I actually thought the claimed frequency was a typo in the article. But in the interview, Mr. Storm says he can sing 8 octaves below the lowest note on a piano. If you work backwords and double 0.189Hz eight times (for each octave), you get 48Hz, making his lowest [claimed] note 8 octaves below the lowest G on a piano.
As for whether this qualifies as singing, I would argue that to be considered real singing he should be using the same vocal cords and musculature required to produce human-audible sounds. I.e. he should be able to produce a continuous sound that starts at a normal note and drops down to the claimed note, without any fundamental change in the way in which he's producing the sound. My $.02.
If you look at the EXIF data in her logo ( http://goo.gl/cHTtq ), it says it was created with Microsoft Windows Live Photo Gallery. So it's probably generic clipart available in that tool.
"Google lied... and paid $500M when they got caught" "Facebook lied... and settled with the FTC when they got caught" "Scott Thompson lied... so just leave him alone, people!"
These systems are going to be optimized for detecting license-platey text, and only if such text is found, doing anything further to look for violations of any sort. Asking them to know when they're looking at something that's supposed to have a license plate on it but doesn't is completely different problem. It's a completely different class of problem, one that hasn't been solved yet.
So, no, these systems won't flag when they're looking at something that doesn't have a recognizable license plate on it, like a trash can, a person, a dog... or a car with a plate that's been removed or covered in some way so it doesn't look like a plate any more.
The Law of Unintended Consequences will probably come into play here. As camera systems - especially ones mounted on cop cars - get better at reading license plates, law enforcement officers will probably come to rely on them more. I.e. they'll pay less attention to your plates. So one conclusion that might be draw from this is that if you hide/obfuscate your plates, you're more likely to get away with it.
/me grabs a handful of mud and slings it at his plates to hide the expired registration tags.
I'm just stunned that the PTO's goal is to get a "first action" notice time down to within 10 months? WTF? Why isn't that goal "24 hours"?
There is clearly something fundamentally broken with the process. And that "something" is all the work required to gain patent status. What is needed is a process that doesn't require all this back-and-forth to get a patent but, rather, defers that work until there is a clear and obvious need for it to be done.
Instead of patenting ideas, why not just "register" them by filing a form that says, "So-and-so claims to have invented this-and-that on such-and-such date." This would reserve the right to pursue legal action against an infringer at some later date, but no further action is required or taken by the PTO. For example...
- It's up to you to educate yourself on which patent ideas are defensable in a court room. - PTO charges $100 to register your "idea". The fee is just to avoid massive spamming. You're notified immediately that it's been accepted. - Once registered, your idea is protected for 14-20 years from the date of filing, just like today. - If and when you ever choose to enforce your patent through legal means, you pay a "substantial" fee ($1,000? $10K? $100K?) to have the PTO provide a patent "determination". The determination pays for the PTO to evaluate the validity of your idea and provide a summary recommendation to the court as to how to proceed. In effect, the PTO acts as a "professional witness" in legal patent battles, and nothing more. - Judgement of actual patent validity is made in the courtroom (where it's already made, in practice).
This process... - makes the patent system more approachable to your average lay-person. - eliminates 99% of the workload that's currently burying the PTO - lets the PTO focus on what they do best - analyzing patent quality - where and when those efforts are genuinly needed - cuts the PTO action time from years down to essentially zero - eliminates much of the abuse of patents (patent "registrations" are basically meaningless until you get into a court room).
I'm sure there are plenty of reasons for why we don't operate this way though, right? So what are they?
You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation. The exchange of the Work for other copyrighted works by means of digital file-sharing or otherwise shall not be considered to be intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation, provided there is no payment of any monetary compensation in connection with the exchange of copyrighted works.
It's up for debate as to whether or not BoingBoing is receiving "monetary compensation" for "exchanging" your work. Yes, it's next to ads, which they're being paid to display. But they're not being paid to display your image. At least, not directly.
Microsoft said in an emailed statement that Google's acquisition of DocVerse acknowledges that customers want to use and collaborate with Office documents. "Furthermore, it reinforces that customers are embracing Microsoft's long-stated strategy of software plus services, which combines rich client software with cloud services."
Dr. Hess was later quoted as saying, "While we're obviously pleased with our success so far, we won't be satisfied until we've trapped not only the rainbow, but the leprechaun and pot of gold as well. Until then, we remain disturbingly dependent on grant money for our research."
While discussing (and rejoicing) in this decision, I'd suggest we all say thank you to Richard Stallman for his work on "copyleft" licensing. It is possibly the single greatest innovation in modern software development and, without it, our world would be a darker, more depressing place.
Mr. Beckerman (or other attorneys familiar with this case and the relevent law), can you comment on the merit of this request?
I've read the plaintiff's letter and to the lay-person it reads pretty reasonably. In effect, "We can't prove our case because the plaintiffs lied, hid evidence, and generally didn't cooperate to the extent required by law".
I'm sure the plaintiffs are putting the facts of the case in the most favorable possible light to avoid a "with prejudice" dismissal. But without seeing/hearing the actual testimony it's difficult to judge just how overt the defendents actions were, and to what extent the plaintiffs persual of this case had actual merit - i.e. how justified it was and, therefore, to what extent a prejudicial decision might or might not be warranted.
There are things which I just can't work on because of my agreement with my employer. Working for a large corporation means that almost anything technical, which has the ability to change the world for the better, would fall under my employment agreement. Sure, I could probably post beer recipes (yes, I do brew...), but the work I've been doing with this FPGA kit is probably covered in part, if not completely, by my employment agreement. Because of the general wording of the agreement, and my desire to continue working there, I generally do not publish anything which could be construed as belonging to my employer in any way. So I typically can't publish anything related to my areas of most proficiency.
I understand what you're saying, but just to be clear, by,"proficiency", you mean, "intellectual property", right? The issue being that the company "owns" any IP you create while on their payroll or using their property (computers, offices, etc.). In practical terms, the problem is that you spend 40 hours a week writing such-and-such a library, and it'd be great to share this work, but the pointy-heads in management are reluctant to opensource it.
Ideally, you can convince management that it's in the company's best interests to allow you to opensource the code. Regardless, there are several good arguments you can make:
Opensourcing allows you to leverage the efforts of a broad community of developers (that the company doesn't have to pay for) to get your job done.
Opensourcing gives your company influence (but not control) over a technology that 1) provides a distinct competitive advantage and 2) is highly visible within your industry
Opensourcing provides for a maintanence plan for your software. i.e. the company isn't screwed if you decide to leave. Either you, or other contributers to the opensource project, will continue to support the codebase.
But that's not always possible. The best alternative is to bide your time and start an opensource project the next chance you get (i.e. between jobs). The company may own you while you work for them, but when you leave, you are no longer bound by your employment agreement. The company will own the IP you create for them, and you might be bound by a non-compete agreement, depending on where you work(ed), but those are different beasts, with different rules. IMNAL, but I suspect that as long as you aren't explicitely using IP owned by the company - i.e. not infringing on patents or using code you had access to - than an opensource project will be relatively immune to non-compete claims. (Anyone else have experience with this?)
There are strong incentives for you to do this that only grow as you grow your career. You get to take your code with you as you move from job to job. The opensource effort embodies your expertise and proficiency. And it gives you some modicum of identity, prestige even, within the industry in which you work.
Well, when I'm wrong, I'm wrong! Apparently there's a gay character in Ships of Earth too.
Regardless, I'm pretty sure he's not criticizing Rowling for her failure to take a stance on Dumbledore's sexuality in the books. Rather, he's criticizing her for the stance she does take outside of them, which just happens to be contrary to his own views on the subject.
I'm a huge fan of Mr. Card's fiction, but I find his taking the moral high road on the issue of Dumbledore being gay rather disengenuous. He implies that he would have written his sexuality into the story when, in fact he's never had a gay character in *any* of his novels (at least, not the ones I've read). And, given his public stance on gay rights ("Gay rights is a collective delusion that's being attempted" - http://archive.salon.com/books/feature/2000/02/03/card/index2.html ), there's little doubt in my mind that what he's really criticizing is the fact that Rowling admitted Dumbledore was gay at all, regardless of whether or not that fact is printed anywhere.
You're blaming the "hackers" for this?
This was a project for a poor community with a limited, fixed budget. The hackers got involved because volunteer efforts were likely the only way this project was going to happen. The only thing that changed was that Meraki switched from one unaffordable model to a different, still-unaffordable one, and in the process alienated a group of hackers with a vested interest in helping them improve their product.
Perhaps Meraki should have instead open-sourced their Dashboard code and tried to leverage the efforts of people who are able and willing to help them make it better. And at the same time take a long, hard look at their business model. Because it's threatened by a bunch of hobbyists with some spare time on their hands, they're going to be in real trouble.
Rather than trying to extort (too strong a word?) subscription fees for their software, perhaps they would be better served by slightly raising the price on the hardware (which they did) and offering support/services contracts to those customers who can afford them. It's a pretty safe bet that these other customers are going to be evaluating vendors not just on the hardware and software, but also on how open their code is, how robust the user and developer communities are, and whether or not they can count on the vendor (Meraki in this case) to act in their best interests in the future.
Heaven forbid that Google should actually become a monopoly in online advertising. Why, they could drive the prices through the roof making it difficult or impossible to advertise online. Oh, whatever shall we do!
Now if they decided to buy the AdBlock plugin for Firefox, then I'd be worried.
This is really interesting. I'm surprised there hasn't been any commentary on this yet.
The claim by plaintiffs that their litigation investment cannot be easily distilled down to a single case is simply preposterous. Since the plaintiff's claim that they are litigating these cases on a "gigantic scale", the problem can be distilled to the simplest form by identifying all their fees as either:
A) Directly related to the Foster case
B)... or not.
The fees for the Foster case would be A + (B divided by the # of cases in litigation). A gross oversimplification, no doubt - I'm sure there are lots of gray areas, either real or imagined by the plaintiffs - but it yields an interesting observation: The argument that the plaintiff's fees are intertwined with all the other cases would force them to reveal _all_ their expenses, and not just the ones tied directly to the Foster case, right?
I have to assume that this is so distasteful an option to the RIAA that it's never going to happen, though. Which means that someone somewhere must be making a decision about what fees are relevant to the case. So who is doing this? The court? Surely that decision shouldn't be left to the plaintiffs.
Regardless, I can't wait to see what this yields. Please let us know once you have the documents in hand!
Don't buy Thomson, and let market forces do their thing.
... or if you do, pay in cash.
The latter raising the question of, "If they don't know who you are, what value is the watermark?" i.e. What information is going into that watermark to make it useful? It's certainly not your name and address.
I suppose they could embed the system's serial number. If it's on the network, which is not at all unlikely, it could embed it's IP address. But that's only marginally useful since it could very well be a LAN IP (e.g. 192.168.1.X). Beyond that, it'd need to start being smart about probing the network around it to figure out what the WAN IP it's connecting through is.
... Or, they could simply force a registration process of some sort. "Hi, the device you just bought won't work until you give us some information". Yeah, right.
Beyond these technical hurdles there are also the legal ones. As the popular RIAA.vs. Lindor case that we've all read about here is demonstrating, proving that a device actually corresponds to a person can be a bit tricky.
And for a bit of related randomness, check out the Michael Smith's website. Mr. Smith)is a Republican long shot whose website represents one of the better low-budget campaign sites I've seen.
The site hits all the key points - Easy to navigate, pleasing-yet-conservative visual design, and relevant content. The navigation bar along the top is easy to find and use, and not overly cluttered. The home page tells you right away who he is, and what his key platform issues are. It has a simple field for signing up to the mailing list, and links to his blog and MySpace pages.
I found the content to be the most compelling part of the site. He obviously has a personal hand in what goes into the site, and isn't afraid to speak his mind (within reason:-) ). A really refreshing change from the heavily filtered B.S. that most of the other candidates post, IMHO.
Anyhow... as an independent voter with democratic/liberal tendencies, I was surprised at how compelling I found this guy to be - and the site had a lot to do with that. It's just too bad that our democratic process makes it impossible (^h^h^h^h^h) unlikely that someone like this (sincere, reasonably forthright, hopefully not too tainted by the political gauntlet that most viable candidates must run) will ever get on the ballot.
Yup, large companies in the US have exactly the same issue(s). These for DHTML applications you typically get around this by providing a hidden image link at the top of the page (so it's the first link a screenreader processes) that has an alttag="Click here to use the screenreader-enabled version of this site". Screenreader users are then directed to a static HTML version of the site.
I imagine Google Suggest could easily do this to simply turn off the "complete=1" parameter in the URL to disable the suggest feature.
Even if they did it wouldn't matter. The ability to do this has been around for years, and there are plenty of examples of prior art. One of the more obvious examples of would be the DHTML version of AOL's webmail product. I don't know if they still use it (haven't looked lately) but it dud auto-complete on email addresses from your (server-side) address book. I.e. start typing a name or email address, it suggests options from your address book, etc... Exactly the same process, exactly the same interface. Just slightly different subject matter. And that was in production 2 years ago.
I think the basic problem with telecommuting is that none of the mechanisms that normally structure your day are in place. You're not commuting, you eat when you get hungry, sleep when you're tired, etc. You don't have to interact with other people, so you don't conform to the (implicitely) agreed to schedule that the rest of humanity keeps.
Getting to and from work is so obscenely convenient ("How far is it from the kitchen to the spare bedroom?") that you end up working in fits and starts, and at all hours of the day and night. [Hmm... writing this at 5:30 am, fwiw]
So, I would say concentrate on finding activities that a) put you into contact with other people and b) help to "bound" your work day to reasaonable hours. Also, make a conscious effort to prioritize non-work activities over work activities.
For example, maybe get into the habit of going to the local coffee shop in the morning for breakfast and *don't* take your laptop or any reading material. This will force you to strike up conversation with the folks that work there and with the other patrons. At the other end of the day, taking night/evening courses (as a previous slash-dotter recommended), going to the gym, or (*gasp*) going out with your S.O. / friends will help get you out.
I currently have pretty much the optimal schedule (for me at least). I work at home 2-3 days a week and go into the office the other days, but about 10 years ago I did a 6-month gig where i was working at home out of the 2nd bedroom. It was great at the time, but as you've pointed out the need for human interaction gets pretty strong.
After a couple months, I found my "schedule" just got completely out of whack. It didn't actually bother me too much, but my roommate kind of thought I was a freak (rightly so, i'm sure). A "typical" day consisted of...
Wake up at 3am
Shower/shave/dress to walk, literally, 10' to the spare bedroom. (I should point out this is the only "job" I ever considered wearing a tie for!)
Work for 4-5 hours
Go for a 2-3 hour bike ride (I was training for a Pacific Coast ride)
Lunch/watch TV for a couple hours
2 hour nap
Work until midnight with dinner thrown in the middle there somewhere
Sleep for 3 hours
Repeat as needed.
I'm definitely glad I did it since it's helped me structure and prioritize work in the context of all the other things I do in the intervening 10 years. Would I do it again? Perhaps. I'd have to be really careful about how much time I spent in the house. My wife and I love eachother dearly, but we're not one of those couples that can spend 24x7 with eachother.:-) (She also telecommutes 2-3 days a week, btw).
Slashdot Mirror
I actually thought the claimed frequency was a typo in the article. But in the interview, Mr. Storm says he can sing 8 octaves below the lowest note on a piano. If you work backwords and double 0.189Hz eight times (for each octave), you get 48Hz, making his lowest [claimed] note 8 octaves below the lowest G on a piano.
As for whether this qualifies as singing, I would argue that to be considered real singing he should be using the same vocal cords and musculature required to produce human-audible sounds. I.e. he should be able to produce a continuous sound that starts at a normal note and drops down to the claimed note, without any fundamental change in the way in which he's producing the sound. My $.02.
If you look at the EXIF data in her logo ( http://goo.gl/cHTtq ), it says it was created with Microsoft Windows Live Photo Gallery. So it's probably generic clipart available in that tool.
Paraphrasing the article:
"Google lied ... and paid $500M when they got caught" ... and settled with the FTC when they got caught" ... so just leave him alone, people!"
"Facebook lied
"Scott Thompson lied
These systems are going to be optimized for detecting license-platey text, and only if such text is found, doing anything further to look for violations of any sort. Asking them to know when they're looking at something that's supposed to have a license plate on it but doesn't is completely different problem. It's a completely different class of problem, one that hasn't been solved yet.
So, no, these systems won't flag when they're looking at something that doesn't have a recognizable license plate on it, like a trash can, a person, a dog... or a car with a plate that's been removed or covered in some way so it doesn't look like a plate any more.
The Law of Unintended Consequences will probably come into play here. As camera systems - especially ones mounted on cop cars - get better at reading license plates, law enforcement officers will probably come to rely on them more. I.e. they'll pay less attention to your plates. So one conclusion that might be draw from this is that if you hide/obfuscate your plates, you're more likely to get away with it.
From the article: producing a supercharged electron beam that can burn through 20 feet of steel per second"
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/02/18/navy-breaks-world-record-futuristic-laser-getting-real/#ixzz1EPpwfpx0
I'm just stunned that the PTO's goal is to get a "first action" notice time down to within 10 months? WTF? Why isn't that goal "24 hours"?
There is clearly something fundamentally broken with the process. And that "something" is all the work required to gain patent status. What is needed is a process that doesn't require all this back-and-forth to get a patent but, rather, defers that work until there is a clear and obvious need for it to be done.
Instead of patenting ideas, why not just "register" them by filing a form that says, "So-and-so claims to have invented this-and-that on such-and-such date." This would reserve the right to pursue legal action against an infringer at some later date, but no further action is required or taken by the PTO. For example ...
- It's up to you to educate yourself on which patent ideas are defensable in a court room.
- PTO charges $100 to register your "idea". The fee is just to avoid massive spamming. You're notified immediately that it's been accepted.
- Once registered, your idea is protected for 14-20 years from the date of filing, just like today.
- If and when you ever choose to enforce your patent through legal means, you pay a "substantial" fee ($1,000? $10K? $100K?) to have the PTO provide a patent "determination". The determination pays for the PTO to evaluate the validity of your idea and provide a summary recommendation to the court as to how to proceed. In effect, the PTO acts as a "professional witness" in legal patent battles, and nothing more.
- Judgement of actual patent validity is made in the courtroom (where it's already made, in practice).
This process ...
- makes the patent system more approachable to your average lay-person.
- eliminates 99% of the workload that's currently burying the PTO
- lets the PTO focus on what they do best - analyzing patent quality - where and when those efforts are genuinly needed
- cuts the PTO action time from years down to essentially zero
- eliminates much of the abuse of patents (patent "registrations" are basically meaningless until you get into a court room).
I'm sure there are plenty of reasons for why we don't operate this way though, right? So what are they?
My $.02 worth.
It's up for debate as to whether or not BoingBoing is receiving "monetary compensation" for "exchanging" your work. Yes, it's next to ads, which they're being paid to display. But they're not being paid to display your image. At least, not directly.
Anyone else hearing the Titanic's dance band playing in the background?
Dr. Hess was later quoted as saying, "While we're obviously pleased with our success so far, we won't be satisfied until we've trapped not only the rainbow, but the leprechaun and pot of gold as well. Until then, we remain disturbingly dependent on grant money for our research."
While discussing (and rejoicing) in this decision, I'd suggest we all say thank you to Richard Stallman for his work on "copyleft" licensing. It is possibly the single greatest innovation in modern software development and, without it, our world would be a darker, more depressing place.
RMS, you rock dude!
Mr. Beckerman (or other attorneys familiar with this case and the relevent law), can you comment on the merit of this request?
I've read the plaintiff's letter and to the lay-person it reads pretty reasonably. In effect, "We can't prove our case because the plaintiffs lied, hid evidence, and generally didn't cooperate to the extent required by law".
I'm sure the plaintiffs are putting the facts of the case in the most favorable possible light to avoid a "with prejudice" dismissal. But without seeing/hearing the actual testimony it's difficult to judge just how overt the defendents actions were, and to what extent the plaintiffs persual of this case had actual merit - i.e. how justified it was and, therefore, to what extent a prejudicial decision might or might not be warranted.
I understand what you're saying, but just to be clear, by,"proficiency", you mean, "intellectual property", right? The issue being that the company "owns" any IP you create while on their payroll or using their property (computers, offices, etc.). In practical terms, the problem is that you spend 40 hours a week writing such-and-such a library, and it'd be great to share this work, but the pointy-heads in management are reluctant to opensource it.
Ideally, you can convince management that it's in the company's best interests to allow you to opensource the code. Regardless, there are several good arguments you can make:
But that's not always possible. The best alternative is to bide your time and start an opensource project the next chance you get (i.e. between jobs). The company may own you while you work for them, but when you leave, you are no longer bound by your employment agreement. The company will own the IP you create for them, and you might be bound by a non-compete agreement, depending on where you work(ed), but those are different beasts, with different rules. IMNAL, but I suspect that as long as you aren't explicitely using IP owned by the company - i.e. not infringing on patents or using code you had access to - than an opensource project will be relatively immune to non-compete claims. (Anyone else have experience with this?)
There are strong incentives for you to do this that only grow as you grow your career. You get to take your code with you as you move from job to job. The opensource effort embodies your expertise and proficiency. And it gives you some modicum of identity, prestige even, within the industry in which you work.
Well, when I'm wrong, I'm wrong! Apparently there's a gay character in Ships of Earth too.
Regardless, I'm pretty sure he's not criticizing Rowling for her failure to take a stance on Dumbledore's sexuality in the books. Rather, he's criticizing her for the stance she does take outside of them, which just happens to be contrary to his own views on the subject.
I'm a huge fan of Mr. Card's fiction, but I find his taking the moral high road on the issue of Dumbledore being gay rather disengenuous. He implies that he would have written his sexuality into the story when, in fact he's never had a gay character in *any* of his novels (at least, not the ones I've read). And, given his public stance on gay rights ("Gay rights is a collective delusion that's being attempted" - http://archive.salon.com/books/feature/2000/02/03/card/index2.html ), there's little doubt in my mind that what he's really criticizing is the fact that Rowling admitted Dumbledore was gay at all, regardless of whether or not that fact is printed anywhere.
You're blaming the "hackers" for this? This was a project for a poor community with a limited, fixed budget. The hackers got involved because volunteer efforts were likely the only way this project was going to happen. The only thing that changed was that Meraki switched from one unaffordable model to a different, still-unaffordable one, and in the process alienated a group of hackers with a vested interest in helping them improve their product. Perhaps Meraki should have instead open-sourced their Dashboard code and tried to leverage the efforts of people who are able and willing to help them make it better. And at the same time take a long, hard look at their business model. Because it's threatened by a bunch of hobbyists with some spare time on their hands, they're going to be in real trouble. Rather than trying to extort (too strong a word?) subscription fees for their software, perhaps they would be better served by slightly raising the price on the hardware (which they did) and offering support/services contracts to those customers who can afford them. It's a pretty safe bet that these other customers are going to be evaluating vendors not just on the hardware and software, but also on how open their code is, how robust the user and developer communities are, and whether or not they can count on the vendor (Meraki in this case) to act in their best interests in the future.
Heaven forbid that Google should actually become a monopoly in online advertising. Why, they could drive the prices through the roof making it difficult or impossible to advertise online. Oh, whatever shall we do!
Now if they decided to buy the AdBlock plugin for Firefox, then I'd be worried.
Statement from Justin Layshock's parents on why they brought suit
Original MySpace page created by Justin Layshock
To say the principal and school board are overreacting would be putting it mildly.This is really interesting. I'm surprised there hasn't been any commentary on this yet.
... or not.
The claim by plaintiffs that their litigation investment cannot be easily distilled down to a single case is simply preposterous. Since the plaintiff's claim that they are litigating these cases on a "gigantic scale", the problem can be distilled to the simplest form by identifying all their fees as either:
A) Directly related to the Foster case
B)
The fees for the Foster case would be A + (B divided by the # of cases in litigation). A gross oversimplification, no doubt - I'm sure there are lots of gray areas, either real or imagined by the plaintiffs - but it yields an interesting observation: The argument that the plaintiff's fees are intertwined with all the other cases would force them to reveal _all_ their expenses, and not just the ones tied directly to the Foster case, right?
I have to assume that this is so distasteful an option to the RIAA that it's never going to happen, though. Which means that someone somewhere must be making a decision about what fees are relevant to the case. So who is doing this? The court? Surely that decision shouldn't be left to the plaintiffs.
Regardless, I can't wait to see what this yields. Please let us know once you have the documents in hand!
The latter raising the question of, "If they don't know who you are, what value is the watermark?" i.e. What information is going into that watermark to make it useful? It's certainly not your name and address.
I suppose they could embed the system's serial number. If it's on the network, which is not at all unlikely, it could embed it's IP address. But that's only marginally useful since it could very well be a LAN IP (e.g. 192.168.1.X). Beyond that, it'd need to start being smart about probing the network around it to figure out what the WAN IP it's connecting through is.
Beyond these technical hurdles there are also the legal ones. As the popular RIAA .vs. Lindor case that we've all read about here is demonstrating, proving that a device actually corresponds to a person can be a bit tricky.
And for a bit of related randomness, check out the Michael Smith's website. Mr. Smith)is a Republican long shot whose website represents one of the better low-budget campaign sites I've seen.
The site hits all the key points - Easy to navigate, pleasing-yet-conservative visual design, and relevant content. The navigation bar along the top is easy to find and use, and not overly cluttered. The home page tells you right away who he is, and what his key platform issues are. It has a simple field for signing up to the mailing list, and links to his blog and MySpace pages.
I found the content to be the most compelling part of the site. He obviously has a personal hand in what goes into the site, and isn't afraid to speak his mind (within reason :-) ). A really refreshing change from the heavily filtered B.S. that most of the other candidates post, IMHO.
Anyhow... as an independent voter with democratic/liberal tendencies, I was surprised at how compelling I found this guy to be - and the site had a lot to do with that. It's just too bad that our democratic process makes it impossible (^h^h^h^h^h) unlikely that someone like this (sincere, reasonably forthright, hopefully not too tainted by the political gauntlet that most viable candidates must run) will ever get on the ballot.
*sigh*
Cool! It's always fun to see hardware reuse. I made myself a set of drink coasters from and old NeXT cube hard drive
Yup, large companies in the US have exactly the same issue(s). These for DHTML applications you typically get around this by providing a hidden image link at the top of the page (so it's the first link a screenreader processes) that has an alttag="Click here to use the screenreader-enabled version of this site". Screenreader users are then directed to a static HTML version of the site. I imagine Google Suggest could easily do this to simply turn off the "complete=1" parameter in the URL to disable the suggest feature.
Even if they did it wouldn't matter. The ability to do this has been around for years, and there are plenty of examples of prior art. One of the more obvious examples of would be the DHTML version of AOL's webmail product. I don't know if they still use it (haven't looked lately) but it dud auto-complete on email addresses from your (server-side) address book. I.e. start typing a name or email address, it suggests options from your address book, etc... Exactly the same process, exactly the same interface. Just slightly different subject matter. And that was in production 2 years ago.
I think the basic problem with telecommuting is that none of the mechanisms that normally structure your day are in place. You're not commuting, you eat when you get hungry, sleep when you're tired, etc. You don't have to interact with other people, so you don't conform to the (implicitely) agreed to schedule that the rest of humanity keeps.
Getting to and from work is so obscenely convenient ("How far is it from the kitchen to the spare bedroom?") that you end up working in fits and starts, and at all hours of the day and night. [Hmm ... writing this at 5:30 am, fwiw]
So, I would say concentrate on finding activities that a) put you into contact with other people and b) help to "bound" your work day to reasaonable hours. Also, make a conscious effort to prioritize non-work activities over work activities.
For example, maybe get into the habit of going to the local coffee shop in the morning for breakfast and *don't* take your laptop or any reading material. This will force you to strike up conversation with the folks that work there and with the other patrons. At the other end of the day, taking night/evening courses (as a previous slash-dotter recommended), going to the gym, or (*gasp*) going out with your S.O. / friends will help get you out.
I currently have pretty much the optimal schedule (for me at least). I work at home 2-3 days a week and go into the office the other days, but about 10 years ago I did a 6-month gig where i was working at home out of the 2nd bedroom. It was great at the time, but as you've pointed out the need for human interaction gets pretty strong.
After a couple months, I found my "schedule" just got completely out of whack. It didn't actually bother me too much, but my roommate kind of thought I was a freak (rightly so, i'm sure). A "typical" day consisted of...
- Wake up at 3am
- Shower/shave/dress to walk, literally, 10' to the spare bedroom. (I should point out this is the only "job" I ever considered wearing a tie for!)
- Work for 4-5 hours
- Go for a 2-3 hour bike ride (I was training for a Pacific Coast ride)
- Lunch/watch TV for a couple hours
- 2 hour nap
- Work until midnight with dinner thrown in the middle there somewhere
- Sleep for 3 hours
- Repeat as needed.
I'm definitely glad I did it since it's helped me structure and prioritize work in the context of all the other things I do in the intervening 10 years. Would I do it again? Perhaps. I'd have to be really careful about how much time I spent in the house. My wife and I love eachother dearly, but we're not one of those couples that can spend 24x7 with eachother.