Oops - screwed up the Vicadin units.
$200 gets you 90 pills of 10 mg generic hydrocodone mixed with 500mg of acetaminophen (Tylenol). Thats a little over $2 a pill, and you can sell them to your junkie friends for $5-$10. (Assuming you are willing to commit both state & federal felonies doing so).
Valium/diazepam is about $4.25 per pill for 10mg, and Viagra is usually $5-$10 each.
Viagra, hydrocordone (Vicadin), Valium, etc. are easy to get from spam pharmacies, they charge a credit card and ship FedEx, so its consumer-friendly. (If the deal fails, you file a complaint with your credit card company and get a refund, and FedEx is a good escrow agency).
They just change a huge markup 10mg/500 of generic Vicadin for about $200. Profit: about $180. Its also stronger than Morphine and just as addictive. Just the thing for a doctor to do for a few months before retiring or having his license pulled.
Drug dealing has followed this protocol ever since the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914. The diference is that the database is decentralized and either committed to human memory or stored in an encrypted form.
Basically, to form a new hookup you must be introduced to a dealer by someone whom the dealer already trusts. The edges of the networks are called "runners", and can be found on streetcorners and in dance clubs. Retail and wholesale distribution follows a similar pattern.
When the protocol breaks down, particularly due to personnel security issues, bullets fly. Otherwise it works pretty well!
Here is a URL in the LOREO website, with more info on this gadget:
http://www.loreo.com/pages/products/loreo_3dcap. ht ml
LOREO has a number of other cool things. For example, a "Lens in a Cap" that lets you do view-camera style perspective control, one with a pinhole "lens", and another one that lets you convert your SLR into a "Point and Shoot" camera.
will convert a 35mm SLR or a digital camera like the Nikon D-100 into a 3D Camera instantly.
It is an assembly of mirrors that gathers light from two viewpoints and focuses it down onto the film/image sensor so that when it is printed out at a photo lab or on a printer, it makes a 3D card just like the ones from Victorian times.
LOREA also makes a camera with this lens built in. It works pretty good - the only drawbacks are the long focal lengh (F11) and a blurry border between the left and right image. Some versions can also show unwanted reflections.
I got mine for my Nikon film SLR and it works on the D-100 too!
The problem with P2P has always been the asymmetry between people willing to share and those willing to download. Downloading is far less risky because it does not require you to present yourself to others on an extended basis. You are thus are less likely to be discovered by the enforcers of the copyright laws and to be subjected to litigation. You also do not have to give up your bandwidth to others as an alturistic gesture.
Ultimately this leads to the classic "Tragedy of the Commons" in which a few are exploited by the many.
The only cure it to come up with some sort of compensation system that rewards those willing to share. The MoJo Nation project was an attempt at this.
In the early 1990s, John tried his line on me. Every time I met him he brought up his interest in his "energy excercises" and encouraged me to join him.
One time I actually did. He never did anything that Kenneth Starr would define as a sexual advance, but you could sense that intention was simmering beneath the surface.
Needless to say, his deteriorated body and rotten teeth could only appeal to a necrophiliac - which is not one of my kinks.
Since then, he has made a few more trys. He never offered me any MDMA - I must have caught him before the rave era really got going.
Zilog, which made the ubiqitous Z-80, came out with a 16 bit microprocessor called the Z-8000. As part of their marketing campaign, they created a super hero called Captain Zilog, whom they honored with a comic book, tee-shirts, and even a pack of matches proclaiming that you could get a good job programming Z8000s.
The Z-8000 did not go anywhere, unfortunately. Great kitch though!
I was one of the developers of the Bally Arcade in 1977 - it had a Z-80, 4K of RAM, 4 built-in games, a 160x100 4 color frame buffer. It was way ahead of everything else. Eventually it included a BASIC programming cartridge with a audio tape interface.
It also cost about $300 back then - and the Midway Manufacturing Division of Bally had a 60% mortality rate in manufacturing. It did not help that several of the executives wanted the project to die.
Anyway - it lingered for a while and attracted a cult following. Eventually it was sold to a startup called Astrocade which failed a year or so later.
The lesson is that you can not make an open console that costs lots more than someone else doing the "loss leader - razor" model.
What I really regret was that I spent a evening chatting away with another designer at a GameTronics conference and basically invented many of the IP protection techniques that Nintendo and Sony later used to achieve market dominance and corporate control of game content. I wish I had patented them and not let anybody use them!
The Arcade firmware and architecture is open source now - we released all the specs to the world about 5 years ago. I wish someone would copy the "Gun Handle" joystick controller - it is about the only thing that does not cripple people who use them.
The company will crash, and the patent portfolio will be snatched up in a fire sale by some lawyer(s) who will go around playing the same extortion game.
This scenario can be the worst because the lawyer(s) don't have to pay retail for law services and they also have no incentive to horse trade via cross-licensing.
Robert D. Steele has been to many hacking conferences over the years. He has been a force in the movement to reform the US Intelligence Community and presents many fresh ideas.
Unlike most of the rest of the Intelligence Community, he is open to us and our views.
The term "Open Source" has had a meaning in the Intelligence field long before it came into vogue as a software development movement - RDS makes an analogy - that open intelligence sources and methods are more trustworthy (than closed sources) for the same reasons that open source programs are.
San Francisco and Silicon Valley has an enormous critical mass of Gay/Lesbian/Bi/Trans people, and Nerds. The counter-culture continues to thrive here.
For techies - it means that you are respected and accepted everywhere, no matter what you look like.
It is the opposite of the nightmare world Jon Katz describes in "Voices from the Hellmouth". Nobody who has been dumped-on for being smart or diferent wants to go back out into the cold.
Attempts to replicate the Bay Area have to replicate this tolerance too - which often requires a massive, slow change in attitude.
For the last 6 years, I have helped operate a web community that has two service-level tiers. One, which is free, has fewer desirable graphics and contains a content subset.
The other, which requires a subscription, has a noticably higher content quality - and still includes ads. We also feature a variety of "community membership features", like a home page, email, access to the archives, and so forth. Nobody minds, because our ads are genuinely useful and designed not to delay or annoy.
It works for us - we serve a niche audience - transgender people - who really appreciate the access to resources that ads enable. I have found similar value in slashdot advertising, buying usefull books, software, and equipment to help run this project.
Slashdot could do similar things. One idea is to give priority during busy times to paying subscribers. Another idea, suggested in an earlier post, is to give subscribers the ability to run their own weblogs. There are many other possibilities for a two-tier slashdot beyond just ad reduction.
Certainly paying subscribers should have the option to see ads, perhaps with enhanced performance or reduced annoyance.
yes indeed - Alan was frustrated for many years because all the versions of Smalltalk that were available were closed-source or expensive. (I think ParcPlace wanted something like $2000 a cpu for a while.)
When he stopped working at Apple, he was able to get Apple to open-source their version of Smalltalk - hence Squeak. Its pretty neat.
who is the co-author of the screenplay, is Alan Kay's (Smalltalk, Xerox PARC, etc.) wife. There are a lot of obscure references to Alan and PARC in TRON. Alan even made a prototype "monitor in a desk" later on at Apple.
Alan went on to work for Disney for a while, recently departing.
SRI International (in Menlo Park) has an auction twice a year and do they have cool stuff!
If you want a glovebox for your living room, a pallet of old Macintosh SE computers, old test instruments, a radar dish, or my favorite, the contents of a prototype intercept station with about 30 mil-grade HF recievers - this is the place to go.
We picked up a large jar-bath which we put a life-sized plastic brain into that now reposes in our living room.
http://www.sri.com/ (I think they should have one in a few months).
Lets invent a cheap signature algorithm which you can run on a message to digest it into a form you can compare with a blacklist, but can cope with simple measures to vary the contents. (I am using the term "signature" as in "signature analysis used by hardware engineers for fault detection".
One idea (lets hear more):
Compute a word-frequency histogram. Reject noise words like "a" and "the". Include long words that are relatively rare. Take the top 5 words that are common and the top 5 words that are long and store them with a frequency count.
To compare similarity, consider each word as a seperate dimension and calculate the Euclidian distance.
I recall reading that the captain of an airliner can shut off the seat-back telephones in an emergency and that an airline was recommending that they do so if a crash seemed emminent.
This may be a good idea during a terrorist incident -- although I suspect the motives are to control the PR spin that people get and to reduce the damages for emotional distress that next-of-kin can claim.
People surfing are acting on an intention to do something, such as to discover information or to amuse themselves.
The problem with banner ads and interruption ads is that they displace this intention either voluntarily or involuntarily.
What is needed are new advertising schemes which co-exist with the user's intentionality, rather than thwarting it. Two suggestions come to mind.
The first is to allow a user to click on a banner ad, and rather than having it interrupt their train of thought, it instead adds it to an agenda that the user can visit latter. For example, I see an ad for a game that looks interesting, and I can put it "on the stack" for later.
The other idea is to let users create interest profiles for themselves, something like a "digital hanky code**" that says things like "I am interested in trains, motorcycles, fine wine, and cats". Advertiser's agents can then scan for these and send me messages (hopefully in an non-instrusive way) that I can get later, again when I am in the mood. There are plenty of technical issues with spam avoidance but they can be dealt with by the message receiver software that could use reputation servers and the like.
-- Jamie
** gays use hankerchiefs to advertise for partners, diferent colors mean diferent interests.
Actually, the also have a "license agreement" you have to click to accept, which is hard to read but if you do struggle through it you agree not to lie about who you are.
While I doubt they would swoop down on me for joining the chorus of bogus noise, they would have my IP number now associated with something that looks like a confession. If I come in through an anonomizer, then they can tell I did not come in from the site I was caught sharing from and could just refuse to turn my Napster back on.
I imagine the long-term strategy here is to make people with something to lose, like a business, house. or savings, become scared about getting nailed in a lawsuit. This would push file sharing into regulated areas like universitys or onto judgement-proof people likely to have lower bandwidth connections.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops - screwed up the Vicadin units.
$200 gets you 90 pills of 10 mg generic hydrocodone mixed with 500mg of acetaminophen (Tylenol). Thats a little over $2 a pill, and you can sell them to your junkie friends for $5-$10. (Assuming you are willing to commit both state & federal felonies doing so).
Valium/diazepam is about $4.25 per pill for 10mg, and Viagra is usually $5-$10 each.
Viagra, hydrocordone (Vicadin), Valium, etc. are easy to get from spam pharmacies, they charge a credit card and ship FedEx, so its consumer-friendly. (If the deal fails, you file a complaint with your credit card company and get a refund, and FedEx is a good escrow agency).
They just change a huge markup 10mg/500 of generic Vicadin for about $200. Profit: about $180. Its also stronger than Morphine and just as addictive. Just the thing for a doctor to do for a few months before retiring or having his license pulled.
-- Jamie
Drug dealing has followed this protocol ever since the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914. The diference is that the database is decentralized and either committed to human memory or stored in an encrypted form.
Basically, to form a new hookup you must be introduced to a dealer by someone whom the dealer already trusts. The edges of the networks are called "runners", and can be found on streetcorners and in dance clubs. Retail and wholesale distribution follows a similar pattern.
When the protocol breaks down, particularly due to personnel security issues, bullets fly. Otherwise it works pretty well!
Here is a URL in the LOREO website, with more info on this gadget:
. ht ml
http://www.loreo.com/pages/products/loreo_3dcap
LOREO has a number of other cool things. For example, a "Lens in a Cap" that lets you do view-camera style perspective control, one with a pinhole "lens", and another one that lets you convert your SLR into a "Point and Shoot" camera.
http://www.loreo.com/
LOREO is the RonCo of photo accessories!
will convert a 35mm SLR or a digital camera like the Nikon D-100 into a 3D Camera instantly.
It is an assembly of mirrors that gathers light from two viewpoints and focuses it down onto the film/image sensor so that when it is printed out at a photo lab or on a printer, it makes a 3D card just like the ones from Victorian times.
LOREA also makes a camera with this lens built in. It works pretty good - the only drawbacks are the long focal lengh (F11) and a blurry border between the left and right image. Some versions can also show unwanted reflections.
I got mine for my Nikon film SLR and it works on the D-100 too!
The problem with P2P has always been the asymmetry between people willing to share and those willing to download. Downloading is far less risky because it does not require you to present yourself to others on an extended basis. You are thus are less likely to be discovered by the enforcers of the copyright laws and to be subjected to litigation. You also do not have to give up your bandwidth to others as an alturistic gesture.
Ultimately this leads to the classic "Tragedy of the Commons" in which a few are exploited by the many.
The only cure it to come up with some sort of compensation system that rewards those willing to share. The MoJo Nation project was an attempt at this.
In the early 1990s, John tried his line on me. Every time I met him he brought up his interest in his "energy excercises" and encouraged me to join him.
One time I actually did. He never did anything that Kenneth Starr would define as a sexual advance, but you could sense that intention was simmering beneath the surface.
Needless to say, his deteriorated body and rotten teeth could only appeal to a necrophiliac - which is not one of my kinks.
Since then, he has made a few more trys. He never offered me any MDMA - I must have caught him before the rave era really got going.
Zilog, which made the ubiqitous Z-80, came out with a 16 bit microprocessor called the Z-8000. As part of their marketing campaign, they created a super hero called Captain Zilog, whom they honored with a comic book, tee-shirts, and even a pack of matches proclaiming that you could get a good job programming Z8000s.
The Z-8000 did not go anywhere, unfortunately. Great kitch though!
-- Jamie
Dani did express regrets about GRS. Her writings on this are a major reason I am taking far longer than the one year minimum to make up my mind.
People unhappy with their GRS rarely let others know they blew it. Dani's courage in writing about it is extraordinary.
-- Jamie
The correct term these days is "Gender Reassignment Surgery". Not everyone who undertakes a gender transition has this done.
I know of over 20 transsexual game designers. It is like gays in the floral industry. Dani was the best of us all.
I was one of the developers of the Bally Arcade in 1977 - it had a Z-80, 4K of RAM, 4 built-in games, a 160x100 4 color frame buffer. It was way ahead of everything else. Eventually it included a BASIC programming cartridge with a audio tape interface.
It also cost about $300 back then - and the Midway Manufacturing Division of Bally had a 60% mortality rate in manufacturing. It did not help that several of the executives wanted the project to die.
Anyway - it lingered for a while and attracted a cult following. Eventually it was sold to a startup called Astrocade which failed a year or so later.
The lesson is that you can not make an open console that costs lots more than someone else doing the "loss leader - razor" model.
What I really regret was that I spent a evening chatting away with another designer at a GameTronics conference and basically invented many of the IP protection techniques that Nintendo and Sony later used to achieve market dominance and corporate control of game content. I wish I had patented them and not let anybody use them!
The Arcade firmware and architecture is open source now - we released all the specs to the world about 5 years ago. I wish someone would copy the "Gun Handle" joystick controller - it is about the only thing that does not cripple people who use them.
The company will crash, and the patent portfolio will be snatched up in a fire sale by some lawyer(s) who will go around playing the same extortion game.
This scenario can be the worst because the lawyer(s) don't have to pay retail for law services and they also have no incentive to horse trade via cross-licensing.
Robert D. Steele has been to many hacking conferences over the years. He has been a force in the movement to reform the US Intelligence Community and presents many fresh ideas.
Unlike most of the rest of the Intelligence Community, he is open to us and our views.
The term "Open Source" has had a meaning in the Intelligence field long before it came into vogue as a software development movement - RDS makes an analogy - that open intelligence sources and methods are more trustworthy (than closed sources) for the same reasons that open source programs are.
San Francisco and Silicon Valley has an enormous critical mass of Gay/Lesbian/Bi/Trans people, and Nerds. The counter-culture continues to thrive here.
For techies - it means that you are respected and accepted everywhere, no matter what you look like.
It is the opposite of the nightmare world Jon Katz describes in "Voices from the Hellmouth". Nobody who has been dumped-on for being smart or diferent wants to go back out into the cold.
Attempts to replicate the Bay Area have to replicate this tolerance too - which often requires a massive, slow change in attitude.
-- Jamie
For the last 6 years, I have helped operate a web community that has two service-level tiers. One, which is free, has fewer desirable graphics and contains a content subset.
The other, which requires a subscription, has a noticably higher content quality - and still includes ads. We also feature a variety of "community membership features", like a home page, email, access to the archives, and so forth. Nobody minds, because our ads are genuinely useful and designed not to delay or annoy.
It works for us - we serve a niche audience - transgender people - who really appreciate the access to resources that ads enable. I have found similar value in slashdot advertising, buying usefull books, software, and equipment to help run this project.
Slashdot could do similar things. One idea is to give priority during busy times to paying subscribers. Another idea, suggested in an earlier post, is to give subscribers the ability to run their own weblogs. There are many other possibilities for a two-tier slashdot beyond just ad reduction.
Certainly paying subscribers should have the option to see ads, perhaps with enhanced performance or reduced annoyance.
yes indeed - Alan was frustrated for many years because all the versions of Smalltalk that were available were closed-source or expensive. (I think ParcPlace wanted something like $2000 a cpu for a while.)
When he stopped working at Apple, he was able to get Apple to open-source their version of Smalltalk - hence Squeak. Its pretty neat.
who is the co-author of the screenplay, is Alan Kay's (Smalltalk, Xerox PARC, etc.) wife. There are a lot of obscure references to Alan and PARC in TRON. Alan even made a prototype "monitor in a desk" later on at Apple.
Alan went on to work for Disney for a while, recently departing.
my guess is "Standard Operating Environment".
SRI International (in Menlo Park) has an auction twice a year and do they have cool stuff!
If you want a glovebox for your living room, a pallet of old Macintosh SE computers, old test instruments, a radar dish, or my favorite, the contents of a prototype intercept station with about 30 mil-grade HF recievers - this is the place to go.
We picked up a large jar-bath which we put a life-sized plastic brain into that now reposes in our living room.
http://www.sri.com/ (I think they should have one in a few months).
-- Jamie
Lets invent a cheap signature algorithm which you can run on a message to digest it into a form you can compare with a blacklist, but can cope with simple measures to vary the contents. (I am using the term "signature" as in "signature analysis used by hardware engineers for fault detection".
One idea (lets hear more):
Compute a word-frequency histogram. Reject noise words like "a" and "the". Include long words that are relatively rare. Take the top 5 words that are common and the top 5 words that are long and store them with a frequency count.
To compare similarity, consider each word as a seperate dimension and calculate the Euclidian distance.
-- Jamie
I am smart because I can make mistakes faster than other people.
I wrote a review of the unit and had a look at the drive. Its NTFS. All the standard utilities for futzing with NT should work fine.
1 14 ,00.asp
http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,18
I would try using one of the utilities for upgrading a hard drive like Ghost.
Hope this helps.
I recall reading that the captain of an airliner can shut off the seat-back telephones in an emergency and that an airline was recommending that they do so if a crash seemed emminent.
This may be a good idea during a terrorist incident -- although I suspect the motives are to control the PR spin that people get and to reduce the damages for emotional distress that next-of-kin can claim.
People surfing are acting on an intention to do something, such as to discover information or to amuse themselves.
The problem with banner ads and interruption ads is that they displace this intention either voluntarily or involuntarily.
What is needed are new advertising schemes which co-exist with the user's intentionality, rather than thwarting it. Two suggestions come to mind.
The first is to allow a user to click on a banner ad, and rather than having it interrupt their train of thought, it instead adds it to an agenda that the user can visit latter. For example, I see an ad for a game that looks interesting, and I can put it "on the stack" for later.
The other idea is to let users create interest profiles for themselves, something like a "digital hanky code**" that says things like "I am interested in trains, motorcycles, fine wine, and cats". Advertiser's agents can then scan for these and send me messages (hopefully in an non-instrusive way) that I can get later, again when I am in the mood. There are plenty of technical issues with spam avoidance but they can be dealt with by the message receiver software that could use reputation servers and the like.
-- Jamie
** gays use hankerchiefs to advertise for partners, diferent colors mean diferent interests.
Actually, the also have a "license agreement" you have to click to accept, which is hard to read but if you do struggle through it you agree not to lie about who you are.
While I doubt they would swoop down on me for joining the chorus of bogus noise, they would have my IP number now associated with something that looks like a confession. If I come in through an anonomizer, then they can tell I did not come in from the site I was caught sharing from and could just refuse to turn my Napster back on.
I imagine the long-term strategy here is to make people with something to lose, like a business, house. or savings, become scared about getting nailed in a lawsuit. This would push file sharing into regulated areas like universitys or onto judgement-proof people likely to have lower bandwidth connections.