When I saw this subject on Ask Slashdot, I thought immediately of Radio Shack.
Hate to sound like an AOLer, but: Me too!
I had one of those hundred-and-something-in-one kits as a youngster, definitely one of the neatest gifts I ever got. The best part was that you didn't have to understand anything to make the projects work (just follow instructions like "connect terminals 23 and 86, 34 and 65, 14 and 16...."), yet there was a circuit diagram and a pretty good explanation of how it worked and some variations you might try. It was a very good set of progressive lessons.
Radio Shack also has (or used to have, I dunno about now) a good set of electronics books, many of which would be suitable for high schoolers or even bright and interested middle schoolers.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
If 180-0555 is a real phone number, it would conflict with 1-800-555-xxxx. I know the switch could use a time out, but havig the wrong number get dialed due to a delay in dialing is generally a bad thing.
But with mandatory ten digits, 180-0555 is not valid, and 1-800-555-xxxx is an overdial of 180-055-5xxx.
You would call me at 410-455-xxxx (heck, you can look up my number online if you really want to) regardless of whether you were next door or across the country - never 455-xxxx (which you can't do anymore anyway), never 1-410-455-xxxx. The switch could look at 410 and know whether it's local or not; no need for the 1- prefix. So it frees up a lot of new numbers, at the price of no longer being clear to the caller if the call is long distance or not.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
So, each that's why many people in the same area will have similar numbers. They've changed it though (obviuosly), so this isn't the case everywhere.
Yes. My street - only about 20 or 25 houses - has 4 different exchanges. I also get power off a different line than the rest of the street; I guess someone was on interesting drugs when they drew up the wiring plan.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
you need to dial 1+ area code + number for long distance
No. Not under the FCC proposal. Read the fine article:
Federal regulators are expected to consider a controversial proposal Thursday that would require telephone users to dial 10 digits for all local and long-distance calls...
FCC officials contend that 10-digit dialing would create tens of millions of new local phone numbers beginning with the digit "1" or "0." Currently, ones and zeros can't be used at the beginning of a seven-digit local number because they signal that the caller is making a long-distance or operator-assisted call.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
A friend of mine hangs AOL CDs from the mast and boom of his sailboat to scare away birds (and keep away the attendant birdcrap.) A scarecrow for modern times.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Maybe, though I wouldn't be surprised if someone like Vernor Vinge or Neal Stephenson did. But I have typeset a chapbook of my poetry using LaTeX.
(I didn't write the poems with LaTeX, I wrote them with a pencil, typed them up in Emacs, stuck LaTex markup in, and ran them through LaTeX2HTML for the web version.)
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Since no fusion power plant has ever been designed, much less built, I
don't see how it can be a solution.
There are designs, they're just experimental.
Assuming you meant fission, I agree that it's a wonderful alternative,
Sure, if you don't mind spreading fission technology and fissionable materials to all parts of the globe. Otherwise, it's only an alternative for nations we trust to not only not use the tech and fuels to enhance their nuclear weapons programs (didn't Israel destroy what Iraq claimed was a fission power plant?), but to build stable, safe, durable, non-Chernobyl-able reactors, since fallout tends not to respect national boundaries. Oh, and do you want your neighbor to bury nuclear waste near their border wth you? (Keep in mind that in 500 years the dump may be forgotten, your national borders may have expanded to include that area, and your nation may have a major city growing on that site.)
Not to mention that digging uranium out of the ground is hardly enviromentally friendly. (Yes, some claim enough could be cleanly and cheaply extracted from seawater, but AFAIK that's even farther from reality than practical fusion tech.)
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
To a certain extent, science did, at least in the beginning. It went something like this:
Science: Behold! I give to you refrigeration! Not only can you make hot climates comfortable, you can store and ship foods and medicinces like never before! Imagine what this will do for vaccination efforts!
Mankind: Pretty cool. But this ammonia
refrigerant! It's nasty stuff. Can you give us something non-toxic and non-reactive?
Science: Behold! I give you CFCs! They're inert and nontoxic and make a great refrigerant. A miracle of Modern Science! Use them to make plastics! Use them in spray cans! A thousand and one uses!
Mankind: Great!
Time passes...
Science: Um, about those CFCs...we goofed. Turns out they aren't so inert when they float up into the upper atmosphere and get exposed to UV light. Bad things start to happen.
Businessman-kind: Dude, I've got a billion-dollar spraycan business going here. You said this stuff was a wonder-chemical. I'm not cutting my profits because you changed your mind.
Science: Dude, we're talking about major environmental damage here. Skin cancer for everyone. Maybe the total destruction of the ecosystem.
Businessman-kind: Sez you. You don't know that for sure.
Science: The only way to know 100% for sure is to wait a few decades and see what happens, by which time we'd be too fscked to fix anything. We're as sure as we can be at this point in time.
Businessman-kind: Well, our scientists disagree.
Science: Your scientists either suck or are paid off.
Businessman-kind: You're a bunch of pinko commies! Commies! Commies! We own this planet and we'll fsck it up if we want! It's our property and you want to take it away! Commies! Wah! Wah! (aside: They might be able to convince the government. Better start making continency plans...maybe we can even rack up some patents
on CFC-free refrigerants. There may yet be profits to be had!)
Exunt all.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Given time, the earth
gradually heals itself, and even adjusts to human intervention and polution.
Except that the adjustment in this case wasn't the earth's it was ours. In a rare show of common sense, we've drastically cut CFC productions, and these guys are prediciting that our actions in that regard will be sufficient. Read the fine article.
We change our environment to suit are needs, as most animals do;
We're changing the enviroment more than any species has done since blue-green algae discovered chlorophyll. They changed the environment so much that aerobic respiration and predation became viable strategies, much to the disadvantage of the algae. (There's a frame in Larry Gonick's The Cartoon History of the Universe where one lump of algae says "Stop! We're destroying the environment!" and another replies "Alarmist!")
Yes, the rock we call Earth will still be here no matter what we do, and it will almost certainly harbor some form of life no matter what we do. But we could destroy the current ecosystem, and we certainly could destroy ourselves. It's not so much the planet (which is safe from our actions), as the planet-as-we-know-and-need it (which isn't), that we have to protect.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
When I went to see X-Men there was a twit on the other side of the theatre using his cell phone thoughout the film. If he'd have been sitting near me, we would have had words. (Along the line of "Either hang up, leave the the theatre, or we're going to see how well your phone survives being stomped on then thrown against the wall.")
Way back when I worked at the local UA theatre complex, we ushers told noise patrons to shut up or leave. Have things changed in 14 years such that that's no longer in the job description?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
a living human beings on one hand, a hunk of metal and silicon whose
ancestor was a vacuum tube on the other.
A hunk of fatty meat and gristle whose ancestor was a blue-gree algea on one hand, a hunk of metal and silicon whose ancestor was a vacuum tube on the other.
It's all about software, not the physical properties of the platform. That's what the point of the Turing Test is.
IMHO anyone or
anything sufficiently advanced to be able to understand liberty, freedom, free
speech, free software (erm oops not that last one) and so on should be allowed
it.
From Asimov's The Bicentennial Man: "There is no right to deny freedom to any object with a mind advanced enough to grasp the concept and desire the state."
That brings up another question -- what is learning? Aaaargh, this is making
my head hurt.
Vague memories of a grad school class in machine learning drove me to the bookshelf, where a copy of Readings in Machine Learning (Shavlik and Dietterich, ed.) revealed on page 1 (alway a good place for basic definitions):
Simon...has defined `learning' as "changes in [a] system that...enable[it] to do the same task or tasks drawn from the same population more efficiently and more effectively the next time." There are two ways in which a system can change: (1) the system can acquire new knowledge from external sources, or (2) the system can modify itself to exploit its current knowledge more effectively.
I suppose that drawing a new conclusion from existing knowledge would fit under (2).
And what about those who have the time but don't have any interest in learning the intimate underpinnings of the computer?
They can pay someone to do it. They can either pay a vendor who won't open the source and will lock
the customer into their proprietary system (and maybe even lure them into a subscription system), or they can pay someone to develop an open source system, possibly via a market like SourceXchange or CoSource.
But I doubt that a detective is getting any feathers in his cap for busting a $135 misdemeanor. So why would he lie?
Because many, if not most, cops are power and authority fetishists who get off on caging people they think are a "threat to the system". If you think cops don't lie, look at some news besides the Florida mess - a huge police corruption trial just ended in California.
IMHO, it renders HTML to the desires of the web developer better than Netscape.
What ever happened to the idea of browsers rendering HTML to the desires of the viewer? That is, after all, the whole idea of HTML and CSS. We'd all be better served if web developers followed the old adage "trust the browser" more, instead of excessively messing with special effects. Maybe they could even devote the time they saved to providing content instead of eye candy.
But people are ignoring a perfectly
valid option that has been available in PG county MD at least since the 80s: Mechanical Voting booths.
We used to have them here in Baltimore County; we went to an optical mark system (connect the dots next to your choice) in 1996, for reasons I don't know. The problem I see with our optical system is that the ballot is two-sided;I wonder how many people missed voting on the bond issues on the back.
Old-style mechanical booths do have the advantage of clarity and built-in validity checks, but I wonder how robust the mechanical system is. Perhaps an electronic system with the same sort of interface would be best.
While there are many problems with the balloting system, the idea that it "takes too long" is silly. This is not an instant-win scratch-off game, there are month-long delays between election day, the meeting of electors, and inauguration exactly so that problems can be dealt with.
Also, the suggestion that some people should be able to vote from their homes while those who can't afford, or choose not to own, computers have to wait in line raises serious "equal protection" issues - not to mention huge technical hurdles. Forget it.
Yes, we needd better tech at the voting booth and the counting centers. But the concern should be accuracy and usability (check out the Sun-Sentinel's virtual Palm Beach ballot and tell me we can't do better!), not speed of results.
Agreed on the overheated processor. My K6 started flaking out during kernel compiles and Quakeworld games. I found that the CPU fan had died, replaced it and had more more problems.
Re:No one's vote was taken away.
on
eLection '04
·
· Score: 1
1) CNN seems to have taken considerable care not to say that any of those 19,000 mispunched ballots resulted in that
person's vote being lost, nor have I seen anyone else make that claim.
AP says they were "thrown out before they were counted". I hope that does not mean literally disposed of, just put into an "non-parsable" box, but at this point I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they were used to line birdcages.
Re:Old method still isn't good enough
on
eLection '04
·
· Score: 2
You know, your the first person to say that if statistical irregularities occur than some judge can adjust things to more believeable levels.
I may, of course, be wrong (dammit Jim, I'm a hacker, not a lawyer), but that's the impression I've picked up from the CNN coverage.
See the following:
So if the courts find substantial irregularity (and I don't see how they could not), I would suggest that ballots marked for both Gore and Buchanan are clearly meant for one or the other. Someone might deliberately mark both Gore and Nader, or Gore and Bush, or Bush and Buchanan, or punch them all out as some protest, but Gore and Buchanan? Forget it. Statistical means should be used to assign these to one or the other. There should also be an adjustment to the high Buchanan vote.
Bush's camp is threatening to call for recounts and challeneges in other states. I say go for it. This is a great opportunity to scrutinize and revamp balloting practices thoughout the nation. We can take the time, that's why there are months between election and inauguration.
Slashdot Mirror
Hate to sound like an AOLer, but: Me too!
I had one of those hundred-and-something-in-one kits as a youngster, definitely one of the neatest gifts I ever got. The best part was that you didn't have to understand anything to make the projects work (just follow instructions like "connect terminals 23 and 86, 34 and 65, 14 and 16...."), yet there was a circuit diagram and a pretty good explanation of how it worked and some variations you might try. It was a very good set of progressive lessons.
Radio Shack also has (or used to have, I dunno about now) a good set of electronics books, many of which would be suitable for high schoolers or even bright and interested middle schoolers.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
You would call me at 410-455-xxxx (heck, you can look up my number online if you really want to) regardless of whether you were next door or across the country - never 455-xxxx (which you can't do anymore anyway), never 1-410-455-xxxx. The switch could look at 410 and know whether it's local or not; no need for the 1- prefix. So it frees up a lot of new numbers, at the price of no longer being clear to the caller if the call is long distance or not.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
No. Not under the FCC proposal. Read the fine article:
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
A friend of mine hangs AOL CDs from the mast and boom of his sailboat to scare away birds (and keep away the attendant birdcrap.) A scarecrow for modern times.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Not to mention that digging uranium out of the ground is hardly enviromentally friendly. (Yes, some claim enough could be cleanly and cheaply extracted from seawater, but AFAIK that's even farther from reality than practical fusion tech.)
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
To a certain extent, science did, at least in the beginning. It went something like this:
Science: Behold! I give to you refrigeration! Not only can you make hot climates comfortable, you can store and ship foods and medicinces like never before! Imagine what this will do for vaccination efforts!
Mankind: Pretty cool. But this ammonia refrigerant! It's nasty stuff. Can you give us something non-toxic and non-reactive?
Science: Behold! I give you CFCs! They're inert and nontoxic and make a great refrigerant. A miracle of Modern Science! Use them to make plastics! Use them in spray cans! A thousand and one uses!
Mankind: Great!
Time passes...
Science: Um, about those CFCs...we goofed. Turns out they aren't so inert when they float up into the upper atmosphere and get exposed to UV light. Bad things start to happen.
Businessman-kind: Dude, I've got a billion-dollar spraycan business going here. You said this stuff was a wonder-chemical. I'm not cutting my profits because you changed your mind.
Science: Dude, we're talking about major environmental damage here. Skin cancer for everyone. Maybe the total destruction of the ecosystem.
Businessman-kind: Sez you. You don't know that for sure.
Science: The only way to know 100% for sure is to wait a few decades and see what happens, by which time we'd be too fscked to fix anything. We're as sure as we can be at this point in time.
Businessman-kind: Well, our scientists disagree.
Science: Your scientists either suck or are paid off.
Businessman-kind: You're a bunch of pinko commies! Commies! Commies! We own this planet and we'll fsck it up if we want! It's our property and you want to take it away! Commies! Wah! Wah! (aside: They might be able to convince the government. Better start making continency plans...maybe we can even rack up some patents on CFC-free refrigerants. There may yet be profits to be had!)
Exunt all.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Yes, the rock we call Earth will still be here no matter what we do, and it will almost certainly harbor some form of life no matter what we do. But we could destroy the current ecosystem, and we certainly could destroy ourselves. It's not so much the planet (which is safe from our actions), as the planet-as-we-know-and-need it (which isn't), that we have to protect.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
When I went to see X-Men there was a twit on the other side of the theatre using his cell phone thoughout the film. If he'd have been sitting near me, we would have had words. (Along the line of "Either hang up, leave the the theatre, or we're going to see how well your phone survives being stomped on then thrown against the wall.")
Way back when I worked at the local UA theatre complex, we ushers told noise patrons to shut up or leave. Have things changed in 14 years such that that's no longer in the job description?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
It's all about software, not the physical properties of the platform. That's what the point of the Turing Test is.
I suppose that drawing a new conclusion from existing knowledge would fit under (2).
Never trust a law enforcement official.
Old-style mechanical booths do have the advantage of clarity and built-in validity checks, but I wonder how robust the mechanical system is. Perhaps an electronic system with the same sort of interface would be best.
While there are many problems with the balloting system, the idea that it "takes too long" is silly. This is not an instant-win scratch-off game, there are month-long delays between election day, the meeting of electors, and inauguration exactly so that problems can be dealt with.
Also, the suggestion that some people should be able to vote from their homes while those who can't afford, or choose not to own, computers have to wait in line raises serious "equal protection" issues - not to mention huge technical hurdles. Forget it.
Yes, we needd better tech at the voting booth and the counting centers. But the concern should be accuracy and usability (check out the Sun-Sentinel's virtual Palm Beach ballot and tell me we can't do better!), not speed of results.
Agreed on the overheated processor. My K6 started flaking out during kernel compiles and Quakeworld games. I found that the CPU fan had died, replaced it and had more more problems.
Bush's camp is threatening to call for recounts and challeneges in other states. I say go for it. This is a great opportunity to scrutinize and revamp balloting practices thoughout the nation. We can take the time, that's why there are months between election and inauguration.