actually, a lot of people buy the "music" CD-R's, even when they're going to burn them in a computer, because they don't know any better. i've witnessed this many times among my less tech-savvy friends. the "music" ones are the ones sold with the blank tapes. they see "music" on it, and they either think that it is somehow necessary to get those, or that their music will somehow sound better with those. and they're always surprised when i tell them what's up.
I like your idea- that sounds like a good way to keep people from voting twice, although there is still no paper trail, and therefore no way to verify that nothing has changed. Here's how I think it should work on the other end: (formatted properly this time)
The Bureau of Printing and Engraving prints up ballots like money- with every anti-counterfeiting measure we would give to money, and each with a unique serial number. Each ballot also has a matching receipt with the same serial number, identical in every way except a different color.
The voting machines are computers that fill out your ballot for you. This addresses the usability issues that caused the problems in the 2000 election, and allows for electronic tabulation.
Your ballot and receipt are printed out, both showing what you voted for, etc.. A number should also be printed on both at the time of voting which is a checksum of sorts that is a combination of your keycode, your votes, the ballot's unique ID, polling location, machine, time, etc. You verify that they are both identical before putting your ballot in the box. All unused/mis-filled ballots AND receipts must be accounted for.
At any time (up to say, a year after the results have been certified?) you may go into the county clerk (or whomever it is)'s office with your receipt and verify that your ballot still says what your receipt says.
I like your idea- that sounds like a good way to keep people from voting twice, although there is still no paper trail, and therefore no way to verify that nothing has changed.
Here's how I think it should work on the other end:
1) The Bureau of Printing and Engraving prints up ballots like money- with every anti-counterfeiting measure we would give to money, and each with a unique serial number. Each ballot also has a matching receipt with the same serial number, identical in every way except a different color.
2) The voting machines are computers that fill out your ballot for you. This addresses the usability issues that caused the problems in the 2000 election, and allows for electronic tabulation.
3) Your ballot and receipt are printed out, both showing what you voted for, etc.. A number should also be printed on both at the time of voting which is a checksum of sorts that is a combination of your keycode, your votes, the ballot's unique ID, polling location, machine, time, etc. You verify that they are both identical before putting your ballot in the box. All unused/mis-filled ballots AND receipts must be accounted for.
4) At any time (up to say, a year after the results have been certified?) you may go into the county clerk (or whomever it is)'s office with your receipt and verify that your ballot still says what your receipt says.
this is really frightening, and must be stopped PRONTO. The computer may be useful for helping people to fill-out/print the ballot, and for rapid counting. But, as has been said a thousand times already, there must be a paper trail.
Better yet, I think the bureau of printing and engraving should make some fancy counterfeit-resistant ballots, each printed/embedded with a unique serial number in a place where everyone can keep an eye on the process.
After the election, any unused/mismarked ballots must be accounted for. The ballots should have a matching stub with the unique number and what they voted for that the they can take home with them and may at any time go to the county clerk's office to verify that their ballot is still recorded as having said what they thought they said.
I didn't say the music itself was cheap, or mass-produced (although much of it is). The CD is, though. It's a piece of plastic that takes pennies to make, and the artists LOSE MONEY to have it made. Why? Because, if they're lucky, they'll make money off of the concerts. The record companies payola this stuff through MTV and your local ClearChannel station 24/7 so that you'll want to pay $40+ to go to the ClearChannel-sponsored concert when the band comes to town.
I love the music, and I support the artists by going to their concerts (none of the bands I like do big stadium-style $40+/ticket shows anyway).
...and you don't think the "quality" you attribute to Dashboard Confessional, System of a Down, Offspring, etc. (yuck on all counts) has just as much to do with the fact that they've been force-fed to you by your local "Modern Rock" station (funny, because half of what the "Modern Rock" station here in Austin plays is ~10 years old).
Check out your local college radio station. I like UT's KVRX their slogan is even "none of the hits, all of the time". Here's music that people put out because they LOVE MAKING IT and obviously don't give a crap if they get rich doing it. They usually take a loss on the CD's so that people will come to their shows. I expect any artist worth their salt to sing for their supper. Not, sing once, and reap forever. Same goes for software, books, etc. Digital media with zero cost of reproduction is a reality. Deal with it.
but I'll never pay for recorded music again. I don't care how good it is, or how "little" they're charging for it. If it is impossible to get off of Kazaa, or IRC, or whatever new system is available in the future, I can live without it.
HELLO, PEOPLE you're paying for cheap, mass-produced advertising. They should be giving it away for free...
there are lots of people this would be good for besides just the elderly. my father, for example has had to wear a brace on his right leg all his life because of polio. he has no control of it below the hip, and when he walks the brace just locks that leg straight, so he has to swing it around. he has difficulty with stairs, and the unbalanced load has caused a lot of problems with his left knee.
this invention could very well lead to an active brace, which would give him much more mobility.
they do it because it's easy, thanks to OPC (OLE for Process Control). It's very popular for interfacing different computing platforms and control devices using Windows. Just get an OPC driver from the manufacturer of the PLC, analyzer, flow computer, etc. Maybe if there were a comparable Linux/other solution, and manufacturers supported it, the control systems engineers would use it. Until then, expect this kind of stuff...
James Bond doesn't need to be a guy who "looks like he could at least throw a punch". His character is that of a clever spy who gets by with his cunning use of cool gadgets, wit, and charm (with the ladies). Don't get me wrong, the last few have sucked, but I think that's more the fault of the writers than the casting of Pierce Brosnan. He fits the role well.
On that note, I doubt James bond would ever carry anything as unstylish plastic drill case (however "covert" this may be). If this guy had the money to buy a drill and throw it away, why not just buy a metal briefcase? Spy movies always have metal briefcases...
there's a dude here in my office that wears one of the Jabra headseats 24/7, and everyone else makes fun of him behind his back. we joke about the guy having been assimilated by the borg. the funny thing is that he's such a loser that nobody ever calls him. we've never seen him actually talking on it. he's an older guy who's always buying useless crap, and it's apparent to everyone else that he thinks it gives him status. it's really, really pathetic. i advise all of you against these. At the very least, don't wear it when you're not using it. thanks.:)
looks like a repackaged version of creative's muvo, which means it uses its own proprietary USB key that has the controls on it. why can't someone make a little mp3 player that is basically the buttons and headphone jack into which one plugs an ordinary USB-keydrive? that way one could keep a couple keydrives around and swap them.
An LCD panel you mount on your monitor frame that provides you with notification of things like system temp, new mail, etc. This panel can sync to your pda as you walk in the door, letting you know of low importance information.
why do you want to add a display to your display? why not just display the information on your monitor?
what this technology is good for is X-10 type stuff. How about when I'm doing laundry and working on my computer or watching TV at the same time? Even if my washer/dryer had a buzzer I might not hear it. Wouldn't it be great if a little notice popped up (or your watch beeped) to tell you the wash is done, or that the clothes are dry?
It may also be a good format for creating an electronic wallet. RFID is passive (and therefore insecure), and bluetooth/wifi consume too much power, but this may be perfect. Walk your cartload of stuff through register (or RFID scanner since this is the future) and then your zigbee e-wallet watch asks you if you would like to authorize this purchase, what account you would like it to come from, shows you your current balance, etc. and sends back an encrypted authentication code.
or maybe your zigbee lock on your door could send an encrypted challenge to your zigbee watch as you approach the door and have it unlocked when you get to it?
call them "certifications" and make stupid little "certificates" for them to hang on their walls. maybe then a local business will try to get all their employees "certified". it seems to make the people in my office think they're competent... you may also want to offer testing.
i would guess that as long as people have to pay up front the $8-12K it takes to install them, competition won't heat up. i think the idea behind subsidies is to artificially lower the price until the production volume is high enough to make that price sustainable.
how do they figure $1/msg? It maybe only takes me 10 seconds to alt-tab over to outlook and see that it's spam, delete it, and alt-tab back. let's see... that amounts to $360/hr! I wish I were making that kind of money! If it weren't for all this spam...
if they'd just get spambayes they wouldn't have this problem anymore. hardly any junk mail gets past spambayes...
you moron, you didn't understand the question at all. he was talking about the widgets. the font size gets bigger, but the all the widgets stay the same size, often screwing up the text, too. ever notice how if you use windows at ANYTHING other than the normal font sizes it looks EXTREMELY shitty? I just switched mine to large text @ 1600x1200- sure, the text is readable, but now all the widgets are off-baseline and still tiny. MacOS X has got everyone beat on this with Quartz
yeah, and everything looks CLUNKY AS HELL when you do that. It's not like Quartz on OSX where everything scales properly. only the text gets bigger, everything else stays the same size, which means everything gets way F'd up. Hopefully they'll get this fixed in future versions...
I used to be on the Solar Race car team at UT, and I can tell you that the rules for this and Sunrayce are extremely restrictive as to what kind of cells and batteries you can use (to keep the rich schools from buying all the super-top-of-the-line stuff and outspending the competition), and you're limited to driving the speed limit. It's more of a competition about making a car that won't break down than about speed.
I think MySQL's success is its use with PHP. Everyone knows of PHP-MySQL websites, and there are lots of books and online tutorials and such. You don't find much about PHP-Postgres...
if that were a really effective strategy, wouldn't Apple be winning right now?
I think the fact is that approx 99.9999% of desktops get one OS installed when they're shipped from the factory and that OS remains on it until the day it dies. People rarely even upgrade, but MS has just about gotten rid of that- look for them to go to a subscription model for windows update and do away with official releases. Apple would pose a serious threat if they would just ditch their hardware (and PLEASE the goddamned weird keyboard and one-button mouse with no scroll wheel)
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actually, a lot of people buy the "music" CD-R's, even when they're going to burn them in a computer, because they don't know any better. i've witnessed this many times among my less tech-savvy friends. the "music" ones are the ones sold with the blank tapes. they see "music" on it, and they either think that it is somehow necessary to get those, or that their music will somehow sound better with those. and they're always surprised when i tell them what's up.
I like your idea- that sounds like a good way to keep people from voting twice, although there is still no paper trail, and therefore no way to verify that nothing has changed. Here's how I think it should work on the other end: 1) The Bureau of Printing and Engraving prints up ballots like money- with every anti-counterfeiting measure we would give to money, and each with a unique serial number. Each ballot also has a matching receipt with the same serial number, identical in every way except a different color. 2) The voting machines are computers that fill out your ballot for you. This addresses the usability issues that caused the problems in the 2000 election, and allows for electronic tabulation. 3) Your ballot and receipt are printed out, both showing what you voted for, etc.. A number should also be printed on both at the time of voting which is a checksum of sorts that is a combination of your keycode, your votes, the ballot's unique ID, polling location, machine, time, etc. You verify that they are both identical before putting your ballot in the box. All unused/mis-filled ballots AND receipts must be accounted for. 4) At any time (up to say, a year after the results have been certified?) you may go into the county clerk (or whomever it is)'s office with your receipt and verify that your ballot still says what your receipt says.
obviously you haven't seen me try to dance. it would be very easy for me to compromise a physical ballet :)
this is really frightening, and must be stopped PRONTO. The computer may be useful for helping people to fill-out/print the ballot, and for rapid counting. But, as has been said a thousand times already, there must be a paper trail.
Better yet, I think the bureau of printing and engraving should make some fancy counterfeit-resistant ballots, each printed/embedded with a unique serial number in a place where everyone can keep an eye on the process.
After the election, any unused/mismarked ballots must be accounted for. The ballots should have a matching stub with the unique number and what they voted for that the they can take home with them and may at any time go to the county clerk's office to verify that their ballot is still recorded as having said what they thought they said.
I didn't say the music itself was cheap, or mass-produced (although much of it is). The CD is, though. It's a piece of plastic that takes pennies to make, and the artists LOSE MONEY to have it made. Why? Because, if they're lucky, they'll make money off of the concerts. The record companies payola this stuff through MTV and your local ClearChannel station 24/7 so that you'll want to pay $40+ to go to the ClearChannel-sponsored concert when the band comes to town.
I love the music, and I support the artists by going to their concerts (none of the bands I like do big stadium-style $40+/ticket shows anyway).
...and you don't think the "quality" you attribute to Dashboard Confessional, System of a Down, Offspring, etc. (yuck on all counts) has just as much to do with the fact that they've been force-fed to you by your local "Modern Rock" station (funny, because half of what the "Modern Rock" station here in Austin plays is ~10 years old).
Check out your local college radio station. I like UT's KVRX their slogan is even "none of the hits, all of the time". Here's music that people put out because they LOVE MAKING IT and obviously don't give a crap if they get rich doing it. They usually take a loss on the CD's so that people will come to their shows. I expect any artist worth their salt to sing for their supper. Not, sing once, and reap forever. Same goes for software, books, etc. Digital media with zero cost of reproduction is a reality. Deal with it.
but I'll never pay for recorded music again. I don't care how good it is, or how "little" they're charging for it. If it is impossible to get off of Kazaa, or IRC, or whatever new system is available in the future, I can live without it.
HELLO, PEOPLE you're paying for cheap, mass-produced advertising. They should be giving it away for free...
Gawd, I remember going to Pink Floyd shows, and half the songs would be done differently from the album. Made the show really special
yeah, that and the three hits of acid and giant cloud of pot smoke... in fact, are you sure you weren't just looking at the poster? hmmm...
for a second there i was thinking
cum on almost everyone in the modern entertainment industry [who] owes their life to silicone
mmm... i'd love to....
there are lots of people this would be good for besides just the elderly. my father, for example has had to wear a brace on his right leg all his life because of polio. he has no control of it below the hip, and when he walks the brace just locks that leg straight, so he has to swing it around. he has difficulty with stairs, and the unbalanced load has caused a lot of problems with his left knee.
this invention could very well lead to an active brace, which would give him much more mobility.
they do it because it's easy, thanks to OPC (OLE for Process Control). It's very popular for interfacing different computing platforms and control devices using Windows. Just get an OPC driver from the manufacturer of the PLC, analyzer, flow computer, etc. Maybe if there were a comparable Linux/other solution, and manufacturers supported it, the control systems engineers would use it. Until then, expect this kind of stuff...
James Bond doesn't need to be a guy who "looks like he could at least throw a punch". His character is that of a clever spy who gets by with his cunning use of cool gadgets, wit, and charm (with the ladies). Don't get me wrong, the last few have sucked, but I think that's more the fault of the writers than the casting of Pierce Brosnan. He fits the role well.
On that note, I doubt James bond would ever carry anything as unstylish plastic drill case (however "covert" this may be). If this guy had the money to buy a drill and throw it away, why not just buy a metal briefcase? Spy movies always have metal briefcases...
there's a dude here in my office that wears one of the Jabra headseats 24/7, and everyone else makes fun of him behind his back. we joke about the guy having been assimilated by the borg. the funny thing is that he's such a loser that nobody ever calls him. we've never seen him actually talking on it. he's an older guy who's always buying useless crap, and it's apparent to everyone else that he thinks it gives him status. it's really, really pathetic. i advise all of you against these. At the very least, don't wear it when you're not using it. thanks. :)
looks like a repackaged version of creative's muvo, which means it uses its own proprietary USB key that has the controls on it. why can't someone make a little mp3 player that is basically the buttons and headphone jack into which one plugs an ordinary USB-keydrive? that way one could keep a couple keydrives around and swap them.
An LCD panel you mount on your monitor frame that provides you with notification of things like system temp, new mail, etc. This panel can sync to your pda as you walk in the door, letting you know of low importance information.
why do you want to add a display to your display? why not just display the information on your monitor?
what this technology is good for is X-10 type stuff. How about when I'm doing laundry and working on my computer or watching TV at the same time? Even if my washer/dryer had a buzzer I might not hear it. Wouldn't it be great if a little notice popped up (or your watch beeped) to tell you the wash is done, or that the clothes are dry?
It may also be a good format for creating an electronic wallet. RFID is passive (and therefore insecure), and bluetooth/wifi consume too much power, but this may be perfect. Walk your cartload of stuff through register (or RFID scanner since this is the future) and then your zigbee e-wallet watch asks you if you would like to authorize this purchase, what account you would like it to come from, shows you your current balance, etc. and sends back an encrypted authentication code.
or maybe your zigbee lock on your door could send an encrypted challenge to your zigbee watch as you approach the door and have it unlocked when you get to it?
here
call them "certifications" and make stupid little "certificates" for them to hang on their walls. maybe then a local business will try to get all their employees "certified". it seems to make the people in my office think they're competent... you may also want to offer testing.
i would guess that as long as people have to pay up front the $8-12K it takes to install them, competition won't heat up. i think the idea behind subsidies is to artificially lower the price until the production volume is high enough to make that price sustainable.
how do they figure $1/msg? It maybe only takes me 10 seconds to alt-tab over to outlook and see that it's spam, delete it, and alt-tab back. let's see... that amounts to $360/hr! I wish I were making that kind of money! If it weren't for all this spam...
if they'd just get spambayes they wouldn't have this problem anymore. hardly any junk mail gets past spambayes...
you moron, you didn't understand the question at all. he was talking about the widgets. the font size gets bigger, but the all the widgets stay the same size, often screwing up the text, too. ever notice how if you use windows at ANYTHING other than the normal font sizes it looks EXTREMELY shitty? I just switched mine to large text @ 1600x1200- sure, the text is readable, but now all the widgets are off-baseline and still tiny. MacOS X has got everyone beat on this with Quartz
yeah, and everything looks CLUNKY AS HELL when you do that. It's not like Quartz on OSX where everything scales properly. only the text gets bigger, everything else stays the same size, which means everything gets way F'd up. Hopefully they'll get this fixed in future versions...
I used to be on the Solar Race car team at UT, and I can tell you that the rules for this and Sunrayce are extremely restrictive as to what kind of cells and batteries you can use (to keep the rich schools from buying all the super-top-of-the-line stuff and outspending the competition), and you're limited to driving the speed limit. It's more of a competition about making a car that won't break down than about speed.
I wouldn't trust any research done by the Upright Citizen's Brigade. This stuff isn't nearly as entertaining as their other works, anyway...
I think MySQL's success is its use with PHP. Everyone knows of PHP-MySQL websites, and there are lots of books and online tutorials and such. You don't find much about PHP-Postgres...
if that were a really effective strategy, wouldn't Apple be winning right now?
I think the fact is that approx 99.9999% of desktops get one OS installed when they're shipped from the factory and that OS remains on it until the day it dies. People rarely even upgrade, but MS has just about gotten rid of that- look for them to go to a subscription model for windows update and do away with official releases. Apple would pose a serious threat if they would just ditch their hardware (and PLEASE the goddamned weird keyboard and one-button mouse with no scroll wheel)