You know, what sucks about this whole "10 highest moderated questions" thing is, most of us don't have any mod points. Otherwise I'd be using them right here.
How about changing to the 10 most replied-to questions, so that _everyone_ has a chance to "vote"?
Anyway, this is easily the best question I've read so far - why is it moderated below the "show us your tits" question? (Oh yeah, my personal preferences.:)
What the hell is a company like Macrovision, whose entire agenda (to my knowledge) consists of restricting freedom of information, doing at a convention for open source software? I want to know too!
I'll leave the outrage at the stupid use of a stupid law to other posters.
The summary judgment motion is the more interesting document, which (partially) describes how the technology works.
What it doesn't say is how Chamberlain's (the plaintiff) remote control resynchronises with the receiver. This is interesting, since it's this resynchronisation that Skylink's (the defendant) remote control uses to trigger Chamberlain's receiver. By doing so, Skylink circumvent the rolling-code mechanism that's supposed to protect the Chamberlain device from code-grabbers.
I wonder how Skylink have done this - does their remote control learn how to resynchronise from an original remote control? Have they also needed to crack Chamberlain's code to be able to do this? If so, that's a second circumvention, isn't it?
Lastly, you have to wonder how buggy/weak Chamberlain's code/system is if it can be so easily circumvented. But I guess that's not relevant under the DMCA.:(
(IANAL) (Anyone got a Skylink RC? Can you comment on the process of teaching it to open your door?)
My servers send me SMSs via an email gateway, run by my (mobile-phone) network provider. Apart from getting notified immediately in case of a problem, I get about 4 SMSs per day to send me stats and a notification that everythings all hunky dory.
(Hopefully all the posters who are whinging "Why would anyone want to send short messages to a tiny screen?" have just learned something.)
The messages are also sent to my pager, since I have lousy phone reception at home - they also go via an email gateway.
Now, granted the email factor makes it hard to tell where my messages get lost, but I estimate that about 10% of my SMSs never arrive. And since I _do_ receive the pager messages, this suggests that the email bit is working...
are we currently able to put together a free version of the big convergence media center others are trying to do?
Yes. I have one. My file-server contains a DVB card (receives digital satellite, hard-decodes MPEG and exports audio and video) and an IR receiver, which are both cabled up to my living room.
As other posters report, there are similar commercial solutions on- or close-to- market, but this is all open, all free.
And yes, it's all integrated. The centrepiece is VDR (FAQs, plugins here) (please don't hurt the webservers). Plugins enable MP3, DVD, SVCD, DiVX and more.
The drawbacks, you ask? It's Linux. (ducks for cover) What I mean is that, like so many other Linux projects, the developers are much more interested in building new features than working on stability. The code is also growing in a fairly uncontrolled way, although the developers are working on that problem.
In my opinion, this system will never be as polished as the commercial solutions. But it will remain a hell of a lot more flexible (you want Ogg? You got it!). And it's a lot of fun.:)
Someone who quite blatently leaves his or her keys in their car and parks outside bars would not be viewed by most people as completely blameless in the event that a drunk staggers out, takes the car, and drives it into a shop window.
I think you chose a controversial example here - I would not hold myself to blame in this case.
Better (IMHO) would have been:
- leaving keys in car, resulting in a child driving the car and causing damage.
- leaving gun cabinet unlocked resulting in another person going on killing rampage.
Not sure if the original poster is for real, but anyway...
I am curious why you are spending time trying to develop motion tracking without using motion-capture sensors. I would guess that trying to develop a computer vision algorithm that can determine what the hell a fast-moving gamer is doing in real time and then converting that into inputs would be a mighty challenging problem.
I have played such a game, albeit quite a primitive one. It was a snowboarding game where you stand in front of a green screen, and your movements (leaning and jumping) are used to steer your character (which is live video of yourself) down the slope and over jumps. All done on a large projection screen and reasonably impressive.
Granted, the motion capture didn't have to do much, but it seemed reasonably capable. Even my 1.5 y.o. daughter toddling around got her own icon - the computer had no problem recognising a variety of body shapes.
Especially cool was the completely intuitive interface - there were no instructions posted or anything, you simply walked into the game, saw yourself, and learned to "snowboard".
The ping is only really annoying if the air temperature is hovering around 4 deg.
Agreed. But then it gets pretty distracting. Once an hour would be okay, as would only getting a warning if the temperature drops more than half a degree.
Heck, maybe I could even disable that annoying , everytime the temperature drops below 4oC.:)
This is from the poster you replied to, and I can't think of anything stupider than disabling the warning noises. Granter, I can't think of a real good reason why you should have a warning that your engine is COLD, other than that if you hear this ping you should start thinking about your antifreeze/water mixture and checking your service records for when you last had it changed.
External temperature, not engine temperature!
While something drawing your attention to falling temperature can be useful, I guess the developers didn't test the car when the temperature was hovering around 4 degrees. Having it ping every two minutes really gets on my nerves.
- what interface do our cars have? Serial? - is there a standard protocol used, or is each manufacturer coming up with his own? Standards would allow smaller garages to have a computer for use with multiple makes of car, but I bet the manufacturers don't want that. - is there software on the net that'll talk to the car computer? Got any URLs?
In my last few cars, I found connectors in the cabin which I assumed were for the garage's computer. Haven't run across it yet in my current car, but it'd be kinda cool to hook my laptop/palm up to my car and see what it's upto. Heck, maybe I could even disable that annoying <ping>, everytime the temperature drops below 4oC.:)
I guess I have a different idea of what a 'classic computer' is. I first learned to program on a PDP-11 and a PDP-8, so when one came up on the secondhand-market back in about 1990, I bought it. A PDP-11/40 with some piddling amount of core memory (which was originally worth a fortune).
I quickly found a number of PDP enthusiasts around town who helped me getting it all running (got RSX-11M+ installed - remember that?), and was surprised to find out just how much old equipment was still around - being stored by these guys, and being thrown out by institutions.
I "upgraded" to an 11/35 and then an 11/34, passing on my old gear. Man I wish I'd held onto it! Finding new peripherals and building them in was a lot of fun - the variety in disk and tapes units back then was astounding. And there was nothing like hearing those disk drives spin up.
One guy, who had an 11/70 in his back room, helped me with hardware problems. He'd sit down with the faulty drive/board/whatever and the hardware manuals and go across the boards with a logic probe until he found the fault, and replaced the chip. Don't see that happening much any more.
At the high-point of my collection, I had a VAX 11/780 in my bedroom, complete with Unibus and tape expansion cabinet (I put my bed on top of it), and had managed to rescue a junked PDP-8 and pass it onto a collector.
Then I moved continents and had to give it all away. A lot got scrapped <sniff>.
DECUS (does it still exist?) used to have a 'NOP' sub-section - Nostalgic Old Products. Still got my membership badge somewhere...
My situation is perhaps similar to yours, and perhaps my solution is also helpful to you.
I have 200GB of data, spread across several IDE disks. I'd love to back it all up, but money is tight, and I can't justify the cost of removable media. If I could, I would probably look at a CD jukebox with CD or DVD writer, since this form-factor looks to me to have some life left in it, and I could put my DVDs in there too. My compromise is to consider only a portion of this data to be valuable enough to backup, so I periodically copy it from one disk to another.
I'm doing a find|cpio, and I'm not pre-erasing the target directories, so I expect that over time the target directories will (slowly) grow to be bigger than the source. It's a compromise between having an accurate recent image, and having a good long retention time.
Since I find that any time I buy a new disk, it's bigger than my old disks, I'm not expecting disk capacity to be a big problem! Also, having these disks online all the time will allow me to react quickly to problems, although this is only running for about a year now, and "Dan's Data" has some disturbing things to say about the lifetime of these cheap disks.
If you're worried about the reliability of powered-off disks, what about leaving them online? If your computers are already distributed, you could install disks in several of them, and copy data between them. You could also exercise the disks regularly, to get advance warning of media failures...
Wasting 20-40% of the resources of your $2k desktop on your OS's feature bloat may not be too bad, but wasting 20-40% of the resources of your $5 mil supercomputer is a lot of money.
<sarcasm>Well, it's a pity that the supercomputer vendors haven't realised that then, isn't it?</sarcasm>
Come on now, you think that the vendors don't optimise their OSs for every last bit of performance? Of course they do. They're all in competition here, and every one of them is struggling to get every last FLOP out of their processors.
The reason that we're only just now starting to see large CPU counts in Linux boxen is because it's only just now becoming viable to scale Linux. Other vendors' UNIXs mostly scale much better than Linux.
I believe that SGI's Linux will (at first) scale to only 32 CPUs, and I'll be interested to see what sort of performance they get on such machines. I'd wager that Linux will not scale nearly as well as, say, IRIX.
OTOH, the recent slashdot thread on the performance of the 2.5 kernel is reassuring - way better performance on parallelised tasks. I suspect that these improvements are being driven by all the vendors who want to use Linux on their high-end, high CPU count machines.
I think your two reasons are somewhat conflicting. An institute that will choose Linux to save a few thousand dollars is unlikely to be able to spare the manpower to debug/develop Linux. To put this another way, how many months of Linux-developing does your few thousand dollars buy you?
Also, in my experience, institutions with this much computing power (and they _do_ buy a lot of power), have a lot of clout when it comes to getting OS problems fixed.
I think the main reason is the cost of the hardware - it's simply much cheaper to rack up cheap IA32 boxes than to buy RISC workstations/servers.
The result is, as you say, a total dominance of Linux in the HEP computing world.
More applications, more background
on
Lotus Nanotech
·
· Score: 1
I've seen roof-tiles with the lotus effect advertised here in Germany. Not that having a clean roof is a major priority for most of us - perhaps they're just easier to make?
Did a little search and here's some information from the Fraunhofer institute about their research (no, they don't _just_ make MP3 codecs).
They also link to this page which is a federally funded research project who are looking at applying microstructures onto large surfaces...
Does the subject that you gave this post and the AC posting infer that you disapprove of EMusic's letter?
Here _we_ are, trying to argue that the music industry needs to change it's business model in order to adapt to the digital age.
Here's a company trying to do just that.
I find EMusic's letter to be well written, and I can understand why they find downloading 5-6 full albums per day unreasonable.
OTOH, "Unlimited" is "unlimited", and while I haven't seen EMusic's Terms and Conditions (do they say anything about this?), I would take "unlimited" to mean I could subscribe, download a year's worth of music, and then unsubscribe.
Now it may well be that EMusic's business model is not yet robust enough to cope with the abuse it's getting. It may have to adapt further to reach that stage. But that is what this letter is all about.
Rather than thinking about the security of electronic voting (the security flaws in the voting systems that I know (not US) are huge, and can't be fixed by electronics), I like to think about the potential advantage of an electronic voting system.
It seems to be that politics is in a situation where advancement is very slow, nearly impossible, because any change would benefit one party or the other. Maybe the only real changes in political systems happen when the entire government is overthrown (think Germany post WWII)?
I know that Switzerland hold very regular referendums, in which the people can vote on matters which, in our countries, would be decided by those in power. This seems like a great application of today's telecommunication technology to me. If electronic voting systems can be made such that a person can vote over the Internet from home, then _you_ could directly have a say in the matters which interest you.
Such ideas will, of course, be opposed by worker's parties, who will argue that Internet voting favors the rich. And there's an element of truth to that. But voting booths could also be placed out in public (does the US also have public Internet terminals spring up everywhere, as seems to be happening here in Europe?)
On a related note, Germany now legally recognises electronic signatures. And german post offices can issue you a (digital) certificate upon presentation of valid photo ID. Public keys can be (and are being) stored on a smart-card. There are a whole bunch of companies springing up here, offering this service (try a google search for trust, germany, PKI).
The big secret about the show is that there is an extra day between the build and the contest. They call it a "safety" day. The teams get the day off, but the experts and some real professional welders and mechanics come in and make sure the machines actually will work and no one will get hurt or killed. In some cases I heard that they will actually deconstruct a machine and re-build it from scratch all over again.
Personally, I think they should match it to your license plate number. That way, you can call people who are driving horribly and then email them about how badly they were driving via your PDA. We could turn road rage into its own medium.
You know, I've often wondered what the effect of communication between cars would be.
It might well _reduce_ road rage, since it would turn "cars" into "people".
OTOH, it's probably not enough to offset the armor-and-muscles arrogance that tinted windows and 200HP supplies.:(
I think this is what I like most about BMWs - they take something like a computer-controller clutch, and proceed to build in a bunch of neat features to make use of the new tech. Another example would be opening the windows and sunroof with the remote control. It's definitely a geek-thing.:)
What I like least about BMWs? The effect that driving a BMW has on a person's road-manners.
Because let's face it,/we/ all know how to encrypt our email. But until "Your Mom" (TM) can do it, it's not useful.
I can't agree with this. When the video recorder was invented, was it necessary for "My Mom" to be able to use it? No, these were very large, very expensive machines, designed to be operated by professionals.
Once the technology was available, it slowly became cheaper and filtered down to the masses. Today it's at the point where anyone can own one, and knows how to put a tape in and push play. Some people can even program them.:)
Likewise with email encryption. Yesterday it was limited to geeks. Today it's also available to those with a need (think of sensitive company documents. I imagine that any reasonably large company with a decent security policy would be on the lookout for an email plugin to allow secure comunications.
Now that such software exists, it's use will spread, until even "Your Mom" has it.
(In fact, "My Mom" is the director of a small software company, so I guess that actually, I do agree with you.:)
Slashdot Mirror
You know, what sucks about this whole "10 highest moderated questions" thing is, most of us don't have any mod points. Otherwise I'd be using them right here.
:)
How about changing to the 10 most replied-to questions, so that _everyone_ has a chance to "vote"?
Anyway, this is easily the best question I've read so far - why is it moderated below the "show us your tits" question? (Oh yeah, my personal preferences.
What the hell is a company like Macrovision, whose entire agenda (to my knowledge) consists of restricting freedom of information, doing at a convention for open source software? I want to know too!
my Jesus Christ action figure with posable arms and legs?
:)
Does it come with holes in the hands and feet and a little plastic crucifix?
Enquiring minds want to know...
Apparently these displays would have a short lifespan. We would then have disposable screens.
You mean we would read information off of a layer of thin, flexible material, only to end up throwing it away a short while later?
Nah... it'll never happen.
I'll leave the outrage at the stupid use of a stupid law to other posters.
:(
The summary judgment motion is the more interesting document, which (partially) describes how the technology works.
What it doesn't say is how Chamberlain's (the plaintiff) remote control resynchronises with the receiver. This is interesting, since it's this resynchronisation that Skylink's (the defendant) remote control uses to trigger Chamberlain's receiver. By doing so, Skylink circumvent the rolling-code mechanism that's supposed to protect the Chamberlain device from code-grabbers.
I wonder how Skylink have done this - does their remote control learn how to resynchronise from an original remote control? Have they also needed to crack Chamberlain's code to be able to do this? If so, that's a second circumvention, isn't it?
Lastly, you have to wonder how buggy/weak Chamberlain's code/system is if it can be so easily circumvented. But I guess that's not relevant under the DMCA.
(IANAL)
(Anyone got a Skylink RC? Can you comment on the process of teaching it to open your door?)
My servers send me SMSs via an email gateway, run by my (mobile-phone) network provider. Apart from getting notified immediately in case of a problem, I get about 4 SMSs per day to send me stats and a notification that everythings all hunky dory.
(Hopefully all the posters who are whinging "Why would anyone want to send short messages to a tiny screen?" have just learned something.)
The messages are also sent to my pager, since I have lousy phone reception at home - they also go via an email gateway.
Now, granted the email factor makes it hard to tell where my messages get lost, but I estimate that about 10% of my SMSs never arrive. And since I _do_ receive the pager messages, this suggests that the email bit is working...
(My network is T-D1 in Germany, for the curious).
are we currently able to put together a free version of the big convergence media center others are trying to do?
:)
Yes. I have one. My file-server contains a DVB card (receives digital satellite, hard-decodes MPEG and exports audio and video) and an IR receiver, which are both cabled up to my living room.
As other posters report, there are similar commercial solutions on- or close-to- market, but this is all open, all free.
And yes, it's all integrated. The centrepiece is VDR (FAQs, plugins here) (please don't hurt the webservers). Plugins enable MP3, DVD, SVCD, DiVX and more.
The drawbacks, you ask? It's Linux. (ducks for cover) What I mean is that, like so many other Linux projects, the developers are much more interested in building new features than working on stability. The code is also growing in a fairly uncontrolled way, although the developers are working on that problem.
In my opinion, this system will never be as polished as the commercial solutions. But it will remain a hell of a lot more flexible (you want Ogg? You got it!). And it's a lot of fun.
Someone who quite blatently leaves his or her keys in their car and parks outside bars would not be viewed by most people as completely blameless in the event that a drunk staggers out, takes the car, and drives it into a shop window.
I think you chose a controversial example here - I would not hold myself to blame in this case.
Better (IMHO) would have been:
- leaving keys in car, resulting in a child driving the car and causing damage.
- leaving gun cabinet unlocked resulting in another person going on killing rampage.
Not sure if the original poster is for real, but anyway...
I am curious why you are spending time trying to develop motion tracking without using motion-capture sensors. I would guess that trying to develop a computer vision algorithm that can determine what the hell a fast-moving gamer is doing in real time and then converting that into inputs would be a mighty challenging problem.
I have played such a game, albeit quite a primitive one. It was a snowboarding game where you stand in front of a green screen, and your movements (leaning and jumping) are used to steer your character (which is live video of yourself) down the slope and over jumps. All done on a large projection screen and reasonably impressive.
Granted, the motion capture didn't have to do much, but it seemed reasonably capable. Even my 1.5 y.o. daughter toddling around got her own icon - the computer had no problem recognising a variety of body shapes.
Especially cool was the completely intuitive interface - there were no instructions posted or anything, you simply walked into the game, saw yourself, and learned to "snowboard".
At the risk of going off-topic...
The ping is only really annoying if the air temperature is hovering around 4 deg.
Agreed. But then it gets pretty distracting. Once an hour would be okay, as would only getting a warning if the temperature drops more than half a degree.
Heck, maybe I could even disable that annoying , everytime the temperature drops below 4oC. :)
:)
This is from the poster you replied to, and I can't think of anything stupider than disabling the warning noises. Granter, I can't think of a real good reason why you should have a warning that your engine is COLD, other than that if you hear this ping you should start thinking about your antifreeze/water mixture and checking your service records for when you last had it changed.
External temperature, not engine temperature!
While something drawing your attention to falling temperature can be useful, I guess the developers didn't test the car when the temperature was hovering around 4 degrees. Having it ping every two minutes really gets on my nerves.
Sure you can't think of anything stupider?
Here's a chance for someone to earn some karma...
:)
- what interface do our cars have? Serial?
- is there a standard protocol used, or is each manufacturer coming up with his own? Standards would allow smaller garages to have a computer for use with multiple makes of car, but I bet the manufacturers don't want that.
- is there software on the net that'll talk to the car computer? Got any URLs?
In my last few cars, I found connectors in the cabin which I assumed were for the garage's computer. Haven't run across it yet in my current car, but it'd be kinda cool to hook my laptop/palm up to my car and see what it's upto. Heck, maybe I could even disable that annoying <ping>, everytime the temperature drops below 4oC.
I guess I have a different idea of what a 'classic computer' is. I first learned to program on a PDP-11 and a PDP-8, so when one came up on the secondhand-market back in about 1990, I bought it. A PDP-11/40 with some piddling amount of core memory (which was originally worth a fortune).
I quickly found a number of PDP enthusiasts around town who helped me getting it all running (got RSX-11M+ installed - remember that?), and was surprised to find out just how much old equipment was still around - being stored by these guys, and being thrown out by institutions.
I "upgraded" to an 11/35 and then an 11/34, passing on my old gear. Man I wish I'd held onto it! Finding new peripherals and building them in was a lot of fun - the variety in disk and tapes units back then was astounding. And there was nothing like hearing those disk drives spin up.
One guy, who had an 11/70 in his back room, helped me with hardware problems. He'd sit down with the faulty drive/board/whatever and the hardware manuals and go across the boards with a logic probe until he found the fault, and replaced the chip. Don't see that happening much any more.
At the high-point of my collection, I had a VAX 11/780 in my bedroom, complete with Unibus and tape expansion cabinet (I put my bed on top of it), and had managed to rescue a junked PDP-8 and pass it onto a collector.
Then I moved continents and had to give it all away. A lot got scrapped <sniff>.
DECUS (does it still exist?) used to have a 'NOP' sub-section - Nostalgic Old Products. Still got my membership badge somewhere...
My situation is perhaps similar to yours, and perhaps my solution is also helpful to you.
I have 200GB of data, spread across several IDE disks. I'd love to back it all up, but money is tight, and I can't justify the cost of removable media. If I could, I would probably look at a CD jukebox with CD or DVD writer, since this form-factor looks to me to have some life left in it, and I could put my DVDs in there too. My compromise is to consider only a portion of this data to be valuable enough to backup, so I periodically copy it from one disk to another.
I'm doing a find|cpio, and I'm not pre-erasing the target directories, so I expect that over time the target directories will (slowly) grow to be bigger than the source. It's a compromise between having an accurate recent image, and having a good long retention time.
Since I find that any time I buy a new disk, it's bigger than my old disks, I'm not expecting disk capacity to be a big problem! Also, having these disks online all the time will allow me to react quickly to problems, although this is only running for about a year now, and "Dan's Data" has some disturbing things to say about the lifetime of these cheap disks.
If you're worried about the reliability of powered-off disks, what about leaving them online? If your computers are already distributed, you could install disks in several of them, and copy data between them. You could also exercise the disks regularly, to get advance warning of media failures...
Wasting 20-40% of the resources of your $2k desktop on your OS's feature bloat may not be too bad, but wasting 20-40% of the resources of your $5 mil supercomputer is a lot of money.
<sarcasm>Well, it's a pity that the supercomputer vendors haven't realised that then, isn't it?</sarcasm>
Come on now, you think that the vendors don't optimise their OSs for every last bit of performance? Of course they do. They're all in competition here, and every one of them is struggling to get every last FLOP out of their processors.
The reason that we're only just now starting to see large CPU counts in Linux boxen is because it's only just now becoming viable to scale Linux. Other vendors' UNIXs mostly scale much better than Linux.
I believe that SGI's Linux will (at first) scale to only 32 CPUs, and I'll be interested to see what sort of performance they get on such machines. I'd wager that Linux will not scale nearly as well as, say, IRIX.
OTOH, the recent slashdot thread on the performance of the 2.5 kernel is reassuring - way better performance on parallelised tasks. I suspect that these improvements are being driven by all the vendors who want to use Linux on their high-end, high CPU count machines.
I think your two reasons are somewhat conflicting. An institute that will choose Linux to save a few thousand dollars is unlikely to be able to spare the manpower to debug/develop Linux. To put this another way, how many months of Linux-developing does your few thousand dollars buy you?
Also, in my experience, institutions with this much computing power (and they _do_ buy a lot of power), have a lot of clout when it comes to getting OS problems fixed.
I think the main reason is the cost of the hardware - it's simply much cheaper to rack up cheap IA32 boxes than to buy RISC workstations/servers.
The result is, as you say, a total dominance of Linux in the HEP computing world.
I've seen roof-tiles with the lotus effect advertised here in Germany. Not that having a clean roof is a major priority for most of us - perhaps they're just easier to make?
Did a little search and here's some information from the Fraunhofer institute about their research (no, they don't _just_ make MP3 codecs).
They also link to this page which is a federally funded research project who are looking at applying microstructures onto large surfaces...
The definition of irony: That Yahoo included this GIF as advertising within this article on spam. :)
Does the subject that you gave this post and the AC posting infer that you disapprove of EMusic's letter?
Here _we_ are, trying to argue that the music industry needs to change it's business model in order to adapt to the digital age.
Here's a company trying to do just that.
I find EMusic's letter to be well written, and I can understand why they find downloading 5-6 full albums per day unreasonable.
OTOH, "Unlimited" is "unlimited", and while I haven't seen EMusic's Terms and Conditions (do they say anything about this?), I would take "unlimited" to mean I could subscribe, download a year's worth of music, and then unsubscribe.
Now it may well be that EMusic's business model is not yet robust enough to cope with the abuse it's getting. It may have to adapt further to reach that stage. But that is what this letter is all about.
I, for one, hope they get there.
Rather than thinking about the security of electronic voting (the security flaws in the voting systems that I know (not US) are huge, and can't be fixed by electronics), I like to think about the potential advantage of an electronic voting system.
It seems to be that politics is in a situation where advancement is very slow, nearly impossible, because any change would benefit one party or the other. Maybe the only real changes in political systems happen when the entire government is overthrown (think Germany post WWII)?
I know that Switzerland hold very regular referendums, in which the people can vote on matters which, in our countries, would be decided by those in power. This seems like a great application of today's telecommunication technology to me. If electronic voting systems can be made such that a person can vote over the Internet from home, then _you_ could directly have a say in the matters which interest you.
Such ideas will, of course, be opposed by worker's parties, who will argue that Internet voting favors the rich. And there's an element of truth to that. But voting booths could also be placed out in public (does the US also have public Internet terminals spring up everywhere, as seems to be happening here in Europe?)
On a related note, Germany now legally recognises electronic signatures. And german post offices can issue you a (digital) certificate upon presentation of valid photo ID. Public keys can be (and are being) stored on a smart-card. There are a whole bunch of companies springing up here, offering this service (try a google search for trust, germany, PKI).
Oops - I got that wrong - Ron built a trebuchet, and his opponent built an air cannon. Sorry about that...
(Disclaimer - I've never seen either of these shows)
Ron Toms built an air cannon on Junkyard Wars, and you can read about it both on his own site (whole site makes for good reading!)
http://www.trebuchet.com/story.php/jyw.html
and also on a teevee.org interview:
google cache of interview
Here's an excerpt from the second interview:
The big secret about the show is that there is an extra day between the build and the contest. They call it a "safety" day. The teams get the day off, but the experts and some real professional welders and mechanics come in and make sure the machines actually will work and no one will get hurt or killed. In some cases I heard that they will actually deconstruct a machine and re-build it from scratch all over again.
Microsoft's OS is owned by Microsoft. As are their file formats.
You expect Microsoft to adhere to any sort of standard? Not to change them in the way that best benefits them financially?
Personally, I think they should match it to your license plate number. That way, you can call people who are driving horribly and then email them about how badly they were driving via your PDA. We could turn road rage into its own medium.
:(
You know, I've often wondered what the effect of communication between cars would be.
It might well _reduce_ road rage, since it would turn "cars" into "people".
OTOH, it's probably not enough to offset the armor-and-muscles arrogance that tinted windows and 200HP supplies.
OK, so it's not an easter-egg, but it's still cool. Here's a description of the "racing start" and "burn-out" modes:
p hp?postid=525686&page=1
:)
http://forums.roadfly.org/bmw/forums/e46m3/forum.
I think this is what I like most about BMWs - they take something like a computer-controller clutch, and proceed to build in a bunch of neat features to make use of the new tech. Another example would be opening the windows and sunroof with the remote control. It's definitely a geek-thing.
What I like least about BMWs? The effect that driving a BMW has on a person's road-manners.
Because let's face it, /we/ all know how to encrypt our email. But until "Your Mom" (TM) can do it, it's not useful.
:)
:)
I can't agree with this. When the video recorder was invented, was it necessary for "My Mom" to be able to use it? No, these were very large, very expensive machines, designed to be operated by professionals.
Once the technology was available, it slowly became cheaper and filtered down to the masses. Today it's at the point where anyone can own one, and knows how to put a tape in and push play. Some people can even program them.
Likewise with email encryption. Yesterday it was limited to geeks. Today it's also available to those with a need (think of sensitive company documents. I imagine that any reasonably large company with a decent security policy would be on the lookout for an email plugin to allow secure comunications.
Now that such software exists, it's use will spread, until even "Your Mom" has it.
(In fact, "My Mom" is the director of a small software company, so I guess that actually, I do agree with you.