Actually, the title is simply an out-and-out lie. Requiring a permit is not the same as "banning."
This crap wouldn't be tolerated in comments and it shouldn't be tolerated in story headlines at least half of which seem to be misleading, inaccurate, or out and out lies these days.
No worries. I see how it sounded obnoxious. I really meant to be laughing at myself and my age, rather than your comment. I thought my story was simply the pre-RJ one, but the Wikipedia article makes it clear that the 2nd pair was actually used for several different purposes (as well as a second line, as you noted).
That's not what that article says at all.. Not sure what you're referring to, but if it's the Trimline Wikipedia article, then I'm sorry that I misled. I included that because it explains that there were models that needed additional, local power for their dialpad lights
Two models - one which had to plug into a nearby outlet, and one that used the 48V from the phone line itself. Nothing about a power transformer running on an additional pair. Doesn't make it untrue.
Although if I had the first model, I'd cut the transformer cord and do just that - run the power over an unused line - which is possible what some people did. It's good to know that's what you'd do, however it was also official policy. The transformers generally had no cord, per se, but two screw terminals. Quoting from here:
The Princess telephone and some Trimline telephones made by Western Electric use a transformer to light up the dial. In the old days, the telephone installer would simply plug the transformer into an outlet in an out of the way place, like a laundry room, and then wire the transformer to the yellow and black wires of the home telephone wiring.
This site has a link to PDFs of the "Bell System practices document" on several princess phones. I won't link to it directly to spare the owner, but search for "practices" if you're interested. The wiring diagrams all show (BK) and (Y) as connected to the "DIAL LIGHT TRNSF".
I didn't mean for this to be a controversial statement, just a bit of history. If you have some first hand knowledge of the situation that differs from my first-hand knowledge, by all means please share.
The red/green (or blue/blue-white) pair is for the first phone line; the yellow/black (or orange/orange-white) pair is for the second phone line. See the RJ11/14/25 standard. And for those of us who pre-date RJ11 (and residences where people often had multiple lines), we remember that the yellow/black pair was connected to a transformer which provided DC voltage to do things such as power the light-bulbs in, say, a Trimline handset.
I've used the Boeing Connexion service on Lufthansa and I'm blown away that they discontinued it due to lack of interest. I would pay an extra $50 to have Internet on an 8+ hour flight, easily.
The Wikipedia article cites satellite and ground stations, which makes sense as ping latencies were large (like two seconds+, if I remember correctly). Playing WoW or Second Life probably wouldn't work out so well.
This is not measuring the action potential caused by the firing of a single neuron, as the writeup seems to indicate. This is measuring the aggregate signal from tens of thousands of neurons. The typical recording grid is a flexible material (silicone?) with a grid of circular electrodes about 5mm in diameter. The surgeon can place the grid on the cortical surface or cut off a strip and push it into a sulcus. Clearly not a single-cell recording.
I agree with the issue of dynamic range. I'm vastly more interested in greater dynamic range than in greater resolution.
However, when comparing cameras to human eyes you need to keep some things in mind. Your eye is constantly moving and the resolution is not constant across the field of view. Fovial high-resolution vision covers about the width of your thumbnail held at arm's length. You think that you're seeing a high-res scene because when you're interested in something, your gaze moves towards it. If you stare at this article, however, and without moving your eyes *think* about the rest of your field of view (e.g. your officemate sitting next to you), you'll notice that he or she is quite blurred. If you fixate on the middle of the screen, can you tell what time the clock in the corner says?
This serves to bolster your point, however I think that comparing biological vision to standard, static conventional photographic technology is comparing apples to oranges. It's a fun metaphor, but they're really quite different.
> The only reason for US and UK banks not to use it is outright incompetence.
I'm guessing that you're not American. Banks in the United States are entirely driven by market forces. Until they have a *financial or legal incentive* to implement something, they will not do so. It has nothing to do with incompetence, it has to do with what will and will not make them money. Either a major bank has to be sued and lose a LOT of money (millions, such as implementing a proper security system will cost) or laws have to be passed requiring it. Look for the latter once a Senator is scammed, heavily, and not before.
1. The U.S. does poorly at the high school level, so students are "behind" in college and play catch up.
2. Programming contests may be biased. I did them in high school and my team was consistently ranked in the top 5 in the US and I was consistently a member of that team. However, by the time I reached graduate school in computer science at a top engineering university, I didn't have time to practice and play programming games. When I wasn't working on class work, I had serious research commitments. No one I know participiated in these things, so you can be sure that some of America's top talent was missing. I'm guessing that students at the other presitigious American tech schools were similarly engaged in either research work or making money. When I was an undergrad, I had the usual 5-course a semester engineering load and two jobs. I never considered entering programming contests, let alone practicing for them -- I had plenty of programming to do and I didn't need an aritificial ego boost.
If there's an American problem here it's that we need to spend more money on middle and high school education (or find a free way to fix it) and we need to encourage companies to think beyond the next financial quarter.
The site is registered to the same entity that holds the main Vonage.com registration and it doesn't (currently) say anything about buying the domain. Maybe you hit it right at the start before they shut off domain parking.
I think that it's a matter of attitude, also. The referenced security blog says:
We're going to continue to look into this but remind you also that safe browsing practices can
help here, like only visiting trusted websites, etc.
The idea that the user should be careful about which sites they browse to is insane. It's hard to imagine a corporate culture that thinks this way, if it's a pervasive attitude, ever producing a reasonably secure product.
It's one thing to expect the user not to download an executable and then run it as Administrator. It's quite another to expect people to be "careful" which Google hits they click on.
According to RIM's webmaster, the reason that a web download of Google Talk for Blackberry (http://www.blackberry.com/GoogleTalk) requires IE is that this and future Blackberry applications will be installed directly via an ActiveX control. Since Blackberry Desktop is no longer "a required part of the BlackBerry solution," Internet Explorer is and they're not packaging software to be installed with BB Desktop.
I'm going to keep an old, virus infested Windows PC lying around.
Do you have actual knowledge that these patents "survive[d] so much previous scrutiny" or is this the first actual challenge at the patent office?
The previous challenge was in court which, as far as I know, came to the conclusion that RIM infringed the patents, not that the patents were valid. What seems to be happening is a race between the patent review process and the legal process.
The USPTO has a history of issuing patents for which there exists prior art both to "little guys" and "big guys." The resulting process of then having those patents invalidated can take years. All throughout the 1980's, the Patent Office refused to hire people with Computer Science backgrounds. I assume that they eventually relented, but this was after years and years of software patent review by people with Electrical Engineering backgrounds and virtually no software experience.
This was addressed in an article that I read recently. The indication was that the DoJ is conservative with their requests because of the FISA court. i.e., they don't ask for things that they're not going to receive. So there's some thought behind it. You can't take it as random chance and say that 5/20,000 is the fraction of all possible requests that would be denied. It's only the fraction denied of those that were actually made.
I didn't see the specific "ethically difficult" tasks that they were proposing, but pain research that involves *causing* physical pain *is* done and IRB approved. One way to cause moderate pain without physical damage is to inject capsaicin (the heat inducing oil in chili peppers) under the skin. In the article's description of the ethical difficulties, the problems cited (radiopharmaceuticals, plastic facial mask, IV lines) are somewhat specific to PET scanning and wouldn't be experienced in an fMRI setting.
If you're bored, go to http://www.pubmed.gov/ and search for "coghill" and "pain" and you'll see one researcher's body of work.
Some of this was funded by the US National Institute for Dental Research (part of NIH), which I always found amusing.
Honestly, I find this entire issue baffling. I'm baffled as to why this is an issue. I have never, ever considered a book to be anything other than the opinion of the author. On the other hand, I do EXPECT a newspaper or magazine to be factual. With a newspaper or magazine, you're putting your trust in the publisher. Most of the time, I have no idea who the author of an article even is. But when I read, say, Papoulis's "Probability, Random Variables, and Stochastic Processes," I trust the content because I respect Papoulis, not McGraw-Hill.
"Protandim" does not exist, at all, in MEDLINE (www.pubmed.gov), which means that there is essentially zero peer reviewed medical research on the drug, at least under its brand name.
I had actually never seen the error message before:
> The following term was not found and ignored: protandim.
This work presently under discussion, at least, seems to involve a published line of investigation.
Which is a nice thought, however what we saw in the last four years of Bushtopia is that anything that impedes a company's ability to make a buck will be opposed.
Here's a sample Republican press release about a future, hypothetical Democratic attempt to expand the FCRA, as you suggest:
``Democrats want to take away your right to pay less at Best Buy. Support the President, God, and your country by opposing the Democrats' attempt to charge YOU more MONEY.''
Yes, of course Google has a right, as a company, to set their own policy. It's just that people have presumed that they were getting the best results for their search and they'll stop presuming that about Google if it becomes an arm of the right-wing government.
Now, the more interesting thing is the fact that there are, in fact, other nations on the planet. So, follow the downfall of the US:
government lies -> government alters the media and information sources to support their lies -> top engineering and science talent stop flocking to the US from elsewhere -> top engineering and science talent flee the US for elsewhere -> number of engineering and science innovations created within the country drops -> military superiority drops as we end up needing to buy technological advances from other countries and do so at their whim ->
Shall I continue?
Step #3 is well underway.
(Background: I'm an American patriot. I grew up in and was educated about the history of a very different country than the one in which I currently reside. Unlike the current administration, I do not think that the system of government that was, quite carefully at times, built over the past 228+ years was such a mistake that we can, without careful thought, overturn all of its checks and balances (see: limits on how much media one company can own, separation of chuch and state, etc.)
Everything I've read today says that *OSDN* has set up the fund, and that their *goal* is $10M, but they currently have $3M which includes an *unspecified* amount by each of Intel and IBM. How does that translate into "Intel and IBM set up $10M fund?"
How about laser transmission between the two buildings? Two years ago when I was busy helping to kill a dot-com, we needed to move about two blocks away in Manhattan, but apparently our T1 would require digging up Broadway as that part of Silicon Alley was having a shortage of buried copper. In any case, I don't remember the company, but our network guys got a laser system installed that worked quite fabulously. Only real hitch was when a construction worker on the roof unplugged our device to plug in some power tools. We ran our network as well as IP phones serving 200+ people over the system and it worked quite well.
I don't think that anyone has mentioned Sensable Technologies' (http://www.sensable.com) Phantom. And no, I'm not an investor. I used one of these six years ago and was blown away. It's a haptic (touch/feel) rendering device that consists of a jointed arm with motors at each joint, covering each degree of freedom, and a big amplifier to drive the motors. You program a physical model that drives the motors, so someone poking into your virtual world with the stick at the end of the jointed arm, will feel infinite resistance normal to the surface of a hard "object." But, if it's smooth and slippery, they'll get little resistance to motion along the surface, etc. It's difficult to describe appropriately -- it was one of the coolest technology demos that I've seen.
One demo was called, I think, Jell-O Blocks. Imagine a setup like a tiny hockey rink with a block of Jell-O on the ice. When you touch the Jell-O, you can feel the pointer squish into it and if you keep pressing, you can send the block sailing across the ice. If you sit there, you might feel a thud against your pointer as the block bounces off of the opposite wall and then smacks into your pointer.
These used to be quite expensive ($20K, I think), but I suspect that they've come down in price. Anyone use one recently?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the title is simply an out-and-out lie. Requiring a permit is not the same as "banning."
This crap wouldn't be tolerated in comments and it shouldn't be tolerated in story headlines at least half of which seem to be misleading, inaccurate, or out and out lies these days.
No worries. I see how it sounded obnoxious. I really meant to be laughing at myself and my age, rather than your comment. I thought my story was simply the pre-RJ one, but the Wikipedia article makes it clear that the 2nd pair was actually used for several different purposes (as well as a second line, as you noted).
This site has a link to PDFs of the "Bell System practices document" on several princess phones. I won't link to it directly to spare the owner, but search for "practices" if you're interested. The wiring diagrams all show (BK) and (Y) as connected to the "DIAL LIGHT TRNSF".
I didn't mean for this to be a controversial statement, just a bit of history. If you have some first hand knowledge of the situation that differs from my first-hand knowledge, by all means please share.
I've used the Boeing Connexion service on Lufthansa and I'm blown away that they discontinued it due to lack of interest. I would pay an extra $50 to have Internet on an 8+ hour flight, easily.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connexion_by_Boeing
The Wikipedia article cites satellite and ground stations, which makes sense as ping latencies were large (like two seconds+, if I remember correctly). Playing WoW or Second Life probably wouldn't work out so well.
This is not measuring the action potential caused by the firing of a single neuron, as the writeup seems to indicate. This is measuring the aggregate signal from tens of thousands of neurons. The typical recording grid is a flexible material (silicone?) with a grid of circular electrodes about 5mm in diameter. The surgeon can place the grid on the cortical surface or cut off a strip and push it into a sulcus. Clearly not a single-cell recording.
According to the numbers quoted here http://www.gaspricewatch.com/usgastaxes.asp, taxes account for a small part of the price of a gallon of gas.
I agree with the issue of dynamic range. I'm vastly more interested in greater dynamic range than in greater resolution.
However, when comparing cameras to human eyes you need to keep some things in mind. Your eye is constantly moving and the resolution is not constant across the field of view. Fovial high-resolution vision covers about the width of your thumbnail held at arm's length. You think that you're seeing a high-res scene because when you're interested in something, your gaze moves towards it. If you stare at this article, however, and without moving your eyes *think* about the rest of your field of view (e.g. your officemate sitting next to you), you'll notice that he or she is quite blurred. If you fixate on the middle of the screen, can you tell what time the clock in the corner says?
This serves to bolster your point, however I think that comparing biological vision to standard, static conventional photographic technology is comparing apples to oranges. It's a fun metaphor, but they're really quite different.
Tired of hacking sites only to steal customer information for a single company? Ever wish you could compromise them all at once?
Well, now you can. With i-names! Sign up today!
> The only reason for US and UK banks not to use it is outright incompetence.
I'm guessing that you're not American. Banks in the United States are entirely driven by market forces. Until they have a *financial or legal incentive* to implement something, they will not do so. It has nothing to do with incompetence, it has to do with what will and will not make them money. Either a major bank has to be sued and lose a LOT of money (millions, such as implementing a proper security system will cost) or laws have to be passed requiring it. Look for the latter once a Senator is scammed, heavily, and not before.
Two observations about this stuff:
1. The U.S. does poorly at the high school level, so students are "behind" in college and play catch up.
2. Programming contests may be biased. I did them in high school and my team was consistently ranked in the top 5 in the US and I was consistently a member of that team. However, by the time I reached graduate school in computer science at a top engineering university, I didn't have time to practice and play programming games. When I wasn't working on class work, I had serious research commitments. No one I know participiated in these things, so you can be sure that some of America's top talent was missing. I'm guessing that students at the other presitigious American tech schools were similarly engaged in either research work or making money. When I was an undergrad, I had the usual 5-course a semester engineering load and two jobs. I never considered entering programming contests, let alone practicing for them -- I had plenty of programming to do and I didn't need an aritificial ego boost.
If there's an American problem here it's that we need to spend more money on middle and high school education (or find a free way to fix it) and we need to encourage companies to think beyond the next financial quarter.
The site is registered to the same entity that holds the main Vonage.com registration and it doesn't (currently) say anything about buying the domain. Maybe you hit it right at the start before they shut off domain parking.
I think that it's a matter of attitude, also. The referenced security blog says:
We're going to continue to look into this but remind you also that safe browsing practices can
help here, like only visiting trusted websites, etc.
The idea that the user should be careful about which sites they browse to is insane. It's hard to imagine a corporate culture that thinks this way, if it's a pervasive attitude, ever producing a reasonably secure product.
It's one thing to expect the user not to download an executable and then run it as Administrator. It's quite another to expect people to be "careful" which Google hits they click on.
According to RIM's webmaster, the reason that a web download of Google Talk for Blackberry (http://www.blackberry.com/GoogleTalk) requires IE is that this and future Blackberry applications will be installed directly via an ActiveX control. Since Blackberry Desktop is no longer "a required part of the BlackBerry solution," Internet Explorer is and they're not packaging software to be installed with BB Desktop.
I'm going to keep an old, virus infested Windows PC lying around.
Do you have actual knowledge that these patents "survive[d] so much previous scrutiny" or is this the first actual challenge at the patent office?
The previous challenge was in court which, as far as I know, came to the conclusion that RIM infringed the patents, not that the patents were valid. What seems to be happening is a race between the patent review process and the legal process.
The USPTO has a history of issuing patents for which there exists prior art both to "little guys" and "big guys." The resulting process of then having those patents invalidated can take years. All throughout the 1980's, the Patent Office refused to hire people with Computer Science backgrounds. I assume that they eventually relented, but this was after years and years of software patent review by people with Electrical Engineering backgrounds and virtually no software experience.
This was addressed in an article that I read recently. The indication was that the DoJ is conservative with their requests because of the FISA court. i.e., they don't ask for things that they're not going to receive. So there's some thought behind it. You can't take it as random chance and say that 5/20,000 is the fraction of all possible requests that would be denied. It's only the fraction denied of those that were actually made.
I didn't see the specific "ethically difficult" tasks that they were proposing, but pain research that involves *causing* physical pain *is* done and IRB approved. One way to cause moderate pain without physical damage is to inject capsaicin (the heat inducing oil in chili peppers) under the skin. In the article's description of the ethical difficulties, the problems cited (radiopharmaceuticals, plastic facial mask, IV lines) are somewhat specific to PET scanning and wouldn't be experienced in an fMRI setting.
If you're bored, go to http://www.pubmed.gov/ and search for "coghill" and "pain" and you'll see one researcher's body of work.
Some of this was funded by the US National Institute for Dental Research (part of NIH), which I always found amusing.
Honestly, I find this entire issue baffling. I'm baffled as to why this is an issue. I have never, ever considered a book to be anything other than the opinion of the author. On the other hand, I do EXPECT a newspaper or magazine to be factual. With a newspaper or magazine, you're putting your trust in the publisher. Most of the time, I have no idea who the author of an article even is. But when I read, say, Papoulis's "Probability, Random Variables, and Stochastic Processes," I trust the content because I respect Papoulis, not McGraw-Hill.
"Protandim" does not exist, at all, in MEDLINE (www.pubmed.gov), which means that there is essentially zero peer reviewed medical research on the drug, at least under its brand name.
I had actually never seen the error message before:
> The following term was not found and ignored: protandim.
This work presently under discussion, at least, seems to involve a published line of investigation.
Which is a nice thought, however what we saw in the last four years of Bushtopia is that anything that impedes a company's ability to make a buck will be opposed.
Here's a sample Republican press release about a future, hypothetical Democratic attempt to expand the FCRA, as you suggest:
``Democrats want to take away your right to pay less at Best Buy. Support the President, God, and your country by opposing the Democrats' attempt to charge YOU more MONEY.''
Yes, of course Google has a right, as a company, to set their own policy. It's just that people have presumed that they were getting the best results for their search and they'll stop presuming that about Google if it becomes an arm of the right-wing government.
Now, the more interesting thing is the fact that there are, in fact, other nations on the planet. So, follow the downfall of the US:
government lies ->
government alters the media and information sources to support their lies ->
top engineering and science talent stop flocking to the US from elsewhere ->
top engineering and science talent flee the US for elsewhere ->
number of engineering and science innovations created within the country drops ->
military superiority drops as we end up needing to buy technological advances from other countries and do so at their whim ->
Shall I continue?
Step #3 is well underway.
(Background: I'm an American patriot. I grew up in and was educated about the history of a very different country than the one in which I currently reside. Unlike the current administration, I do not think that the system of government that was, quite carefully at times, built over the past 228+ years was such a mistake that we can, without careful thought, overturn all of its checks and balances (see: limits on how much media one company can own, separation of chuch and state, etc.)
You see how susceptible we are to suggestion? Yes, I meant OSDL, not OSDN. :-)
Everything I've read today says that *OSDN* has set up the fund, and that their *goal* is $10M, but they currently have $3M which includes an *unspecified* amount by each of Intel and IBM. How does that translate into "Intel and IBM set up $10M fund?"
Or did I read the wrong sites?
How about laser transmission between the two buildings? Two years ago when I was busy helping to kill a dot-com, we needed to move about two blocks away in Manhattan, but apparently our T1 would require digging up Broadway as that part of Silicon Alley was having a shortage of buried copper. In any case, I don't remember the company, but our network guys got a laser system installed that worked quite fabulously. Only real hitch was when a construction worker on the roof unplugged our device to plug in some power tools. We ran our network as well as IP phones serving 200+ people over the system and it worked quite well.
I don't think that anyone has mentioned Sensable Technologies' (http://www.sensable.com) Phantom. And no, I'm not an investor. I used one of these six years ago and was blown away. It's a haptic (touch/feel) rendering device that consists of a jointed arm with motors at each joint, covering each degree of freedom, and a big amplifier to drive the motors. You program a physical model that drives the motors, so someone poking into your virtual world with the stick at the end of the jointed arm, will feel infinite resistance normal to the surface of a hard "object." But, if it's smooth and slippery, they'll get little resistance to motion along the surface, etc. It's difficult to describe appropriately -- it was one of the coolest technology demos that I've seen.
One demo was called, I think, Jell-O Blocks. Imagine a setup like a tiny hockey rink with a block of Jell-O on the ice. When you touch the Jell-O, you can feel the pointer squish into it and if you keep pressing, you can send the block sailing across the ice. If you sit there, you might feel a thud against your pointer as the block bounces off of the opposite wall and then smacks into your pointer.
These used to be quite expensive ($20K, I think), but I suspect that they've come down in price. Anyone use one recently?