We won't get cars that drive themselves, not in our lifetimes. Reason: You wouldn't need 90% of cops.
Re:Sikorsky ignored a number of problems
on
The Coming Air Age
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· Score: 1
8. Stupidity
Look, if society (read: corporations) used the technology we already have, we would have:
A. Automated cars that you don't have to drive; B. Automated foodmakers that could make, say, a simple breakfast; C. Automated body-scrubbers that would use less soap and water than your average bath or shower; D. Clothing that is custom made to fit your laser-scanned carcass; E. Cell phones, fax machines, microwave ovens, TV remotes, alarm clocks, and VCRs whose features are designed such that people of ordinary intelligence can actually use and benefit from them.
The other drawbacks to the widespread use of personal aircraft are: 9. NIMBYs (on the average, two U.S. general aviation airports close every week (source: Aircraft Owners & Pilots Assn); and 10. The FAA.
We outsourced our help desk to Microsoft and the response time dropped to near-zero. Of course, we now spend most of our time reformatting our hard disks and reinstalling Windows.
Aside from it taking forever to load a PDF file into a browser, when the hell is someone (Adobe and/or the browser-developers, you know who you are) going to make a browser and/or plug-in and/or PDF file that will load correctly without hanging my box? When are They going to make it so I can open multiple PDF browser windows without hanging my box? Why do browser-developers assume I only browse in one window? I have 20 instances of my browser open and loading a PDF will mung the other 19!!?!
1. The article is right-on as far as the law being a system not unlike a computer (although there are human foibles and biases built in on many levels). As my former.sig says, Laws are ROMS, courts are CPUs.
2. Going to law school is a shitty career move, at least money-wise, for a computer geek. Aside from the three years of negative income, big law firms won't hire you unless you go to Harvard or some "top 25" law school and/or your grades are good enough to get on law review. Your IT skills are mostly irrelevant to the law job market. If you have an engineering degree you might possibly be able to get into patent law. If you enter private practice, you will discover that....
3. Computer geeks make crappy law clients. They already think they know everything. They are far happier as pro pers (people who try to represent themselves in court as their own lawyers).
4. IT pays better and you don't have to deal with shit from clients, some of whom will lose in court because they deserve to, and will then be pissed at you and file bogus bar complaints and malpractice suits. Did you rent Cape Fear?
Yeah, maybe a little offtopic but you need to be warned. My wife, bless her heart, bought me a Z3. I HATE, HATE, HATE the thing. The performance is OK but I get a terrible BACKACHE every time I occupy the car for more than 20 minutes or so. Who TF designed this piece of sludge. My legs, knees, and feet are butt up against hardwood. The seat doesn't go back. I would never tell my wife -- but Gawd I wish I hadn't let her talk me in to trading in my comfy (and 1/2 as expensive) '93 5.0 Mustang!!
We are liable to be in a war soon. The people in Washington want to have something going on, even if they can't quite start a war before the elections. Anything - threats, patrols going in, bombing. Just enough to cause the nation to fall behind the President in time of war. Arms inspections only give America the chance to shout from the go: "They won't let me see anything. Bring on the tanks!"
Outfits like the FBI then will be impervious to complaints of false arrest, criticism in some newspapers, opposition by citizens' groups and the few politicians. This is wartime.
The great dream of conservatives, censorship, some kind of censorship, any kind at all just to start it off, would be pursued relentlessly. That fight would be with the newspapers and magazines. Television would be no problem at all. The owners couldn't wait to make life easier by allowing the government to bring you the news the government knows you should see.
What the public doesn't understand is that the suspects who bring them the news wouldn't be harmed at all. Reporters could get civil service vacations and sick leave and the right to take cars from the Coast Guard motor pool.
And rather than be protected fully against terrorism, the public will be tormented by the FBI and other federal agencies.
From Jimmy Breslin's column, http://www.newsday.com/mainnews/breslin0.htm (NY Newsday, !blah-di-blah)
I agree with all the posters: Tour. Tour some more. Allow trading. Post to Furthurnet. Use college radio. Do good PR. And............
Try selling your CD on local cable TV. Make a:60 second spot using desktop video editing or however you can, then buy time for as little as $5 per spot. You get to pick the cable system and even the channel/show (e.g. MTV). Some co's (e.g. Turner Networks) will even rent you the use of their 800 numbers, operators-standing-by, and credit card merchant accounts. Remember the unknown pianist who cut an album of Andrew Lloyd Webber covers, combined with "your favorite memories"? That commercial played for years.
People in some kinds of "correctional" situations *SHOULD* be able to work. Regular jobs, not "making license plates, cleaning up roadsides" sort of make-work, but real paying jobs. Why not?
Because they compete with people whom, not being prisoners, are entitled to at least the minimum wage (instead of 0.25/hr).
Because the wage disparity between prison and non-prison labor creates an economic incentive to lock up people who otherwise would not be locked up, e.g. so-called nonviolent drug offenders.
Some of the biggest and best-known government agencies, the same ones that make headlines and get called before Congress for their shoddy security practices, are still offering senior IT and INFOSEC people $30-35/hr. And even for those sysadmins that would work for $55K W-2 there are other factors that weigh in, such as the unbelievable hassle, weirdness and subjectivity of the hiring process. This in a Federal Government which is going to lose 40% of its employees to retirement in five years.
I work for the Automation and Controls department of a very large company and we are exploring this technology. This is a very real problem, but the solution is pretty easy. Instead of using just one large flywheel, use many smaller ones.
There's an idea. Just make the smaller flywheels, the size of, um, TURNSTILES.....
OK, there's no 802.11b card and you'll have to dial in to your network, but as of last week the Kyocera Smartphone QCP-6035 from Sprint PCS was $149 - cheap just for the built-in Palm. New Sprint PCS subscribers (as of last week at least) also got a $50 rebate on the unit.
Re:Search by model - not specs!
on
Low-end Laptops?
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· Score: 1
Don't forget to search eBay by misspelled words -- some eBay sellers are complett idiots!
Go to law school, pass the bar exam and take on people who had things-that-shouldn't-happen-here happen to them as clients. There is no shortage of such people.
According to the specs, the unit will produce 0.3 oz of 140 degree-F. water per minute. Therefore, it should only take 15 minutes to brew one Standard 5 Oz. Cup of coffee. Now, if they can only get the CD-ROM drive to double as a cupholder....
Has any attorney ever actually gotten in trouble because he posted legal opinion to the Internet and some butthead thought that it created an attorney-client relationship or constituted legal advice? I am a lawyer, and I post stuff from time to time, and I don't choose to.sig my posts with long disclaimers -- because commmon sense should tell you that my post, however opinionated or lawyerlike, doesn't create any duty or liability to readers. If someone knows of a court opinion that says otherwise, please cough it up.
I've wanted to see a device like this for a long time (a tombstone-resident voice playback module). You get some photovoltaic cells, some PROM (with the.wav of your voice burned into it), a piezo tweeter, some CMOS logic including a 4066 analog switch, and an optosensor/timer to turn the thing on and off. You epoxy-pot it in the top of the tombstone so that when a cemetery visitor puts their hand over the optosensor, 30 seconds of the dearly departed's voice comes out. Ought to be no trouble designing a unit that will last 250+ years.
Stop electing Republican presidents who appoint Republican federal judges. This includes those of you who passively elect Republicans by voting for spoiler candidates or not voting at all. Read the lower court opinion in Eldred. This opinion completely ignores the argument, raised by the plaintiffs, that a First Amendment right inheres in the public to have copyrighted material eventually become part of the public domain. The Court of Appeals opinion is typical of modern Republican judicial writing, belittling and mocking the Constitutional arguments raised by the plaintiffs. Fortunately for everyone except Microsoft and Disney, the grant of certiorari means that there are at least four votes in the Supreme Court to overturn the lower court's decision.
Actually, this was the correct story. Bill Gates was looking at some old computer history books and found the story of Adm. Grace Hopper finding a cooked moth amid a bank of relays in ENIAC. And Bill's NYC digs are tres grand, but like all other NYC apt dwellers, Bill too has cockroaches. So he assigned a team to work on the problem and they came up with Microsoft Cockroach. The newly released software causes the little-used PC internal piezo-tweeter speaker to periodically emit an ultrasonic noise that causes the little buggers to crawl into boxen and die. A beta tester on E. 96th observed his PC to operate erratically, he discovered his machine was full of dead roaches and the CPU became overheated when their little carcasses piled up to the point where they blocked the fan. The user dumped the load of creepy-crawlies onto the carpet and then called MS tech support -- only to be told, "They're features."
I'd like to find a type of numeric display which had white-on-black numbers and which may have been manufactured by a company called IEE. The display operated by mechanically moving strips of black plastic or mylar in front of an incandescent lamp, the digit to be displayed was a translucent portion of the mylar. These displays were once widely used in government and military applications, and into the mid '80s were used in the video switching systems of the CBS-TV network. Does anybody remember the exact name of these devices, how they worked, or whether or if any are available to hobbyists.
Slashdot Mirror
We won't get cars that drive themselves, not in our lifetimes. Reason: You wouldn't need 90% of cops.
8. Stupidity
Look, if society (read: corporations) used the technology we already have, we would have:
A. Automated cars that you don't have to drive;
B. Automated foodmakers that could make, say, a simple breakfast;
C. Automated body-scrubbers that would use less soap and water than your average bath or shower;
D. Clothing that is custom made to fit your laser-scanned carcass;
E. Cell phones, fax machines, microwave ovens, TV remotes, alarm clocks, and VCRs whose features are designed such that people of ordinary intelligence can actually use and benefit from them.
The other drawbacks to the widespread use of personal aircraft are:
9. NIMBYs (on the average, two U.S. general aviation airports close every week (source: Aircraft Owners & Pilots Assn); and
10. The FAA.
That would make them easier to find than Segways.
We outsourced our help desk to Microsoft and the response time dropped to near-zero. Of course, we now spend most of our time reformatting our hard disks and reinstalling Windows.
Aside from it taking forever to load a PDF file into a browser, when the hell is someone (Adobe and/or the browser-developers, you know who you are) going to make a browser and/or plug-in and/or PDF file that will load correctly without hanging my box? When are They going to make it so I can open multiple PDF browser windows without hanging my box? Why do browser-developers assume I only browse in one window? I have 20 instances of my browser open and loading a PDF will mung the other 19!!?!
1. The article is right-on as far as the law being a system not unlike a computer (although there are human foibles and biases built in on many levels). As my former .sig says, Laws are ROMS, courts are CPUs.
2. Going to law school is a shitty career move, at least money-wise, for a computer geek. Aside from the three years of negative income, big law firms won't hire you unless you go to Harvard or some "top 25" law school and/or your grades are good enough to get on law review. Your IT skills are mostly irrelevant to the law job market. If you have an engineering degree you might possibly be able to get into patent law. If you enter private practice, you will discover that....
3. Computer geeks make crappy law clients. They already think they know everything. They are far happier as pro pers (people who try to represent themselves in court as their own lawyers).
4. IT pays better and you don't have to deal with shit from clients, some of whom will lose in court because they deserve to, and will then be pissed at you and file bogus bar complaints and malpractice suits. Did you rent Cape Fear?
5. Some clients are insane (see (3)).
There's no parole in the Federal prison system. IAAL.
Yeah, maybe a little offtopic but you need to be warned. My wife, bless her heart, bought me a Z3. I HATE, HATE, HATE the thing. The performance is OK but I get a terrible BACKACHE every time I occupy the car for more than 20 minutes or so. Who TF designed this piece of sludge. My legs, knees, and feet are butt up against hardwood. The seat doesn't go back. I would never tell my wife -- but Gawd I wish I hadn't let her talk me in to trading in my comfy (and 1/2 as expensive) '93 5.0 Mustang!!
Don't forget SOFTWARE FOR KIDS. There isn't any to speak of. I would love to set my kids loose on Linux -- but what would I have them do??
We are liable to be in a war soon. The people in Washington want to have something going on, even if they can't quite start a war before the elections. Anything - threats, patrols going in, bombing. Just enough to cause the nation to fall behind the President in time of war. Arms inspections only give America the chance to shout from the go: "They won't let me see anything. Bring on the tanks!"
Outfits like the FBI then will be impervious to complaints of false arrest, criticism in some newspapers, opposition by citizens' groups and the few politicians. This is wartime.
The great dream of conservatives, censorship, some kind of censorship, any kind at all just to start it off, would be pursued relentlessly. That fight would be with the newspapers and magazines. Television would be no problem at all. The owners couldn't wait to make life easier by allowing the government to bring you the news the government knows you should see.
What the public doesn't understand is that the suspects who bring them the news wouldn't be harmed at all. Reporters could get civil service vacations and sick leave and the right to take cars from the Coast Guard motor pool.
And rather than be protected fully against terrorism, the public will be tormented by the FBI and other federal agencies.
From Jimmy Breslin's column, http://www.newsday.com/mainnews/breslin0.htm (NY Newsday, !blah-di-blah)
I agree with all the posters: Tour. Tour some more. Allow trading. Post to Furthurnet. Use college radio. Do good PR. And............
:60 second spot using desktop video editing or however you can, then buy time for as little as $5 per spot. You get to pick the cable system and even the channel/show (e.g. MTV). Some co's (e.g. Turner Networks) will even rent you the use of their 800 numbers, operators-standing-by, and credit card merchant accounts. Remember the unknown pianist who cut an album of Andrew Lloyd Webber covers, combined with "your favorite memories"? That commercial played for years.
Try selling your CD on local cable TV. Make a
People in some kinds of "correctional" situations *SHOULD* be able to work. Regular jobs, not "making license plates, cleaning up roadsides" sort of make-work, but real paying jobs. Why not?
Because they compete with people whom, not being prisoners, are entitled to at least the minimum wage (instead of 0.25/hr).
Because the wage disparity between prison and non-prison labor creates an economic incentive to lock up people who otherwise would not be locked up, e.g. so-called nonviolent drug offenders.
Some of the biggest and best-known government agencies, the same ones that make headlines and get called before Congress for their shoddy security practices, are still offering senior IT and INFOSEC people $30-35/hr. And even for those sysadmins that would work for $55K W-2 there are other factors that weigh in, such as the unbelievable hassle, weirdness and subjectivity of the hiring process. This in a Federal Government which is going to lose 40% of its employees to retirement in five years.
I work for the Automation and Controls department of a very large company and we are exploring this technology. This is a very real problem, but the solution is pretty easy. Instead of using just one large flywheel, use many smaller ones.
There's an idea. Just make the smaller flywheels, the size of, um, TURNSTILES.....
OK, there's no 802.11b card and you'll have to dial in to your network, but as of last week the Kyocera Smartphone QCP-6035 from Sprint PCS was $149 - cheap just for the built-in Palm. New Sprint PCS subscribers (as of last week at least) also got a $50 rebate on the unit.
Don't forget to search eBay by misspelled words -- some eBay sellers are complett idiots!
Only the U.S. opposes a ban on land slime.
Go to law school, pass the bar exam and take on people who had things-that-shouldn't-happen-here happen to them as clients. There is no shortage of such people.
According to the specs, the unit will produce 0.3 oz of 140 degree-F. water per minute. Therefore, it should only take 15 minutes to brew one Standard 5 Oz. Cup of coffee. Now, if they can only get the CD-ROM drive to double as a cupholder....
Regardless of its provisions, any bill on the subject of telecom which is passed by Congress will cause your phone and cable bill to go up.
Has any attorney ever actually gotten in trouble because he posted legal opinion to the Internet and some butthead thought that it created an attorney-client relationship or constituted legal advice? I am a lawyer, and I post stuff from time to time, and I don't choose to .sig my posts with long disclaimers -- because commmon sense should tell you that my post, however opinionated or lawyerlike, doesn't create any duty or liability to readers. If someone knows of a court opinion that says otherwise, please cough it up.
I've wanted to see a device like this for a long time (a tombstone-resident voice playback module). You get some photovoltaic cells, some PROM (with the .wav of your voice burned into it), a piezo tweeter, some CMOS logic including a 4066 analog switch, and an optosensor/timer to turn the thing on and off. You epoxy-pot it in the top of the tombstone so that when a cemetery visitor puts their hand over the optosensor, 30 seconds of the dearly departed's voice comes out. Ought to be no trouble designing a unit that will last 250+ years.
Stop electing Republican presidents who appoint Republican federal judges. This includes those of you who passively elect Republicans by voting for spoiler candidates or not voting at all. Read the lower court opinion in Eldred. This opinion completely ignores the argument, raised by the plaintiffs, that a First Amendment right inheres in the public to have copyrighted material eventually become part of the public domain. The Court of Appeals opinion is typical of modern Republican judicial writing, belittling and mocking the Constitutional arguments raised by the plaintiffs. Fortunately for everyone except Microsoft and Disney, the grant of certiorari means that there are at least four votes in the Supreme Court to overturn the lower court's decision.
Actually, this was the correct story. Bill Gates was looking at some old computer history books and found the story of Adm. Grace Hopper finding a cooked moth amid a bank of relays in ENIAC. And Bill's NYC digs are tres grand, but like all other NYC apt dwellers, Bill too has cockroaches. So he assigned a team to work on the problem and they came up with Microsoft Cockroach. The newly released software causes the little-used PC internal piezo-tweeter speaker to periodically emit an ultrasonic noise that causes the little buggers to crawl into boxen and die. A beta tester on E. 96th observed his PC to operate erratically, he discovered his machine was full of dead roaches and the CPU became overheated when their little carcasses piled up to the point where they blocked the fan. The user dumped the load of creepy-crawlies onto the carpet and then called MS tech support -- only to be told, "They're features."
I'd like to find a type of numeric display which had white-on-black numbers and which may have been manufactured by a company called IEE. The display operated by mechanically moving strips of black plastic or mylar in front of an incandescent lamp, the digit to be displayed was a translucent portion of the mylar. These displays were once widely used in government and military applications, and into the mid '80s were used in the video switching systems of the CBS-TV network. Does anybody remember the exact name of these devices, how they worked, or whether or if any are available to hobbyists.