Not sure exactly what the situation is like with XBox Media Center these days, but the last time I looked into it, it wouldn't run a real MythTV frontend. It ran a psuedo-MythTV thing, where it would play the contents of a Samba share that had MythTV recordings on it, but I didn't think it would run the interface and basically work like a real MythTV box. That's important if you're going to have nontechnical people using a system.
Also, if you use a hardware MPEG-2 decoder (any of the Hauppauge PVR-x50s, which I think most people do for SDTV right now), the XBMC won't work, at least according to the wiki here. You have to transcode everything to some other format first, because the Hauppauge cards' output will just choke the XBox for some reason. (I don't understand why, though -- it's 4.5Mb/s MPEG-2 video, shouldn't be any harder to decode than a DVD...)
I'm not crapping on XBMC -- it's a neat system, and more than once I've come very close to buying an XBox purely to play with it -- but you can have a lot more flexibility with the power that you get with an Apple TV. Given that up-front hardware costs really are pretty small when you divide them out over a few years that you'll hopefully use an entertainment system, every day, a lot of people are willing to spend the cost initially for the hardware.
(Also -- Apple TV will do highdef, or probably will once they get the software issues worked out; a lot of people are purchasing hardware with HDTV in mind. Personally though, I think this is less important than having a seamless interface that's the same as all the other MythTV units in one's house, though.)
Although I suspect that 100MPH being the average speed there is a load of bull, based on what several other people have asserted about the road in question, but even if that was true, that doesn't mean that she needed to be in that lane, driving that speed.
Doing so was her decision -- if doing that meant that she was so stressed out that she unthinkingly obeyed the GPS system telling her to do something that any reasonable person would know was a terribly bad idea, then she made an error in judgment.
As for the second part of your comment, I don't think name-calling is a particularly effective nor convincing tactic. You might try, I don't know, attempting to construct some sort of rational argument in the future. But whatever works for you.
The woman that won against mcdonalds suffered severe burns (more than you'd get from normal coffee) and sued for medical costs (they'd settled hundreds of times for the same issue). The jury fined them one day's coffee sales, as a symbolic way of punishing mcdonalds. This about was later reduced by the judge. All told, this isn't a frivolous suit.
IMO, the suit was basically frivolous, at least in proportion to the damages that were awarded. What McDonalds did wrong was really, really piss off the jury.
What they got punished for really wasn't the action itself, but the assertion after the fact, that they wouldn't pay for cosmetic/reconstructive surgery on that particular woman, because she was fairly old. (It was on her inner thighs and one assumes genitals.) I don't know what the exact remark or statement was, but there were a lot of people on the jury who thought McDonald's position boiled down to "hey, she's old and basically ugly, she's not getting any except from her fat hubby anyway, she's not going on America's Next Top Model; why the hell should we pay to fix up her thighs?" (Or at least, this was the implication given by the woman's lawyers regarding McDonalds -- this is a lawsuit we're talking about; perception is everything.)
The jury was pretty pissed at McDonalds' attitude throughout the whole business, and they decided to stick it to them.
I suspect if McDonalds had played the situation better, they probably could have gotten out of it for a lot less. But when you piss off the jury or look like the 'bad guy,' that's kinda what happens.
I don't buy for a minute that the case was really decided based on the merits of negligence; it was pretty much a referendum on McDonalds' treatment of that woman after the fact and their legal team's attitude generally.
It's not gene, it's a results of having to take a decision in a stress situation. And the stress was caused by her nto being experienced what "stop the car" might mean and how she should react.
Strongly disagree. If she was so keyed up and stressed out so as to unthinkingly obey any instruction issued out of a machine on the dashboard, then she probably shouldn't have been driving. Certainly she shouldn't have been speeding well in excess of the limit, in the fast lane, on an unfamiliar motorway, on a route she'd never taken before.
She put herself in a situation where she made an error of judgment. That's not the machine's fault, it's her fault for not having the foresight to avoid the situation.
She was sitting at the controls of the car. Barring mechanical failure of the car to obey her controls, she's responsible for everything that it does, and that responsibility extends to judging whether she's fit to operate it or not.
(Now, there's a separate issue here, which is whether the possible collision which might come as a result of coming to a dead stop in the fast lane of a motorway would be the fault of the driver stopping, or of the driver following so closely as to be unable to stop their vehicle before it collided with the stopped one; that's a slightly more complex area and might be argued either way, although I suspect it would be on her for stopping unnecessarily.)
Blaming a GPS unit for a car crash is right up there with blaming the beers you just drank for crashing when you were drunk -- it may in some technical sense be true that it caused the accident, but the buck stops with you for putting yourself in a situation where you were adversely affected. Abrogating personal responsibility in favor of blaming inanimate objects (or chemicals, or atmospheric/weather phenomena, or whatever) is dangerous -- the responsibility always ultimately rests with the human being sitting at the controls, to either be safe, or to not enter into a situation that's outside their capacity for dealing with it. Not knowing your own limits isn't an excuse.
How do we not have the expertise to build one? I can see not having a factory big enough, but engineers are smart, the plans already exist.
Just because you have the plans doesn't mean you know how to build something. Any good machinist can tell you this.
There's a lot of 'tribal knowledge' that goes into the construction of something as big as a spacecraft, or for that matter anything really big and complicated. (You could say the same thing about a nuclear submarine or a microprocessor.) Fire all the people involved, and even with all their documentation, it can take years and millions of dollars to get a new group of people back up to where the old team was -- there's just so much that can be written down, too many little bits and pieces of information critical to making something that only exist in various people's heads.
The Saturn V was produced by a team of people (including von Braun) who had in some cases been working on rockets for decades; it was the culmination of years of work and a series of other projects just on the NASA side, to say nothing of the thousands of contractors who were basically employed full-time on rocketry-related projects. Virtually all of the people involved have since retired, and probably many of them are dead; even with whatever documentation was saved, the knowledge that they had (probably thousands or millions of man-years of experience) is immeasurable and would take a vast national effort to rebuild.
It's not that today's engineers aren't good; it's just that they'd be starting out at a fairly sizable disadvantage, and would probably be working under very harsh expectations ("well, you did it once, how hard can it be?"), which is one of the reasons why I suspect NASA is so reluctant to look back at old designs compared to making new ones from scratch.
Rebuilding a new Saturn V, like rebuilding a brand new fast-passenger steam locomotive, or WWII bomber, seems trivial on the surface because we know what the final product looked like, and have all the schematics; but what's lacking is all the institutional knowledge that went into the actual realization of that design in metal.
Anyone remember packet radio? Packet Radio predates richochet by at least 10 years.
Packet radio, however, is hardly dead -- yeah, it's not exactly impressive to tell people "hey, I'm on the internet...over a radio" anymore, but there are still a lot of people doing some very impressive mobile stuff with APRS on VHF, or long-distance connectivity over HF.
Not long ago I went to a lecture by a ham who had spent some time down in Central America building an email system based on packet radio for some humanitarian workers down there. It was a pretty neat system -- VHF connections for the local links, and then an HF connection for the long haul back to the 'States. Given that the previous system had involved writing down messages and handing them to a ham operator to transmit via CW or SSB voice, even a few hundred baud (transmitting 24/7) was a pretty dramatic step up.
Only thing I didn't like about the system is that the software is all very Windows-centric, and some of the protocols they want to use are proprietary and/or patented (which I think is anathema to the entire concept of Amateur Radio and ought to be prohibited generally), sometimes requiring very expensive hardware modems. Not cool.
But anyway, if you haven't looked into packet in a while, and this goes not only for current hams but also anyone generally interested in computers or communications, it's definitely worth a look. Amateur radio in general is in the midst of a transition, where a lot of the people more resistant to change are dying off, and there's a lot of room for software hackers to get in on the ground floor and do some neat stuff.
Maybe that's the rate that the light bulbs burn out at, and they're installing these things at the same time to save labor?
(I'm sure if we knew the number of total streetlamps in Cambridge, and the average lifespan of a Na- or Hg-vapor lamp, someone around here could probably compute the average number per year that would need replacement.)
Um, so you've stopped paying your taxes, then? Because that's where the actual money for the war comes from. You know, for things like diesel fuel, equipment, ammunition, salaries, etc.
Any money that you might have donated voluntarily would have just been for things to make the soldiers' lives slightly more pleasant and/or easier.
The government doesn't need your donations or consent in order to prosecute a war. Stop paying, and eventually they'll just come to your house with guns and take your stuff.
It's all so backward. What we need is to run most of Internet Explorer in a tightly sandboxed environment on the user's machine, so that when you close the window, any browser damage goes away. That would actually work.
Or, just not run Internet Explorer, which as far as I can tell, is the most effective solution overall.
And the only thing a person who wants to distribute malware neeeds to do is some minimal robots.txt manipulation. The pages with the "bait" content can still be "crawlable" by google while the malware may sit in areas which have been made non-crawlable.
Seems like the solution to that is obvious -- don't obey robots.txt for the purposes of the malware scan.
I'm not sure that robots.txt is legally binding anyway, except perhaps where it relates to an implicit permission to cache content (and even there I don't think the courts have really established any tests that use it, outside of the Netherlands anyway), so Google could just have its crawlers go through everything on the malware scan, but then only index and cache the parts that aren't blocked off. If a page had any malicious content in an area prohibited by robots.txt, then you could assume that the main site was probably bad (since the person creating the robots.txt file specifically crafted it to hide the malware) and you could flag the whole site as possibly dangerous.
Your attitude is fairly typical, but contains a very troubling assumption -- namely that if the global warming phenomenon currently ongoing is not anthropogenic, that somehow we don't need to worry about it.
I think this is completely false, and quite dangerous. Furthermore, I think that the debate over what has caused global warming, has really just become a distraction to the real issue, which is quite simply "what the hell are we going to do about it?"
It doesn't really matter whether the cause of the warming is anthropogenic or not; unless you're going to debate that the planet is not getting warmer -- and it doesn't seem like you are -- we still have a serious problem on our hands. It's a little academic to most people whether it's caused by power production, or automobiles, or cow farts, or energy fluctuations in the Sun, or a lack of pirates.
Telling people in Bangladesh who are up to their knees in seawater that "hey, we're just coming out of a geological cold phase!" isn't particularly useful. Or when the power grid and water supplies in the whole Eastern half of the U.S. fail because the average summer temperature is up in the mid-to-high 90s (or higher), saying "it was a lot worse a few million years ago" isn't getting us any closer to a solution.
The causes of the warming phenomenon are only interesting insofar as they give us possible solutions for dealing with the problem -- because it's not CO2 that's the problem, it's the warming that's the problem. If you don't think it's anthropogenic CO2 that's the cause of the warming, fine, but that doesn't mean that the actual problem just goes away because we didn't cause it, which seems to be the attitude taken by many of the anti-anthropogenic-global-warming side. We still have to deal with the same consequences even if the cause isn't anthropogenic. (And if it's not anthropogenic, then we're probably screwed even further, because it's probably a lot more difficult to reverse the process.)
I have always heard the same thing, FWIW. That "catching cold" wasn't actually caused by being physiologically cold, but occurred more often in the winter because people tend to be inside, packed together, with the houses/buildings all sealed up, basically creating little petri dishes for bacteria to thrive in.
I can imagine that if you were really cold, for a long time -- like, hypothermic -- that perhaps this would weaken your body's immune system to the point where you would become more susceptible to disease. However, I really don't think that there's much credence to the old adages about "putting your hat on so you don't catch cold!"
You mean, like the General Motors EV1, available for sale at your local dealership?
Oh, wait, it's not available anywhere, because GM killed it, even though there were people pretty much lining up to buy them. Instead they recalled all the prototypes, scrapped the project, and destroyed most of the test cars. (Actually 'destroy' puts it lightly -- they annihilated them, like they were really trying to wipe them out without possibly leaving any trace or evidence around. They removed all the key components, crushed them, and then immediately had the crushed hulks melted down. The only extant vehicles have been lobotomized via removal of key components.)
The auto industry -- and I think this goes for both the U.S. and most of the other ones -- have very little interest in anything that's going to fundamentally alter or shake up the landscape. Electric cars, high-mileage cars, fuel-cell cars... they're all vaguely threatening if you're a dinosauric car manufacturer.
Well, I guess I might be exposing my pro-IBM bias here (good God, I can't believe I just said that -- I remember when you pretty much had to curse or spit after saying that name), but I think that IBM would probably be hurt a lot less due to the 'obviousness' ruling than Amazon would.
Just look at the two companies -- IBM has a vast research division, which basically exists to invent stuff and turn out patents (and other things useful to IBM). Amazon is an online bookstore. Whatever patents they have, were probably found/invented/discovered more or less accidentally, while building themselves up. I think that there's a far greater chance that Amazon's patents would be ruled obvious than IBM's, because many of Amazon's patented inventions might be perfectly obvious to anyone else who was engaged in what they were doing... they just happened to be there first because of their positioning during and following the dot-com boom.
To be frank, I think the type of thing that IBM does these days is really what the patent system is supposed to encourage and protect -- IBM probably wouldn't spend the billions of dollars that it does on original research, if it wasn't able to capitalize on and monetize the inventions produced. If you look at the history of that company, they've produced a lot of pretty neat stuff. Leaving aside their past anticompetitive behavior, the world is probably a better place for IBM Research; any patent reform which eliminates the impetus to do what they're doing, would be IMO a mistake. However, Amazon, in contrast, seems to just be patenting stuff in order to protect their business model from competition. While that difference may not seem particularly important, I believe that creating a patent system that rewards original research while not rewarding blatant business-model protectionism is the key to reform.
is this any less plausible than talking serpents, men walking on water, water turning to wine, immaculate conception, talking bushfires, resurrection or giants that live 800 years but leave no bones?
Yeah, but the Christers aren't out to charge you a cool $1.5M or whatever to hear their ridiculous story. In fact, they'll pretty much tell it to anyone who'll listen, for free. They also tend not to sue people for reprinting their texts (which, again, they will send you, for free).
Doesn't make it any less ridiculous, but it's a lot cheaper.
Maybe make it like the NFL draft- if New Hampshire wants to be first so badly, make them give some concessions to the state that got the highest turnout in order to swap places.
What sort of 'concessions' would New Hampshire make to, say, Delaware? A tanker truck full of maple syrup?
(And just in case anyone is curious, here's a breakdown of voter turnout as percent of population, for the 1996 election. South Dakota pretty much swept it with over 60% of the eligible voting-age population [not even just registered voters].)
Working at a computer center, I think the best design I've seen was the "Big Red Button" was actually 2 buttons, spaced far enough apart that you couldn't hit them both at once with on hand, but close enough together that they were obviously related. They were also much higher off the raised floor than any other switches, and clearly marked.
Just as trivia, that type of circuit is common on industrial equipment (think of the big press from the end scene in Terminator 1) and is called a Two-Hand No-Tie-Down. Basically there are two switches, and they have to both be depressed within a certain interval in order to close the circuit (generally 0.5s or so). If you "tie down" one of the switches, or have something leaning against it, or whatever, pressing the second switch won't trigger (otherwise it would be just a simple AND gate).
The circuits to do it are pretty standard and easily available. What's cooler, is that you can actually get a basically-identical circuit that uses compressed air or other gas instead of electricity (for use in chemical plants and other explosive atmospheres). One of the cooler things I've gotten to see made was a pneumatic "circuit board" cut out of Lucite for this purpose. I've always thought they would make a nice demonstration device for teaching kids about electronic circuits.
In Canada we use hand counted pen and paper ballots and the results make the 11 o'clock news. I don't see why the US can't do the same. It's not like vote counting is a serial process. It can be parallelized extremely well.
Um, how would we divert millions of dollars in taxpayer money to our cronies in the electronic-voting industry under this plan?
Unless those are special, patented, electronic pens, which only write in invisible ink that can only be displayed with a special reader, I don't think that plan will ever fly here.
Yeah someday they'll get Unicode support in Slashdot, but I wouldn't hold your breath. It'll be right after they come up with an "Edit" button on comments.
Could be worse; could be straight ASCII. At least we get accents this way. And the symbol. (We'll see if it disappears when I hit submit..)
You have listed my fondest dream: To be part of an abusive monopoly that replaced the abusive monopoly that I hated when I was a young college student....*sigh*
You could still get in on the ground floor -- I hear Google is hiring.
suggests to me that online applications would need to have similar or identical security access to locally installed applications. This seems, uh... possibly problematic.
Oh, come on... Microsoft's been doing that for years!
Not a good comparison. Those devices are unpopular because they're expensive and relatively easy to detect (it's a box sitting on your dashboard, in some cases producing visible flashes). A VAR, by definition, would require equipment pre-installed in everyone's cars, so the difference between someone who had fixed it to transmit false data and an regular one would just be a firmware or software modification. It would be cheap, it would be incredibly difficult to detect, and frankly it would be hard to prosecute (you could make the software wipe itself out under certain conditions, so if you got pulled over you could just dump it).
If those devices to trigger traffic lights were built into everyone's cars today, and could be enabled just by taking your car down to some shady body shop on the wrong side of town and paying some guy to reflash some firmware, you can bet a lot more people would be using them. It's a completely different risk/reward trade-off.
make it a felony. prosecute vehemently. problem solved. it's easy enough to detect.
Not going to work. How are you going to detect which car it's being broadcast from? You're talking about reliably pinpointing a moving target that's probably only putting out a sub-second burst, along with a lot of other cars that are also transmitting things. Not to mention that they're all metal objects, so the multipath would be hideous... you'd never be able to reliably locate which car was transmitting what. Sure, you could serialize the transmitters, but it would be trivial to spoof someone else's.
Besides, how are you going to afford all the DoD-esque equipment that's going to be required, everywhere, in order to spot abuse? And where do you want to divert the resources from in order to enforce it? Law enforcement and the courts are overburdened anyway.
A heavy-handed, judicial or legislative solution to this isn't going to work.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure exactly what the situation is like with XBox Media Center these days, but the last time I looked into it, it wouldn't run a real MythTV frontend. It ran a psuedo-MythTV thing, where it would play the contents of a Samba share that had MythTV recordings on it, but I didn't think it would run the interface and basically work like a real MythTV box. That's important if you're going to have nontechnical people using a system.
Also, if you use a hardware MPEG-2 decoder (any of the Hauppauge PVR-x50s, which I think most people do for SDTV right now), the XBMC won't work, at least according to the wiki here. You have to transcode everything to some other format first, because the Hauppauge cards' output will just choke the XBox for some reason. (I don't understand why, though -- it's 4.5Mb/s MPEG-2 video, shouldn't be any harder to decode than a DVD...)
I'm not crapping on XBMC -- it's a neat system, and more than once I've come very close to buying an XBox purely to play with it -- but you can have a lot more flexibility with the power that you get with an Apple TV. Given that up-front hardware costs really are pretty small when you divide them out over a few years that you'll hopefully use an entertainment system, every day, a lot of people are willing to spend the cost initially for the hardware.
(Also -- Apple TV will do highdef, or probably will once they get the software issues worked out; a lot of people are purchasing hardware with HDTV in mind. Personally though, I think this is less important than having a seamless interface that's the same as all the other MythTV units in one's house, though.)
Although I suspect that 100MPH being the average speed there is a load of bull, based on what several other people have asserted about the road in question, but even if that was true, that doesn't mean that she needed to be in that lane, driving that speed.
Doing so was her decision -- if doing that meant that she was so stressed out that she unthinkingly obeyed the GPS system telling her to do something that any reasonable person would know was a terribly bad idea, then she made an error in judgment.
As for the second part of your comment, I don't think name-calling is a particularly effective nor convincing tactic. You might try, I don't know, attempting to construct some sort of rational argument in the future. But whatever works for you.
The woman that won against mcdonalds suffered severe burns (more than you'd get from normal coffee) and sued for medical costs (they'd settled hundreds of times for the same issue). The jury fined them one day's coffee sales, as a symbolic way of punishing mcdonalds. This about was later reduced by the judge. All told, this isn't a frivolous suit.
IMO, the suit was basically frivolous, at least in proportion to the damages that were awarded. What McDonalds did wrong was really, really piss off the jury.
What they got punished for really wasn't the action itself, but the assertion after the fact, that they wouldn't pay for cosmetic/reconstructive surgery on that particular woman, because she was fairly old. (It was on her inner thighs and one assumes genitals.) I don't know what the exact remark or statement was, but there were a lot of people on the jury who thought McDonald's position boiled down to "hey, she's old and basically ugly, she's not getting any except from her fat hubby anyway, she's not going on America's Next Top Model; why the hell should we pay to fix up her thighs?" (Or at least, this was the implication given by the woman's lawyers regarding McDonalds -- this is a lawsuit we're talking about; perception is everything.)
The jury was pretty pissed at McDonalds' attitude throughout the whole business, and they decided to stick it to them.
I suspect if McDonalds had played the situation better, they probably could have gotten out of it for a lot less. But when you piss off the jury or look like the 'bad guy,' that's kinda what happens.
I don't buy for a minute that the case was really decided based on the merits of negligence; it was pretty much a referendum on McDonalds' treatment of that woman after the fact and their legal team's attitude generally.
It's not gene, it's a results of having to take a decision in a stress situation. And the stress was caused by her nto being experienced what "stop the car" might mean and how she should react.
Strongly disagree. If she was so keyed up and stressed out so as to unthinkingly obey any instruction issued out of a machine on the dashboard, then she probably shouldn't have been driving. Certainly she shouldn't have been speeding well in excess of the limit, in the fast lane, on an unfamiliar motorway, on a route she'd never taken before.
She put herself in a situation where she made an error of judgment. That's not the machine's fault, it's her fault for not having the foresight to avoid the situation.
She was sitting at the controls of the car. Barring mechanical failure of the car to obey her controls, she's responsible for everything that it does, and that responsibility extends to judging whether she's fit to operate it or not.
(Now, there's a separate issue here, which is whether the possible collision which might come as a result of coming to a dead stop in the fast lane of a motorway would be the fault of the driver stopping, or of the driver following so closely as to be unable to stop their vehicle before it collided with the stopped one; that's a slightly more complex area and might be argued either way, although I suspect it would be on her for stopping unnecessarily.)
Blaming a GPS unit for a car crash is right up there with blaming the beers you just drank for crashing when you were drunk -- it may in some technical sense be true that it caused the accident, but the buck stops with you for putting yourself in a situation where you were adversely affected. Abrogating personal responsibility in favor of blaming inanimate objects (or chemicals, or atmospheric/weather phenomena, or whatever) is dangerous -- the responsibility always ultimately rests with the human being sitting at the controls, to either be safe, or to not enter into a situation that's outside their capacity for dealing with it. Not knowing your own limits isn't an excuse.
How do we not have the expertise to build one? I can see not having a factory big enough, but engineers are smart, the plans already exist.
Just because you have the plans doesn't mean you know how to build something. Any good machinist can tell you this.
There's a lot of 'tribal knowledge' that goes into the construction of something as big as a spacecraft, or for that matter anything really big and complicated. (You could say the same thing about a nuclear submarine or a microprocessor.) Fire all the people involved, and even with all their documentation, it can take years and millions of dollars to get a new group of people back up to where the old team was -- there's just so much that can be written down, too many little bits and pieces of information critical to making something that only exist in various people's heads.
The Saturn V was produced by a team of people (including von Braun) who had in some cases been working on rockets for decades; it was the culmination of years of work and a series of other projects just on the NASA side, to say nothing of the thousands of contractors who were basically employed full-time on rocketry-related projects. Virtually all of the people involved have since retired, and probably many of them are dead; even with whatever documentation was saved, the knowledge that they had (probably thousands or millions of man-years of experience) is immeasurable and would take a vast national effort to rebuild.
It's not that today's engineers aren't good; it's just that they'd be starting out at a fairly sizable disadvantage, and would probably be working under very harsh expectations ("well, you did it once, how hard can it be?"), which is one of the reasons why I suspect NASA is so reluctant to look back at old designs compared to making new ones from scratch.
Rebuilding a new Saturn V, like rebuilding a brand new fast-passenger steam locomotive, or WWII bomber, seems trivial on the surface because we know what the final product looked like, and have all the schematics; but what's lacking is all the institutional knowledge that went into the actual realization of that design in metal.
Anyone remember packet radio? Packet Radio predates richochet by at least 10 years.
Packet radio, however, is hardly dead -- yeah, it's not exactly impressive to tell people "hey, I'm on the internet...over a radio" anymore, but there are still a lot of people doing some very impressive mobile stuff with APRS on VHF, or long-distance connectivity over HF.
Not long ago I went to a lecture by a ham who had spent some time down in Central America building an email system based on packet radio for some humanitarian workers down there. It was a pretty neat system -- VHF connections for the local links, and then an HF connection for the long haul back to the 'States. Given that the previous system had involved writing down messages and handing them to a ham operator to transmit via CW or SSB voice, even a few hundred baud (transmitting 24/7) was a pretty dramatic step up.
Only thing I didn't like about the system is that the software is all very Windows-centric, and some of the protocols they want to use are proprietary and/or patented (which I think is anathema to the entire concept of Amateur Radio and ought to be prohibited generally), sometimes requiring very expensive hardware modems. Not cool.
But anyway, if you haven't looked into packet in a while, and this goes not only for current hams but also anyone generally interested in computers or communications, it's definitely worth a look. Amateur radio in general is in the midst of a transition, where a lot of the people more resistant to change are dying off, and there's a lot of room for software hackers to get in on the ground floor and do some neat stuff.
Maybe that's the rate that the light bulbs burn out at, and they're installing these things at the same time to save labor?
(I'm sure if we knew the number of total streetlamps in Cambridge, and the average lifespan of a Na- or Hg-vapor lamp, someone around here could probably compute the average number per year that would need replacement.)
I've stopped donating money to the troops
Um, so you've stopped paying your taxes, then? Because that's where the actual money for the war comes from. You know, for things like diesel fuel, equipment, ammunition, salaries, etc.
Any money that you might have donated voluntarily would have just been for things to make the soldiers' lives slightly more pleasant and/or easier.
The government doesn't need your donations or consent in order to prosecute a war. Stop paying, and eventually they'll just come to your house with guns and take your stuff.
It's all so backward. What we need is to run most of Internet Explorer in a tightly sandboxed environment on the user's machine, so that when you close the window, any browser damage goes away. That would actually work.
Or, just not run Internet Explorer, which as far as I can tell, is the most effective solution overall.
And the only thing a person who wants to distribute malware neeeds to do is some minimal robots.txt manipulation. The pages with the "bait" content can still be "crawlable" by google while the malware may sit in areas which have been made non-crawlable.
Seems like the solution to that is obvious -- don't obey robots.txt for the purposes of the malware scan.
I'm not sure that robots.txt is legally binding anyway, except perhaps where it relates to an implicit permission to cache content (and even there I don't think the courts have really established any tests that use it, outside of the Netherlands anyway), so Google could just have its crawlers go through everything on the malware scan, but then only index and cache the parts that aren't blocked off. If a page had any malicious content in an area prohibited by robots.txt, then you could assume that the main site was probably bad (since the person creating the robots.txt file specifically crafted it to hide the malware) and you could flag the whole site as possibly dangerous.
Your attitude is fairly typical, but contains a very troubling assumption -- namely that if the global warming phenomenon currently ongoing is not anthropogenic, that somehow we don't need to worry about it.
I think this is completely false, and quite dangerous. Furthermore, I think that the debate over what has caused global warming, has really just become a distraction to the real issue, which is quite simply "what the hell are we going to do about it?"
It doesn't really matter whether the cause of the warming is anthropogenic or not; unless you're going to debate that the planet is not getting warmer -- and it doesn't seem like you are -- we still have a serious problem on our hands. It's a little academic to most people whether it's caused by power production, or automobiles, or cow farts, or energy fluctuations in the Sun, or a lack of pirates.
Telling people in Bangladesh who are up to their knees in seawater that "hey, we're just coming out of a geological cold phase!" isn't particularly useful. Or when the power grid and water supplies in the whole Eastern half of the U.S. fail because the average summer temperature is up in the mid-to-high 90s (or higher), saying "it was a lot worse a few million years ago" isn't getting us any closer to a solution.
The causes of the warming phenomenon are only interesting insofar as they give us possible solutions for dealing with the problem -- because it's not CO2 that's the problem, it's the warming that's the problem. If you don't think it's anthropogenic CO2 that's the cause of the warming, fine, but that doesn't mean that the actual problem just goes away because we didn't cause it, which seems to be the attitude taken by many of the anti-anthropogenic-global-warming side. We still have to deal with the same consequences even if the cause isn't anthropogenic. (And if it's not anthropogenic, then we're probably screwed even further, because it's probably a lot more difficult to reverse the process.)
I have it on pretty good authority that GM and Ford are working on developing vehicles which will run on crushed babies and blended puppies
Well, I'm sure the Greenpeace folks will buy one -- it's a renewable resource, after all.
I have always heard the same thing, FWIW. That "catching cold" wasn't actually caused by being physiologically cold, but occurred more often in the winter because people tend to be inside, packed together, with the houses/buildings all sealed up, basically creating little petri dishes for bacteria to thrive in.
I can imagine that if you were really cold, for a long time -- like, hypothermic -- that perhaps this would weaken your body's immune system to the point where you would become more susceptible to disease. However, I really don't think that there's much credence to the old adages about "putting your hat on so you don't catch cold!"
You mean, like the General Motors EV1, available for sale at your local dealership?
... they're all vaguely threatening if you're a dinosauric car manufacturer.
Oh, wait, it's not available anywhere, because GM killed it, even though there were people pretty much lining up to buy them. Instead they recalled all the prototypes, scrapped the project, and destroyed most of the test cars. (Actually 'destroy' puts it lightly -- they annihilated them, like they were really trying to wipe them out without possibly leaving any trace or evidence around. They removed all the key components, crushed them, and then immediately had the crushed hulks melted down. The only extant vehicles have been lobotomized via removal of key components.)
The auto industry -- and I think this goes for both the U.S. and most of the other ones -- have very little interest in anything that's going to fundamentally alter or shake up the landscape. Electric cars, high-mileage cars, fuel-cell cars
Well, I guess I might be exposing my pro-IBM bias here (good God, I can't believe I just said that -- I remember when you pretty much had to curse or spit after saying that name), but I think that IBM would probably be hurt a lot less due to the 'obviousness' ruling than Amazon would.
... they just happened to be there first because of their positioning during and following the dot-com boom.
Just look at the two companies -- IBM has a vast research division, which basically exists to invent stuff and turn out patents (and other things useful to IBM). Amazon is an online bookstore. Whatever patents they have, were probably found/invented/discovered more or less accidentally, while building themselves up. I think that there's a far greater chance that Amazon's patents would be ruled obvious than IBM's, because many of Amazon's patented inventions might be perfectly obvious to anyone else who was engaged in what they were doing
To be frank, I think the type of thing that IBM does these days is really what the patent system is supposed to encourage and protect -- IBM probably wouldn't spend the billions of dollars that it does on original research, if it wasn't able to capitalize on and monetize the inventions produced. If you look at the history of that company, they've produced a lot of pretty neat stuff. Leaving aside their past anticompetitive behavior, the world is probably a better place for IBM Research; any patent reform which eliminates the impetus to do what they're doing, would be IMO a mistake. However, Amazon, in contrast, seems to just be patenting stuff in order to protect their business model from competition. While that difference may not seem particularly important, I believe that creating a patent system that rewards original research while not rewarding blatant business-model protectionism is the key to reform.
is this any less plausible than talking serpents, men walking on water, water turning to wine, immaculate conception, talking bushfires, resurrection or giants that live 800 years but leave no bones?
Yeah, but the Christers aren't out to charge you a cool $1.5M or whatever to hear their ridiculous story. In fact, they'll pretty much tell it to anyone who'll listen, for free. They also tend not to sue people for reprinting their texts (which, again, they will send you, for free).
Doesn't make it any less ridiculous, but it's a lot cheaper.
Maybe make it like the NFL draft- if New Hampshire wants to be first so badly, make them give some concessions to the state that got the highest turnout in order to swap places.
What sort of 'concessions' would New Hampshire make to, say, Delaware? A tanker truck full of maple syrup?
(And just in case anyone is curious, here's a breakdown of voter turnout as percent of population, for the 1996 election. South Dakota pretty much swept it with over 60% of the eligible voting-age population [not even just registered voters].)
Working at a computer center, I think the best design I've seen was the "Big Red Button" was actually 2 buttons, spaced far enough apart that you couldn't hit them both at once with on hand, but close enough together that they were obviously related. They were also much higher off the raised floor than any other switches, and clearly marked.
Just as trivia, that type of circuit is common on industrial equipment (think of the big press from the end scene in Terminator 1) and is called a Two-Hand No-Tie-Down. Basically there are two switches, and they have to both be depressed within a certain interval in order to close the circuit (generally 0.5s or so). If you "tie down" one of the switches, or have something leaning against it, or whatever, pressing the second switch won't trigger (otherwise it would be just a simple AND gate).
The circuits to do it are pretty standard and easily available. What's cooler, is that you can actually get a basically-identical circuit that uses compressed air or other gas instead of electricity (for use in chemical plants and other explosive atmospheres). One of the cooler things I've gotten to see made was a pneumatic "circuit board" cut out of Lucite for this purpose. I've always thought they would make a nice demonstration device for teaching kids about electronic circuits.
In Canada we use hand counted pen and paper ballots and the results make the 11 o'clock news. I don't see why the US can't do the same. It's not like vote counting is a serial process. It can be parallelized extremely well.
Um, how would we divert millions of dollars in taxpayer money to our cronies in the electronic-voting industry under this plan?
Unless those are special, patented, electronic pens, which only write in invisible ink that can only be displayed with a special reader, I don't think that plan will ever fly here.
So much for Preview ... it eats the non-ASCII characters on Submit, even though they're correctly displayed in Preview.
... nice.
Nice, Slashdot
Yeah someday they'll get Unicode support in Slashdot, but I wouldn't hold your breath. It'll be right after they come up with an "Edit" button on comments.
Could be worse; could be straight ASCII. At least we get accents this way. And the symbol. (We'll see if it disappears when I hit submit..)
You have listed my fondest dream: To be part of an abusive monopoly that replaced the abusive monopoly that I hated when I was a young college student....*sigh*
You could still get in on the ground floor -- I hear Google is hiring.
Not a good comparison. Those devices are unpopular because they're expensive and relatively easy to detect (it's a box sitting on your dashboard, in some cases producing visible flashes). A VAR, by definition, would require equipment pre-installed in everyone's cars, so the difference between someone who had fixed it to transmit false data and an regular one would just be a firmware or software modification. It would be cheap, it would be incredibly difficult to detect, and frankly it would be hard to prosecute (you could make the software wipe itself out under certain conditions, so if you got pulled over you could just dump it).
If those devices to trigger traffic lights were built into everyone's cars today, and could be enabled just by taking your car down to some shady body shop on the wrong side of town and paying some guy to reflash some firmware, you can bet a lot more people would be using them. It's a completely different risk/reward trade-off.
make it a felony. prosecute vehemently. problem solved. it's easy enough to detect.
... you'd never be able to reliably locate which car was transmitting what. Sure, you could serialize the transmitters, but it would be trivial to spoof someone else's.
Not going to work. How are you going to detect which car it's being broadcast from? You're talking about reliably pinpointing a moving target that's probably only putting out a sub-second burst, along with a lot of other cars that are also transmitting things. Not to mention that they're all metal objects, so the multipath would be hideous
Besides, how are you going to afford all the DoD-esque equipment that's going to be required, everywhere, in order to spot abuse? And where do you want to divert the resources from in order to enforce it? Law enforcement and the courts are overburdened anyway.
A heavy-handed, judicial or legislative solution to this isn't going to work.