can hit 12 mph while running, especially downhill.
Are they going to ban skateboards, roller blades, and inline electric scooters as well? Seaways are supposed to be safer then these things.
All of these are banned on San Francisco sidewalks.
Bleh, fucking lame ass government stifling innovation because of imagined phantoms. Lets keep things exactly the way they are, and then we don't have to worry about the unknown, nothing to fear (except for car crashes...)
The best reason for the ban to exist is due to the number of people on the sidewalk themselves in a number of areas. You can't walk without bumping into people in some places, so a Segway wouldn't be particularly safe.
I hate this preemptive rulemaking bullshit. If something causes a problem out of proportion to it's benefit then ban it. Certainly they shouldn't be banned until they have been shown to be dangerous!
San Francisco is very liberal (read: Big Brother loving) and therefore believes that they know what's best for people before they know it themselves.
The city is quite interesting actually. It has a large number of hippies. They accepted the gay community with open arms when they came in. They accepted the Chinese community with open arms when they came in. Now they are nearly going to war with the yuppies that are coming in due to the vast difference in core values. Very interesting to watch.
Yes, San Francisco banned this device. We have some very liberal board of supervisors running the city government here that defined the word 'bleeding heart.' Granted, some of the reasons for the ban aren't too bad, but some of them are very big brother.
The problem is that everyone is worried that the elderly walking down the sidewalk would be injured by one of these things.
There is also the whole pro-walking thing which lobbied pretty hard against it. They believe this device would cause everyone to get fat.
The price of the device didn't help its case either. Being a liberal city, a $4000 device is seen as a rich man's toy and rich men should be spending their money on social problems such as the homeless problem, not toys. This viewpoint is pretty common here unfortunately.
Bikes have been banned for quite some time on the sidewalk and for anyone who has biked down Market St. knows, it isn't particularly safe to be in the road either.
Rollerblades have also been banned on the sidewalk for some time. I've seen people try to go down the road on them and it isn't pretty given the general quality of the roads themselves.
Powered scooters are getting more and more common. They seem the safest of any one-person mode of transport simply because they can keep up with traffic. They are obviously banned on sidewalks, but have no real problems with the street from what I've seen.
Powered wheelchairs however have not been banned even though they seem to cause a whole lot more injury than anything else. That would hurt the disabled however, so it isn't even considered.
On the other hand, you have to realize that the sidewalks are litterly *packed* with people in many parts of the city. The segway would have caused problems simply because it is impossible to walk without bumping into someone.
Actually, while Napster was operating, the music industry saw the biggest *increase* in CD sales in a decade.
It wasn't until Napster was shut down that sales started to drop.
Is your reply sent back by SMS? :)
I mean, if it is, how can you be sure you always get back a reply if SMS messages aren't guaranteed?
Why is this under your rights online? Do we not like this system for some reason?
It seems like a perfectly sane system. Distributed login, no personal information swapping between services and even a global logout. All the specifications appear to be published as far as I can tell.
I'm pretty surprised there hasn't been any progress creating an Open Source implementation of the specification. Kinda disappointing.
It doesn't quite work that way.
It is true that the cost to develop, package, ship, advertise, and support a product is signifcantly less than the retail price of the product itself.
However, you must realize that if you get something that you were going to buy without having to pay for it, they have lost revenue. It doesn't matter if they put 90% margins on their software. They have lost the money they would have made and used to subsidize other projects. Since really only the Windows and Office groups are even profitable, that does indeed affect their bottom line.
Now, it won't hurt like outlaying actual currency, but it will still hurt quite a bit.
The original buffered Seagate drive, the ST-412, made in the early 80's had an average seek time of just 85 ms.
However, you have to realize something. Since the drive was only 10 megabytes, there were only 1,224 tracks and seeking was a whole lot easier.
I'll tell you the market. The market is people who want to eliminate needless hardware and centralize the interface for various components in a multi-room (or single) environment.
If you can stick a high enough end digital output device on a PC (because no one trusts DAC's in an electromagnetically noisy PC) and make it realiable enough to store my DVD collection, my CD collection and integrate into my TV to give me PVR-like functionality while at the same time delivering content that is on-par with my originals (ie., no MP3, but AAC is ok), then I'd be the happiest person in the world.
The problem a lot of people have is multi-room installations aren't particularly transparent. I want to be upstairs watching TV in my bedroom and pull up a TV program I recorded yesterday using the interface in my living room. Only, I don't want to know where it is stored. Hell, I don't care. The same goes for my DVD collection, my CD collection, my, uh, "picture" collection.
Then there is all the other functionality I would like. Pulling down movies from the Internet (legally available of course), audio books and what not. Hooking into my security system to record what is on my security camera and letting me access it. Controlling lights, drapes, etc. to save electricity.
The thing is, you can do a lot of this stuff right now. It just is all done by these little independent pieces of hardware that don't talk to eachother nicely and are rather expensive independently.
Of course that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Verified with Windows XP and IE 6.0. The connections appears perfectly valid.
It actually appears to open multiple connections sometimes (first time I hit a site it appears for most.)
I'd say this story is bogus. NAT's would really hate this behavior, so I can't imagine it speeding anything up.
A blackhole warps space and time around it. Light travels in a straight line, but since the space it is traveling over is warped, it enters the black hole.
The light itself does not speed up or slow down. From outside the blackhole, light is moving away from an observer at the speed of light. From inside the blackhole, light is moving towards you at the speed of light.
You have to remember that "speed" is a function of distance and time. Time is not constant, but from any frame of reference (you for instance) however, the "speed" of light is.
E-paper created by MIT a couple years ago is basically what you describe, but uses negatively charged black particles suspended in laminated plastic. Apparently they can transfer it to pretty much any surface including real paper.
They spun off a company called E-ink which sells their products to a couple retail chains for changable signs. There is a description of the technology here.
I'm pretty sure this was covered by slashdot (or maybe wired) a couple years back.
(And Yes, microdrives can carry a fair amount, but a) they're quote expensive and b) maybe the bad apples get more news, but there seem to be a lot of complaints re: reliability. An ipod-size 10 or 20GB drive, that would be something, could carry several movies, days worth of audio, important files you don't want lost when the burglars invade your unoccupied home, etc.)
You do realize that solid-state 1 GB CF cards have been on the market for some time now right?
There have also been announcements for 3 GB Type II CF cards from Pretec.
Granted, they will be pretty expensive at first, but they shouldn't have the reliability issues. I wouldn't be surprised if a 10 GB CF card came out in a couple years.