I've suggested this before -- instead of opening up the voice channels, why not just let everyone use their phone's text messaging feature, and that's it? Satisfies the need for people to tell their friends/family/dog about where/when they are, delays, arrivals etc. and eliminates the voice chatter.
This seems just intuitive to me, why doesn't anyone pick up on it?
A lot of people think that somehow a recording black box producing evidence against you is "self-incrimination" (in case it was your fault in an accident), because the black box belongs to you and is your property. But this completely misunderstands what self-incrimination means.
Self-incrimination is forcing someone to orally testify against him or herself in questioning or trial -- a compelled confession for example, which in our early (colonial, for example) jurisprudence was unfortunately not a foreign concept, and is understood to be highly dubious by any informed jurist. It is limited to that specific act -- testifying against yourself.
For some reason, people think it applies to any act on their part that could demonstrate that guilt, or by extension even evidence produced by something in his/her possession or by someone of his/her acquaintance. That's simply not the case, and an awful reach.
As the caselaw says: a person is immune from having to provide evidence against him/herself. But that does not mean he/she is immune from having that evidence produced [by some other way]...
So how is Skype paying the bill for all this? Don't they have to pay a flat fee to the phone companies per call at least to route the call to the local number? You would think they'd put even a really high limit on this.
This is one of the tradeoffs of a very fluid capital system, where efficiency in any particular task dictates that you find whoever is most qualified at the moment to satisfy your needs. It's the downside of competition, which serves us very well in the short term, but cannot by nature give people points for doing things well in the long term.
For example --
"I need a programmer who knows how to rewrite the code that someone here in the US created 10 years ago, so that it's up to date. It's a very esoteric program. But someone in India already knows it, I guarantee. So I will not hire or train someone here to do it, because it can be done more cheaply, *and right now* if I farm the work out overseas. " -- but in exchange, you have sold off the investment in the programmer here in the US who might have created the code you will use 10 years from now.
"I need furniture for my new house, and I want it cheap and relatively sturdy. I'll buy stuff from Walmart or Ikea, because it satisfies both those requirements." -- but in exchange, market share of domestic (high cost) producers is tanking, and in 10 years, there will be no more domestic furniture producers because no one has been trained for that job anymore (or can find it a sustainable livelihood).
There are better examples I'm sure, and these certainly aren't new thoughts, that haven't been written tons of times elsewhere, but I for one (maybe because I'm not out there searching for a job in frustration) see it as an evolutionary transfer of wealth and assets from the rich to poor. As we (as a country) get old and rich and fat, there are people who are willing to do our work for us cheaper and faster, and better, and who will rise in power because we (just through acting by our human nature individually) create, as a group, these forces that none of us can individually resist.
It's fascinating, but sad sometimes, because the "we" in the above statements isn't a single person who can learn from mistakes or change his/her behavior -- it's usually the next generation that suffers from the shortsightedness of (or irresistible economic grounds laid by) the previous one...
Maybe some experts here (about sc/ramjets) can answer a question that has always nagged me:
If the ramjet has no moving parts, and the diagrams of its cross-section always make it look like a fairly symmetrical constriction, why does the exhaust propel the thing forward? I.e. why doesn't the ignited fuel and hot air expand equally from both ends of the thing, and cause it to go nowhere?
Is it the asymmetry because of the direction of the ram air stream? Or is it because the fuel is lighted just aft of the constriction?
perhaps you can explain something (I have always wanted to understand better about radio transmission): if the transmission is amplitude modulation, I thought this means that the unmodulated carrier wave is a pure single frequency radio wave. (well that is the same thing for FM too, right)
In order to send a signal (voice/whatever), the amplitude of the carrier wave is modulated, only. So why would an amplitude modification of the signal cause it to have any additional frequency bandwidth?
boo hoo. non-profit people having to pay to send out messages?? cry me a river.
Who ever said that a form of communication was free, either in people's effort expended to send/receive the messages, or the cost of hardware to carry the messages? We all pay right now (implicitly) for the cost of keeping massive amounts of storage around for all this junk we get every day. If someone can come up with a workable system to tack 0.1 cent on every message that causes people (and spammers) to more carefully weigh the value of the crap they're sending out, I'm all for it.
Call me conservative, but having people decide what they value for themselves and judge how badly and at what cost they want to send an email is (in principle) better than having some uber-authority decide what constitutes spam or not. Clearly there is a market for some things that you get spam for. Let them decide how much it's worth to spam.
step 1. Old telecom companies notice their revenue dropping like stones.
step 2. old telecom companies attempt to preserve unsustainable revenue streams by limiting the bandwidth of competitors on their networks
step 3. Customers sue over equal access to networks
step 4. company such as Google kicks their asses by offering free, unrestricted wifi in every major city around the world
step 5. old telecom companies stop whining and do what they should've done in the first place
thanks for that link! Is there a simple instruction on how to do this trick for any google video? (ie. create a downloadble avi video from their flash version?)
yes, because the thing I fear most about the NSA, with their acres of listening stations, underground football fields worth of humming supercomputers, and small armies of intelligence agents, is the cookie that they placed on my computer while browsing their website....
that reminds me of a funny onion piece from a while ago -- an illustration of how people need to be ready in other ways for a technology in order for it to be useful at all
KABINDA, ZAIRE--In a move IBM offices are hailing as a major step in the
company's ongoing worldwide telecommunications revolution, M'wana Ndeti,
a member of Zaire's Bantu tribe, used an IBM global uplink network modem
yesterday to crush a nut.
Ndeti, who spent 20 minutes trying to open the nut by hand, easily cracked
it open by smashing it repeatedly with the powerful modem.
"I could not crush the nut by myself," said the 47-year-old Ndeti, who
added the savory nut to a thick, peanut-based soup minutes later. "With
IBM's help, I was able to break it." Ndeti discovered the nut-breaking,
28.8 V.34 modem yesterday, when IBM was shooting a commercial in his
southwestern Zaire village. During a break in shooting, which shows
African villagers eagerly teleconferencing via computer with Japanese
schoolchildren, Ndeti snuck onto the set and took the modem, which he
believed would serve well as a "smashing" utensil.
IBM officials were not surprised the longtime computer giant was able to
provide Ndeti with practical solutions to his everyday problems. "Our
telecommunications systems offer people all over the world global
networking solutions that fit their specific needs," said Herbert Ross,
IBM's director of marketing. "Whether you're a nun cloistered in an
Italian abbey or an Aborigine in Australia's Great Sandy Desert, IBM has
the ideas to get you where you want to go today."
According to Ndeti, of the modem's many powerful features, most impressive
was its hard plastic casing, which easily sustained several minutes of
vigorous pounding against a large stone. "I put the nut on a rock, and I
hit it with the modem," Ndeti said. "The modem did not break. It is a good
modem."
Ndeti was so impressed with the modem that he purchased a new, state-of-
the-art IBM workstation, complete with a PowerPC 601 microprocessor, a
quad-speed internal CD-ROM drive and three 16-bit ethernet networking
connectors. The tribesman has already made good use of the computer
system, fashioning a gazelle trap out of its wires, a boat anchor out of
the monitor and a crude but effective weapon from its mouse.
"This is a good computer," said Ndeti, carving up a just-captured gazelle
with the computer's flat, sharp internal processing device. "I am using
every part of it. I will cook this gazelle on the keyboard." Hours later,
Ndeti capped off his delicious gazelle dinner by smoking the computer's
200-page owner's manual.
IBM spokespeople praised Ndeti's choice of computers. "We are pleased that
the Bantu people are turning to IBM for their business needs," said
company CEO William Allaire. "From Kansas City to Kinshasa, IBM is
bringing the world closer together. Our cutting-edge technology is truly
creating a global village."
I think jailing people for such pathetic white collar crimes is ridiculous.
hmm. That doesn't seem to me reasonable as a general statement. There *are* many white collar crimes worthy of imprisonment, which aren't violent against one particular person/victim. How about the corrupt pension officer who embezzles 12,000 people out of their retirement savings? How about a bank worker who helps funnel $25B out of a poor country's treasury? A judge who trades decisions for money?
None of those people are murderers, rapists, or violent. But aren't those crimes worthy of jail?
Having a very narrow conception of crime as something that makes you bleed, doesn't really work for sophisticated/long-term crimes.
I think this is not a bad idea -- for example, if they made any bank/data aggregator/etc pay credit monitoring fees and penalties for every account holder's information lost (like say, when data tapes fall off a truck), banks might treat personal information a bit more like valuable information.
$50 x 100,000 records lost = big slap on the corporate hands.
I switched from emacs to nedit three years ago, and have not looked back since. I am not a total power user, so while sure emacs has some nice features like understanding c code indentations etc, I found that the lack of user friendly help was too much of a hassle. Nedit's menu simplicity yet fully functional tools (for my needs) were a welcome change from ctrl-x-ctrl-s-ctrl-c etc. And not to overemphasize nedit's understanding of how a mouse click is supposed to interact with text within windows.
Then there are the idiots who insist on still using vi for doing stuff. Forgive me, but I wasn't even able to figure out how to type a sentence in vi until someone told me about colons. What kind of hopeless user interface is that? "Let's make it as challenging and difficult to use as possible -- that'll attract a wide user base!!"
As one commentator put it recently, "the only research that has been carried out at the ISS is of the caliber of a high school science fair."
If you can name any hard hitting science that has been done at the ISS (aside from humans-in-space-duration sort of research), I'd be interested to hear it. I'm an astronomer, and I haven't heard of a single thing useful having been produced by the ISS.
We seem to have fallen into the faulty logic that, "we've invested so much that we shouldn't bail out and waste what we've put in to it so far." If it's a waste, it's a waste -- and continuing it is just throwing good money after bad. This seems to be a common thread these days....
back when I was new to linux, and configuring my own system, my computer was pretty slow and I wanted to remove all the Redhat extras that I thought were slowing it down.
out goes wine, samba, all those extras. And then I see stuff called glibc, libso, and more clearly unneeded baggage. Delete delete delete.
Ah well, that taught me right quick not to fiddle with things you don't know about while logged in as root...
What with this workaday world, I'm too busy to read the articles anymore. So I'll just make up the story in my head.
Scientists sped up light. Experiments -- launched a flashlight from a rocket, spun fiber optic lines really fast around their heads?
To this day, I am pissed off by people who organize things like this and cannot get beyond the mechanism of having people physically waiting in line for things. Isn't this 2005 already? We do understand how to allocate things based on first come, first serve, without having to actually be there in a crowd, right?
People in charge of stuff like this never seem to forsee what's going to happen when the gates are opened. How much more effort would it be to have someone give out numbers to each person standing in line, then tell them to go away until their number is called? No one gets served without a number. Problem solved.
It's like gas rationing back in the 70s. Who was the brilliant idiot who came up with cars waiting in line for gas? Just have one person standing there taking license plate numbers and telling people when to come back at a reserved time. Is it so hard?
At the worst, crowds turn into a nightmare like in India where several dozen people were crushed to death trying to get free clothing being given out. It's ridiculous that you could be crushed to death by other people in this day and age... So even in Virginia, some semblance of order should be possible.
How about Princeton offers 2/3 off tuition, in exchange for a degree that self-destructs 4 years after graduation? Or if you agree not to remember anything you learned in college?
I'm not complaining about Google's choices of feeds on the personalized homepage, because I actually like what they've offered -- but I can see how someone else might be offended at their editorial judgment. For example, (at least in the previous version, maybe also this one) the news choices were NYT, BBC, and other (generally) reputable sources. Now they also have Washington Post and others.
But I can see how someone might see this as liberal bias. "Where's my Washington Times, or Fox News feed??" And then some people will complain the other way -- "How come I can't get my Democracy Now feed on the home page??"
Maybe I just take the position that I like their choices and to those who complain about not having their own right-wing news feeds available, I say, go and create your own Google, losers. On the other hand, is it dangerous for one company to filter the available options so dramatically? You don't have to use their homepage, but when one provider is so dominant, you can't avoid issues like that...
ps. I believe the page now lets you input your own choice of xml feeds...
Slashdot Mirror
I've suggested this before -- instead of opening up the voice channels, why not just let everyone use their phone's text messaging feature, and that's it? Satisfies the need for people to tell their friends/family/dog about where/when they are, delays, arrivals etc. and eliminates the voice chatter.
This seems just intuitive to me, why doesn't anyone pick up on it?
A lot of people think that somehow a recording black box producing evidence against you is "self-incrimination" (in case it was your fault in an accident), because the black box belongs to you and is your property. But this completely misunderstands what self-incrimination means.
Self-incrimination is forcing someone to orally testify against him or herself in questioning or trial -- a compelled confession for example, which in our early (colonial, for example) jurisprudence was unfortunately not a foreign concept, and is understood to be highly dubious by any informed jurist. It is limited to that specific act -- testifying against yourself.
For some reason, people think it applies to any act on their part that could demonstrate that guilt, or by extension even evidence produced by something in his/her possession or by someone of his/her acquaintance. That's simply not the case, and an awful reach.
As the caselaw says: a person is immune from having to provide evidence against him/herself. But that does not mean he/she is immune from having that evidence produced [by some other way]...
from the title, I thought it was going to be how the Mario brothers became fatter, and less efficient.
So how is Skype paying the bill for all this? Don't they have to pay a flat fee to the phone companies per call at least to route the call to the local number? You would think they'd put even a really high limit on this.
aren't we talking about a laser that will just blind the cameras on spy satellites, not blow them to bits? There's quite a big difference...
wait, doesn't Skype for example, already encrypt all voice (and even chat)?
For example --
- "I need a programmer who knows how to rewrite the code that someone here in the US created 10 years ago, so that it's up to date. It's a very esoteric program. But someone in India already knows it, I guarantee. So I will not hire or train someone here to do it, because it can be done more cheaply, *and right now* if I farm the work out overseas. " -- but in exchange, you have sold off the investment in the programmer here in the US who might have created the code you will use 10 years from now.
- "I need furniture for my new house, and I want it cheap and relatively sturdy. I'll buy stuff from Walmart or Ikea, because it satisfies both those requirements." -- but in exchange, market share of domestic (high cost) producers is tanking, and in 10 years, there will be no more domestic furniture producers because no one has been trained for that job anymore (or can find it a sustainable livelihood).
There are better examples I'm sure, and these certainly aren't new thoughts, that haven't been written tons of times elsewhere, but I for one (maybe because I'm not out there searching for a job in frustration) see it as an evolutionary transfer of wealth and assets from the rich to poor. As we (as a country) get old and rich and fat, there are people who are willing to do our work for us cheaper and faster, and better, and who will rise in power because we (just through acting by our human nature individually) create, as a group, these forces that none of us can individually resist.It's fascinating, but sad sometimes, because the "we" in the above statements isn't a single person who can learn from mistakes or change his/her behavior -- it's usually the next generation that suffers from the shortsightedness of (or irresistible economic grounds laid by) the previous one...
Maybe some experts here (about sc/ramjets) can answer a question that has always nagged me:
If the ramjet has no moving parts, and the diagrams of its cross-section always make it look like a fairly symmetrical constriction, why does the exhaust propel the thing forward? I.e. why doesn't the ignited fuel and hot air expand equally from both ends of the thing, and cause it to go nowhere?
Is it the asymmetry because of the direction of the ram air stream? Or is it because the fuel is lighted just aft of the constriction?
thanks...
perhaps you can explain something (I have always wanted to understand better about radio transmission): if the transmission is amplitude modulation, I thought this means that the unmodulated carrier wave is a pure single frequency radio wave. (well that is the same thing for FM too, right)
In order to send a signal (voice/whatever), the amplitude of the carrier wave is modulated, only. So why would an amplitude modification of the signal cause it to have any additional frequency bandwidth?
thanks for any explanation you can offer!
boo hoo. non-profit people having to pay to send out messages?? cry me a river.
Who ever said that a form of communication was free, either in people's effort expended to send/receive the messages, or the cost of hardware to carry the messages? We all pay right now (implicitly) for the cost of keeping massive amounts of storage around for all this junk we get every day. If someone can come up with a workable system to tack 0.1 cent on every message that causes people (and spammers) to more carefully weigh the value of the crap they're sending out, I'm all for it.
Call me conservative, but having people decide what they value for themselves and judge how badly and at what cost they want to send an email is (in principle) better than having some uber-authority decide what constitutes spam or not. Clearly there is a market for some things that you get spam for. Let them decide how much it's worth to spam.
"ding dong, telecoms are dead!"
Who's crapping their pants now?
step 1. Old telecom companies notice their revenue dropping like stones.
step 2. old telecom companies attempt to preserve unsustainable revenue streams by limiting the bandwidth of competitors on their networks
step 3. Customers sue over equal access to networks
step 4. company such as Google kicks their asses by offering free, unrestricted wifi in every major city around the world
step 5. old telecom companies stop whining and do what they should've done in the first place
couldn't they have saved the trouble?
thanks for that link! Is there a simple instruction on how to do this trick for any google video? (ie. create a downloadble avi video from their flash version?)
yes, because the thing I fear most about the NSA, with their acres of listening stations, underground football fields worth of humming supercomputers, and small armies of intelligence agents, is the cookie that they placed on my computer while browsing their website....
need glasses, anyone?
that reminds me of a funny onion piece from a while ago -- an illustration of how people need to be ready in other ways for a technology in order for it to be useful at all
KABINDA, ZAIRE--In a move IBM offices are hailing as a major step in the company's ongoing worldwide telecommunications revolution, M'wana Ndeti, a member of Zaire's Bantu tribe, used an IBM global uplink network modem yesterday to crush a nut.
Ndeti, who spent 20 minutes trying to open the nut by hand, easily cracked it open by smashing it repeatedly with the powerful modem.
"I could not crush the nut by myself," said the 47-year-old Ndeti, who added the savory nut to a thick, peanut-based soup minutes later. "With IBM's help, I was able to break it." Ndeti discovered the nut-breaking, 28.8 V.34 modem yesterday, when IBM was shooting a commercial in his southwestern Zaire village. During a break in shooting, which shows African villagers eagerly teleconferencing via computer with Japanese schoolchildren, Ndeti snuck onto the set and took the modem, which he believed would serve well as a "smashing" utensil.
IBM officials were not surprised the longtime computer giant was able to provide Ndeti with practical solutions to his everyday problems. "Our telecommunications systems offer people all over the world global networking solutions that fit their specific needs," said Herbert Ross, IBM's director of marketing. "Whether you're a nun cloistered in an Italian abbey or an Aborigine in Australia's Great Sandy Desert, IBM has the ideas to get you where you want to go today."
According to Ndeti, of the modem's many powerful features, most impressive was its hard plastic casing, which easily sustained several minutes of vigorous pounding against a large stone. "I put the nut on a rock, and I hit it with the modem," Ndeti said. "The modem did not break. It is a good modem."
Ndeti was so impressed with the modem that he purchased a new, state-of- the-art IBM workstation, complete with a PowerPC 601 microprocessor, a quad-speed internal CD-ROM drive and three 16-bit ethernet networking connectors. The tribesman has already made good use of the computer system, fashioning a gazelle trap out of its wires, a boat anchor out of the monitor and a crude but effective weapon from its mouse.
"This is a good computer," said Ndeti, carving up a just-captured gazelle with the computer's flat, sharp internal processing device. "I am using every part of it. I will cook this gazelle on the keyboard." Hours later, Ndeti capped off his delicious gazelle dinner by smoking the computer's 200-page owner's manual.
IBM spokespeople praised Ndeti's choice of computers. "We are pleased that the Bantu people are turning to IBM for their business needs," said company CEO William Allaire. "From Kansas City to Kinshasa, IBM is bringing the world closer together. Our cutting-edge technology is truly creating a global village."
I think jailing people for such pathetic white collar crimes is ridiculous.
hmm. That doesn't seem to me reasonable as a general statement. There *are* many white collar crimes worthy of imprisonment, which aren't violent against one particular person/victim. How about the corrupt pension officer who embezzles 12,000 people out of their retirement savings? How about a bank worker who helps funnel $25B out of a poor country's treasury? A judge who trades decisions for money?
None of those people are murderers, rapists, or violent. But aren't those crimes worthy of jail?
Having a very narrow conception of crime as something that makes you bleed, doesn't really work for sophisticated/long-term crimes.
I think this is not a bad idea -- for example, if they made any bank/data aggregator/etc pay credit monitoring fees and penalties for every account holder's information lost (like say, when data tapes fall off a truck), banks might treat personal information a bit more like valuable information.
$50 x 100,000 records lost = big slap on the corporate hands.
I switched from emacs to nedit three years ago, and have not looked back since. I am not a total power user, so while sure emacs has some nice features like understanding c code indentations etc, I found that the lack of user friendly help was too much of a hassle. Nedit's menu simplicity yet fully functional tools (for my needs) were a welcome change from ctrl-x-ctrl-s-ctrl-c etc. And not to overemphasize nedit's understanding of how a mouse click is supposed to interact with text within windows.
Then there are the idiots who insist on still using vi for doing stuff. Forgive me, but I wasn't even able to figure out how to type a sentence in vi until someone told me about colons. What kind of hopeless user interface is that? "Let's make it as challenging and difficult to use as possible -- that'll attract a wide user base!!"
All the research that has been done there?
As one commentator put it recently, "the only research that has been carried out at the ISS is of the caliber of a high school science fair."
If you can name any hard hitting science that has been done at the ISS (aside from humans-in-space-duration sort of research), I'd be interested to hear it. I'm an astronomer, and I haven't heard of a single thing useful having been produced by the ISS.
We seem to have fallen into the faulty logic that, "we've invested so much that we shouldn't bail out and waste what we've put in to it so far." If it's a waste, it's a waste -- and continuing it is just throwing good money after bad. This seems to be a common thread these days....
back when I was new to linux, and configuring my own system, my computer was pretty slow and I wanted to remove all the Redhat extras that I thought were slowing it down.
out goes wine, samba, all those extras. And then I see stuff called glibc, libso, and more clearly unneeded baggage. Delete delete delete.
Ah well, that taught me right quick not to fiddle with things you don't know about while logged in as root...
"Free-flowing beer, live music, karaoke and arcade games kept the party raging at the Googleplex the other night..."
is that why gmail has been down for the last two days?
What with this workaday world, I'm too busy to read the articles anymore. So I'll just make up the story in my head. Scientists sped up light. Experiments -- launched a flashlight from a rocket, spun fiber optic lines really fast around their heads?
To this day, I am pissed off by people who organize things like this and cannot get beyond the mechanism of having people physically waiting in line for things. Isn't this 2005 already? We do understand how to allocate things based on first come, first serve, without having to actually be there in a crowd, right?
People in charge of stuff like this never seem to forsee what's going to happen when the gates are opened. How much more effort would it be to have someone give out numbers to each person standing in line, then tell them to go away until their number is called? No one gets served without a number. Problem solved.
It's like gas rationing back in the 70s. Who was the brilliant idiot who came up with cars waiting in line for gas? Just have one person standing there taking license plate numbers and telling people when to come back at a reserved time. Is it so hard?
At the worst, crowds turn into a nightmare like in India where several dozen people were crushed to death trying to get free clothing being given out. It's ridiculous that you could be crushed to death by other people in this day and age... So even in Virginia, some semblance of order should be possible.
How about Princeton offers 2/3 off tuition, in exchange for a degree that self-destructs 4 years after graduation? Or if you agree not to remember anything you learned in college?
here's a cool trick, add the other cars using the "c" key, and then drive into their oncoming lane with arrow keys. You actually can crash the cars!
I'm not complaining about Google's choices of feeds on the personalized homepage, because I actually like what they've offered -- but I can see how someone else might be offended at their editorial judgment. For example, (at least in the previous version, maybe also this one) the news choices were NYT, BBC, and other (generally) reputable sources. Now they also have Washington Post and others.
But I can see how someone might see this as liberal bias. "Where's my Washington Times, or Fox News feed??" And then some people will complain the other way -- "How come I can't get my Democracy Now feed on the home page??"
Maybe I just take the position that I like their choices and to those who complain about not having their own right-wing news feeds available, I say, go and create your own Google, losers. On the other hand, is it dangerous for one company to filter the available options so dramatically? You don't have to use their homepage, but when one provider is so dominant, you can't avoid issues like that...
ps. I believe the page now lets you input your own choice of xml feeds...