Or, how about IAAMD, or probably in your case IAAMD/PHD.
Or you could try YYTIIAAMDBFLRYSNCMSAMAAMOOAROACOT(Yes, you twittering idiot, I am a medical doctor, but for liability reasons you should not construe my statement as medical advice, a medical opinion, or a recommendation of a course of treatment)
Or how about really good looking disposable ties? You could make them from Tyvek or Mylar or some other neat, inexpensive material.
You could even make them out of treated litmus-type paper stuff, so that they would show any liquids that might have contaminated them.
Better yet, you could make ties from agar, and then culture the tie itself to see what sort of baddies the doctor was exposed to all day. It would be a nice information gathering tool for epidemiologists.
And for the non-medical geeks, ties could be made from edible materials like beef jerky or fruit roll-ups. That way you could be fashionalbe and have a handy snack!
Electric companies buy the electricity from you at wholsale rates. Then they sell it back to you at retail rates.
You end up paying the electric company the same for your own electricity as you would if you bought it from them directly, without any solar cells, windmills or whatever.
The concept of Net Metering allows the consumer/generator to sell back to the electric grid at the same price for generation or consumption, based on net usage.
This way you get a real incentive for building your own small facilities and put power on the grid.
Power companies don't like it because they loose money on the deal: transmission efficiencies are well below 100%, the power is not reliable in peak hours (because you are probably consuming it), and they don't get their administration and maintenance costs.
But I like the idea of generating your own electricity, espically for something as engery-intensive as cooling. More power to ya!
History of the World is a great game. It got me interested in ancient history, architecture(from trying to figure out what were on the monument pieces) and non-western history in general.
Don't forget the classic that started the rule modification game craze: Cosmic Encounter. Hours and hours of complex, mind bending fun.
I am astonished neither game has been mentioned in the discussion so far. Perhaps my tastes are a bit different.
That the Company is both a "provider of wire or electronic communication service" and an "other person" within the meaning of 2518(4), and may therefore be required to furnish facilities and technical assistance is not, however, the end of the story. The question remains whether the order goes too far in interfering with the service provided by the Company, by preventing the Company from supplying the System's services to its customers when a vehicle is under surveillance.
We conclude that it does.
16153 In re: IN THE MATTER OF THE APPLICATION
[12] Court orders granted pursuant to the authority of
2518 must specify that assistance be provided "unobtrusively and with a minimum of interference with the services that such service provider, landlord . . . or person is according the person whose communications are to be intercepted."
2518(4) (emphasis added). The "a minimum of interference" language was added in 1970 as part of the amendment that added the explicit assistance requirement to title III. Pub. L. No. 91-358, 211(b) (1970).
[13] Looking at the language of the statute, the "a minimum of interference" requirement certainly allows for some level of interference with customers' service in the conducting of surveillance. We need not decide precisely how much intereference is permitted. "A minimum of interference" at least precludes total incapacitation of a service while interception is in progress. Put another way, eavesdropping is not performed with "a minimum of interference" if a service is completely shut down as a result of the surveillance.
Our interpretation of the "a minimum of interference" language is bolstered by our reading of title III, which, we believe, does not evince a congressional intent to authorize surveillance in the face of complete disruption of a wire and electronic communication service for a particular customer. As the Supreme Court stated in United States v. New York Telephone Co., "[t]he conviction that private citizens have a duty to provide assistance to law enforcement officials when it is required is by no means foreign to our traditions." 434 U.S. at 175 n.24. At the same time, the Supreme Court stressed that the order in question in that case (approved under the All Writs Act, not title III) "required minimal effort on the part of the Company and no disruption to its operations." Id. at 175 (emphasis added). The obligation of private citizens to assist law enforcement, even if they are compensated for the immediate costs of doing so, has not extended to circumstances in which there is a complete disruption of a service they offer to a customer as part of their business, and, as we read title III, Congress did not intend that it would.
[14] In this case, FBI surveillance completely disabled the monitored car's System. The only function that worked in some form was the emergency button or automatic emergency response signal. These emergency features, however, were severely hampered by the surveillance: Pressing the emergency button and activation of the car's airbags, instead of automatically contacting the Company, would simply emit a tone over the already open phone line. No one at the Company was likely to be monitoring the call at such a time, as the call was transferred to the FBI once received. There is no assurance that the FBI would be monitoring the call at the time the tone was transmitted; indeed, the minimization requirements, see note 23, supra, preclude the FBI from listening in to conversations unrelated to the purpose of the surveillance. Also, the FBI, however well-intentioned, is not in the business of providing emergency road services, and might well have better things to do when listening in than respond with such services to the electronic signal sen
Black-hat crackers breaking the encryption on your liver? Sounds like the hepatitis virus to me.
We already have a vast array of nasties to guard against, they are called pathogens. And yes, they do often use your own "code" against you.
I'd like to think of BORG-like enchancements as a belt-and-suspenders approach. Now, if you are eccentric enough to wear both a belt and suspenders, do you worry that you have one more way for your pants to falldown?
Re:Article has nothing to do with RFID tags
on
RFID Hell
·
· Score: 1
I really hope I'm just misunderstanding your intent.
I think you see my point, exactly.
The alternative to wearing the GPS broadcast anklet is much worse. I'm pretty sure that's why the paedophiles in the program chose that option.
I also want to re-iterate that if this is not a choice on behalf of the convict, that it is not a good thing. Everyone deserves a choice, when their privacy is being limited or restricted by the state. Even if the alternative is extremely unpleasant, citizens deserve a choice.
Currently the choice seems to be "take it or leave it" where the "take" part is normal, everyday citizens having to put up with less privacy, more danger of identity theft, and having to worry about credit reports influencing hiring, promotions, political office, and the like. The "leave it" part is dropping out and living in a small shack in Montana with no connection to the outside world or much else.
Re:Panic Shmanic
on
RFID Hell
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I'm sure the first fire starters were
considered sorcerers...
Yes they were. Have you ever read the myth of Prometheus, and how
the gods punished man by giving him woman, in the form of Pandora?
Oh, yes I do agree that technology is neutral. The problem seems to be that humans are not.
Re:Article has nothing to do with RFID tags
on
RFID Hell
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Now available for personal use.
The technology described in the article seems similar to this product which allows GPS units to send their location to other receivers.
This particular application has excellent application with Search And Rescue. It would also be a good idea for keeping track of your family members during trips.
Of course the Brits have an invoulentary system of location reporting, foisted upon convicted padeophiles, probably as a conditinon of parole.
Would you give up a portion of your privacy and freedom in exchange for less time in prision?
Now, if this is a mandatory sentence, it just seems like the physical prision is being exchanged for a technological one.
Which is safer, more humane, and capable of bringing the miscreant back into "normal" society sooner?
I guess England will let us know in a few years when they have the results of the pilot program ready.
Great, now we know that fruit flies are adapated to withstand a season of drought or poor fruit production and still not have the entire species die off. Nifty.
The article did not say if the flies could sustain the same level of activity while they were starved. After all, if you have ever grown drosophila you know that they do not have much more than a quarter liter of living volume, hardly enough room to work up a good sweat, or whatever fruit flies do fo exercise.
Can the fruit flies also do complex computation on an empty stomach? The article did not address that either.
I know that if I went on the calorie restricted diet, I would get cranky, loose focus at work, be a general pain to be around.
As has been stated before in this discussion, where is the real benefits to us, that is humans?
The only thing we know for sure is that if you skip breakfast, you will live until lunchtime.
In the article it is mentioned that your Social Security Number is used as a universal identifier and as "proof" of identity. This is not a good thing.
I work in the medical records/medical billing industry and a patient's SSN is one of the vital bits of information we collect and use to help index records. Also the patient's date of birth.
For billing purposes, we need the patient's home address.
The health insurance company also needs all this information. In fact, if we don't supply all of the patient's personal information, they often don't pay claims.
We try to protect private information. We have yearly training, and monthly filers reminding us of the importance of protecting confidential infromatin. We have every bit of discarded paper shreded, and we have pretty good locks on our doors, and we have a fairly paranoid firewall, but the truly determined employee could always get their hands on thousands of patient records with everything needed for identity theft.
It's probably the same way at Hospitals and Insuance companies too. Too many people have access to private information, and the social and technological controls on it are too weak.
I hope that no one who has access to my personal information decides to do a bit of creative fundraising.
I don't have any answers, but we ought to think of solutions pretty soon.
The article mentioned that IBM was looking into multi-media applicaitons. UDP is just fine for this. With VoIP or other streaming-type apps, you don't really want a completely loss-less protocol. UDP, without the error detection/correction overhead of TCP is fast, but lossy.
Using TCP would create skips and delays while the packets were re-transmitted. In a real-time app, you want (subjective) game time to keep on going, even if you drop a few packets.
The same priciple goes for videoconferencing and other similar media types.
For sending spreadsheets and data files, you need a loss-less protocol like TCP. I wouldn't want the database to miss the chunck of data where I paid my bills to be lost to the bit bucket!
I generally tend to stay away from multi-function machines, if it runs out of toner (needs maintenance, whatever) not only have you lost your printer, but your copier, fax and so on.
A few refurbished HP 4000-series with jet direct cards can serve well as network printers.
If you need the multi-copy collating features of the Panasonic you showed, consider sending the job to Kinkos or the like, you just need a day or two notice, and it often turns out to be cheaper (cost of ownership) unless you want to print several copies of your SOP's each day in house.
Eh, if you've got the scratch, the Panasonic looks spiffy.
Of course you could also look here, here or here.
According to the story, it seems like MSNBC was responsible for the termination of at least three business relations between "Legitimate" companies and spammers.
If only more news outlets traced their spam the same way, it could put a dent in the demand for spam.
Who am I kidding? Those spammers, er "lead generators" will go right back to work, selling to anyone who will buy, no questions asked. As long as businesses will pay for personal information, there will be plenty of weasels to sell it to them.
For smaller ISPs to flourish they need to offer something the Big Boys (ie SBC & co) do not, perhaps better customer support, or some sort of Value Added Service. Competing on price alone will get you nowhere
ILECs (Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers) own the 'Last Mile' and other giants (Verio, Level3, etc) own the upstream pipes. Between paying for the upstream access and the co-location costs at the Central Office, I don't see how anyone even expected to compete with SBC and other ILECs in the DSL business.
SBC does not even make a profit on DSL, they just hope that over the long run they don't have to upgrade any more of their plant, and can continue to sell the same (slow) DSL service for $50 a month. Recurring revenue will let them break even in the long run.
Small ISPs should charge more, and offer more at the same time. Upstream firewall service, or anonymous file swapping, or extra good spam filtering or some sort of extra content available only to subscribers.
More is more. Smart consumers will pay more for expanded and better service.
Re:Math? you want me to do math?
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 1
Partly to mostly cloudy with chances of rain in the afternoon, thank you.
Stores already have the forces of Price Theory set against them whether they like it or not.
If people are willing to loose two cents (not four) they will. If economic times get tough, consumers will go to stores that price things so that people come out ahead. Or even.
Items that are priced on a variable basis, like gasoline, would be largely free of the problem of "two cent price fixing". There are people, myself included, who will drive a few miles out of their way just to save a penny or two per gallon on gas.
In fact, in the case of gas, you could always come out ahead if you paid cash, if you stoped the pump when it read the price of $xx.x7
Heck, sales tax where I live is about 9.5%. I'm already paying an extra dime on the dollar, what does an extra two cents on the final sale bother me?
Math? you want me to do math?
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 1
While these demoniations may be more efficent for reducing the number of coins per transaction, I would think that they would increase the complexity of the math requuired to do the transaction, and the time to count the change back.
This would not necessairly increase the efficency of change transactions.
I would think the implementation of the "Two Penny Lottery" would reduce the amount of change needed just nicely.
Pennies would be removed from circulation, although for electronic transactions, everything would still be counted down to the nearest cent.
If the pack of gum I just bought comes to $0.88 (with tax) I would pay $0.90 and loose two cents. Things would even out because I would come out ahead by paying only $0.85 if it cost $0.87.
That would reduce the number of coins less than a dollar in circulation to three.
I am getting carpal tunnel syndrome, and I am seeing a neruologist about it.
I wonder if I could get my work to shell out $1250 for the nifty-looking cyber keyborad thingy? Not likely. When a cheap keyboard and mouse cost less than $12 each, I think they would rather I just suck it up and let me suffer dimishished capacity in my hands some 5-10 years down the road. Goodness knows if they will be my employers that far in the future.
Even $300 for the vertical keyboard is steep. Most of my attempts to get even basic office supplies at work make me feel like I'm robbing the company.
And darned if I am going to bring in one of those expensive gadgets to work, and risk that my investement in tech trinkets could be pilfered. One of those wacky gizmos would stand out on someone else's desk. The would-be thief would have to take it home instead of keeping it at their desk.
Given the right size paycheck, I'd gladly put on my hip waders and go down there and start running fiber, no problem.
But there's the rub, people are expensive, cantankerous, and insist on frivolities like safety. 'Bots are ideal for jobs where people are too expensive or the environment too dangerous.
Vehicle 6 describes chance and the role it plays in natural selection. He describes chance as "a source of intelligence that is much more powerful than any engineering mind." Never before have I directly thought of natural selection as being intelligent, but once Braitenberg said it, it sunk in that, Yes, natural selection is intelligent; much more intelligent than any human who ever lived. It is the most skilled engineer ever, making machines of unbelievable complexity and ability. And this "intelligence" has no form, no body. It has always been around since life began and it will always be around until the universe ceases to exist. It is a process; an invisible concept. And yet it is more intelligent than any human.
I'm going to disagree and say that a process is a process, and intelligence is something different.
Natural Selection is an elegent process and can (for lack of a better word) craft some exquisitely designed things. Trees, eagles, mosquitos, and even humans are all engineering marvels created in the forge of Natural Selection. But there is no intelligence behind it.
If Natural Selection were intelligent then the dinosaurs would not be extinct, nor would the miryad of complex and promising creatures of the Edicarian Fauna. Intelligent design would not waste such potential sources of design diversity.
Even crystals are beautifully "designed". They are pretty to look at, serve useful functions, and can be highly prized as art, or jewelry. But the crystalization process is merely a result of natural chemical forces in action. No intelligence behind that, or natural selection either.
If the reviewer wants to suggest that Braitenberg is implying that "God is in the details," he can. But a process is a process, and chance is not intelligent design.
You heard the study, folks! Only 83% of the earth's land surface is being used!
Shake a leg, get the lead out, you lazy maggots!
Let's get those figures up, Up, UP!
If we all work at it, we can get those inhospitiable arctic and antarctic zones as well. If we just melted off that antarctic ice cap, we could get our hands on some prime, untouched realestate.
This is a nice demo to show electrical resistance in wires. Take a decent sized battery, and some nicely fine steel wool. Apply electrical current so that it flows through the steel wool. The steel wool will glow and then burn due to the electrical resisance. Sorry, I don't know the relevent math on this one.
Perform this expreiment on a non-flamable surface and use appropriate safety gear.
Do not allow students to wear necklaces or bracelets of steel wool and let the students apply electricty, (even if your back was turned for just a minute,) you may face diciplinary action from the administration.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, how about IAAMD, or probably in your case IAAMD/PHD.
Or you could try YYTIIAAMDBFLRYSNCMSAMAAMOOAROACOT(Yes, you twittering idiot, I am a medical doctor, but for liability reasons you should not construe my statement as medical advice, a medical opinion, or a recommendation of a course of treatment)
Or how about really good looking disposable ties?
You could make them from Tyvek or Mylar or some other neat, inexpensive material.
You could even make them out of treated litmus-type paper stuff, so that they would show any liquids that might have contaminated them.
Better yet, you could make ties from agar, and then culture the tie itself to see what sort of baddies the doctor was exposed to all day. It would be a nice information gathering tool for epidemiologists.
And for the non-medical geeks, ties could be made from edible materials like beef jerky or fruit roll-ups. That way you could be fashionalbe and have a handy snack!
Net Metering is the issue here.
Electric companies buy the electricity from you at wholsale rates. Then they sell it back to you at retail rates.
You end up paying the electric company the same for your own electricity as you would if you bought it from them directly, without any solar cells, windmills or whatever. The concept of Net Metering allows the consumer/generator to sell back to the electric grid at the same price for generation or consumption, based on net usage.This way you get a real incentive for building your own small facilities and put power on the grid.
Power companies don't like it because they loose money on the deal: transmission efficiencies are well below 100%, the power is not reliable in peak hours (because you are probably consuming it), and they don't get their administration and maintenance costs.
But I like the idea of generating your own electricity, espically for something as engery-intensive as cooling.
More power to ya!
History of the World is a great game. It got me interested in ancient history, architecture(from trying to figure out what were on the monument pieces) and non-western history in general.
Don't forget the classic that started the rule modification game craze: Cosmic Encounter. Hours and hours of complex, mind bending fun.
I am astonished neither game has been mentioned in the discussion so far. Perhaps my tastes are a bit different.
D. Requirement of a Minimum of Interference
That the Company is both a "provider of wire or electronic
communication service" and an "other person" within the
meaning of 2518(4), and may therefore be required to furnish
facilities and technical assistance is not, however, the end
of the story. The question remains whether the order goes too
far in interfering with the service provided by the Company,
by preventing the Company from supplying the System's services
to its customers when a vehicle is under surveillance.
We conclude that it does.
16153 In re: IN THE MATTER OF THE APPLICATION
[12] Court orders granted pursuant to the authority of
2518 must specify that assistance be provided "unobtrusively
and with a minimum of interference with the services
that such service provider, landlord . . . or person is according
the person whose communications are to be intercepted."
2518(4) (emphasis added). The "a minimum of interference"
language was added in 1970 as part of the amendment
that added the explicit assistance requirement to title III. Pub.
L. No. 91-358, 211(b) (1970).
[13] Looking at the language of the statute, the "a minimum
of interference" requirement certainly allows for some
level of interference with customers' service in the conducting
of surveillance. We need not decide precisely how much
intereference is permitted. "A minimum of interference" at
least precludes total incapacitation of a service while interception
is in progress. Put another way, eavesdropping is not performed
with "a minimum of interference" if a service is
completely shut down as a result of the surveillance.
Our interpretation of the "a minimum of interference" language
is bolstered by our reading of title III, which, we
believe, does not evince a congressional intent to authorize
surveillance in the face of complete disruption of a wire and
electronic communication service for a particular customer.
As the Supreme Court stated in United States v. New York
Telephone Co., "[t]he conviction that private citizens have a
duty to provide assistance to law enforcement officials when
it is required is by no means foreign to our traditions." 434
U.S. at 175 n.24. At the same time, the Supreme Court
stressed that the order in question in that case (approved under
the All Writs Act, not title III) "required minimal effort on the
part of the Company and no disruption to its operations." Id.
at 175 (emphasis added). The obligation of private citizens to
assist law enforcement, even if they are compensated for the
immediate costs of doing so, has not extended to circumstances
in which there is a complete disruption of a service
they offer to a customer as part of their business, and, as we
read title III, Congress did not intend that it would.
[14] In this case, FBI surveillance completely disabled the
monitored car's System. The only function that worked in
some form was the emergency button or automatic emergency
response signal. These emergency features, however, were
severely hampered by the surveillance: Pressing the emergency
button and activation of the car's airbags, instead of
automatically contacting the Company, would simply emit a
tone over the already open phone line. No one at the Company
was likely to be monitoring the call at such a time, as
the call was transferred to the FBI once received. There is no
assurance that the FBI would be monitoring the call at the
time the tone was transmitted; indeed, the minimization
requirements, see note 23, supra, preclude the FBI from listening
in to conversations unrelated to the purpose of the surveillance.
Also, the FBI, however well-intentioned, is not in
the business of providing emergency road services, and might
well have better things to do when listening in than respond
with such services to the electronic signal sen
Black-hat crackers breaking the encryption on your liver? Sounds like the hepatitis virus to me.
We already have a vast array of nasties to guard against, they are called pathogens. And yes, they do often use your own "code" against you.
I'd like to think of BORG-like enchancements as a belt-and-suspenders approach.
Now, if you are eccentric enough to wear both a belt and suspenders, do you worry that you have one more way for your pants to falldown?
I really hope I'm just misunderstanding your intent.
I think you see my point, exactly.
The alternative to wearing the GPS broadcast anklet is much worse. I'm pretty sure that's why the paedophiles in the program chose that option.
I also want to re-iterate that if this is not a choice on behalf of the convict, that it is not a good thing.
Everyone deserves a choice, when their privacy is being limited or restricted by the state. Even if the alternative is extremely unpleasant, citizens deserve a choice.
Currently the choice seems to be "take it or leave it" where the "take" part is normal, everyday citizens having to put up with less privacy, more danger of identity theft, and having to worry about credit reports influencing hiring, promotions, political office, and the like. The "leave it" part is dropping out and living in a small shack in Montana with no connection to the outside world or much else.
Yes they were. Have you ever read the myth of Prometheus, and how the gods punished man by giving him woman, in the form of Pandora?
Here or Here you can get the story.
Oh, yes I do agree that technology is neutral. The problem seems to be that humans are not.
Now available for personal use.
The technology described in the article seems similar to this product which allows GPS units to send their location to other receivers.
This particular application has excellent application with Search And Rescue. It would also be a good idea for keeping track of your family members during trips.
Of course the Brits have an invoulentary system of location reporting, foisted upon convicted padeophiles, probably as a conditinon of parole.
Would you give up a portion of your privacy and freedom in exchange for less time in prision?
Now, if this is a mandatory sentence, it just seems like the physical prision is being exchanged for a technological one.
Which is safer, more humane, and capable of bringing the miscreant back into "normal" society sooner?
I guess England will let us know in a few years when they have the results of the pilot program ready.
Great, now we know that fruit flies are adapated to withstand a season of drought or poor fruit production and still not have the entire species die off. Nifty.
The article did not say if the flies could sustain the same level of activity while they were starved.
After all, if you have ever grown drosophila you know that they do not have much more than a quarter liter of living volume, hardly enough room to work up a good sweat, or whatever fruit flies do fo exercise.
Can the fruit flies also do complex computation on an empty stomach? The article did not address that either.
I know that if I went on the calorie restricted diet, I would get cranky, loose focus at work, be a general pain to be around.
As has been stated before in this discussion, where is the real benefits to us, that is humans?
The only thing we know for sure is that if you skip breakfast, you will live until lunchtime.
In the article it is mentioned that your Social Security Number is used as a universal identifier and as "proof" of identity.
This is not a good thing.
I work in the medical records/medical billing industry and a patient's SSN is one of the vital bits of information we collect and use to help index records.
Also the patient's date of birth.
For billing purposes, we need the patient's home address.
The health insurance company also needs all this information. In fact, if we don't supply all of the patient's personal information, they often don't pay claims.
We try to protect private information. We have yearly training, and monthly filers reminding us of the importance of protecting confidential infromatin. We have every bit of discarded paper shreded, and we have pretty good locks on our doors, and we have a fairly paranoid firewall, but the truly determined employee could always get their hands on thousands of patient records with everything needed for identity theft.
It's probably the same way at Hospitals and Insuance companies too. Too many people have access to private information, and the social and technological controls on it are too weak.
I hope that no one who has access to my personal information decides to do a bit of creative fundraising.
I don't have any answers, but we ought to think of solutions pretty soon.
Dude, it's this.
The article mentioned that IBM was looking into multi-media applicaitons. UDP is just fine for this. With VoIP or other streaming-type apps, you don't really want a completely loss-less protocol. UDP, without the error detection/correction overhead of TCP is fast, but lossy.
Using TCP would create skips and delays while the packets were re-transmitted. In a real-time app, you want (subjective) game time to keep on going, even if you drop a few packets.
The same priciple goes for videoconferencing and other similar media types.
For sending spreadsheets and data files, you need a loss-less protocol like TCP. I wouldn't want the database to miss the chunck of data where I paid my bills to be lost to the bit bucket!
I generally tend to stay away from multi-function machines, if it runs out of toner (needs maintenance, whatever) not only have you lost your printer, but your copier, fax and so on.
A few refurbished HP 4000-series with jet direct cards can serve well as network printers.
If you need the multi-copy collating features of the Panasonic you showed, consider sending the job to Kinkos or the like, you just need a day or two notice, and it often turns out to be cheaper (cost of ownership) unless you want to print several copies of your SOP's each day in house.
Eh, if you've got the scratch, the Panasonic looks spiffy. Of course you could also look here, here or here.
Heck, just go for broke.
Existing jewelry won't loose that much value. It will be reborn as "antique" jewelry.
I can just see marketroids coming up with monikers like "Pre-CVD" or "Heirloom Gems" or some such.
People will start to collect old jewlery made with "good old fashioned" diamonds. And then there will be the endless eBay collectors.
Don't throw out your 1-carat diamond stud earrings just yet.
According to the story, it seems like MSNBC was responsible for the termination of at least three business relations between "Legitimate" companies and spammers.
If only more news outlets traced their spam the same way, it could put a dent in the demand for spam.
Who am I kidding? Those spammers, er "lead generators" will go right back to work, selling to anyone who will buy, no questions asked. As long as businesses will pay for personal information, there will be plenty of weasels to sell it to them.
For smaller ISPs to flourish they need to offer something the Big Boys (ie SBC & co) do not, perhaps better customer support, or some sort of Value Added Service. Competing on price alone will get you nowhere
ILECs (Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers) own the 'Last Mile' and other giants (Verio, Level3, etc) own the upstream pipes. Between paying for the upstream access and the co-location costs at the Central Office, I don't see how anyone even expected to compete with SBC and other ILECs in the DSL business.
SBC does not even make a profit on DSL, they just hope that over the long run they don't have to upgrade any more of their plant, and can continue to sell the same (slow) DSL service for $50 a month. Recurring revenue will let them break even in the long run.
Small ISPs should charge more, and offer more at the same time. Upstream firewall service, or anonymous file swapping, or extra good spam filtering or some sort of extra content available only to subscribers.
More is more. Smart consumers will pay more for expanded and better service.
The St. Louis Science Center has free admission.
The Missouri Botanical Garden is pretty cheap, and is a premiere research and conservation institution. It's also nice to be outdoors once in a while.
Boeing has a free museum here. Aerospace is somewhat geeky.
The Museum of Transport is pretty geeky. Plus you can see lots of old trains!
Partly to mostly cloudy with chances of rain in the afternoon, thank you.
Stores already have the forces of Price Theory set against them whether they like it or not.
If people are willing to loose two cents (not four) they will. If economic times get tough, consumers will go to stores that price things so that people come out ahead. Or even.
Items that are priced on a variable basis, like gasoline, would be largely free of the problem of "two cent price fixing". There are people, myself included, who will drive a few miles out of their way just to save a penny or two per gallon on gas.
In fact, in the case of gas, you could always come out ahead if you paid cash, if you stoped the pump when it read the price of $xx.x7
Heck, sales tax where I live is about 9.5%. I'm already paying an extra dime on the dollar, what does an extra two cents on the final sale bother me?
While these demoniations may be more efficent for reducing the number of coins per transaction, I would think that they would increase the complexity of the math requuired to do the transaction, and the time to count the change back.
This would not necessairly increase the efficency of change transactions.
I would think the implementation of the "Two Penny Lottery" would reduce the amount of change needed just nicely.
Pennies would be removed from circulation, although for electronic transactions, everything would still be counted down to the nearest cent.
If the pack of gum I just bought comes to $0.88 (with tax) I would pay $0.90 and loose two cents. Things would even out because I would come out ahead by paying only $0.85 if it cost $0.87
That would reduce the number of coins less than a dollar in circulation to three.
I am getting carpal tunnel syndrome, and I am seeing a neruologist about it.
I wonder if I could get my work to shell out $1250 for the nifty-looking cyber keyborad thingy? Not likely.
When a cheap keyboard and mouse cost less than $12 each, I think they would rather I just suck it up and let me suffer dimishished capacity in my hands some 5-10 years down the road. Goodness knows if they will be my employers that far in the future.
Even $300 for the vertical keyboard is steep. Most of my attempts to get even basic office supplies at work make me feel like I'm robbing the company.
And darned if I am going to bring in one of those expensive gadgets to work, and risk that my investement in tech trinkets could be pilfered.
One of those wacky gizmos would stand out on someone else's desk. The would-be thief would have to take it home instead of keeping it at their desk.
Cool to look at though.
But there's the rub, people are expensive, cantankerous, and insist on frivolities like safety. 'Bots are ideal for jobs where people are too expensive or the environment too dangerous.
Go, go, Sewerbots!
I'm going to disagree and say that a process is a process, and intelligence is something different.
Natural Selection is an elegent process and can (for lack of a better word) craft some exquisitely designed things. Trees, eagles, mosquitos, and even humans are all engineering marvels created in the forge of Natural Selection. But there is no intelligence behind it.
If Natural Selection were intelligent then the dinosaurs would not be extinct, nor would the miryad of complex and promising creatures of the Edicarian Fauna. Intelligent design would not waste such potential sources of design diversity.
Even crystals are beautifully "designed". They are pretty to look at, serve useful functions, and can be highly prized as art, or jewelry. But the crystalization process is merely a result of natural chemical forces in action. No intelligence behind that, or natural selection either.
If the reviewer wants to suggest that Braitenberg is implying that "God is in the details," he can. But a process is a process, and chance is not intelligent design.
Shake a leg, get the lead out, you lazy maggots!
Let's get those figures up, Up, UP!
If we all work at it, we can get those inhospitiable arctic and antarctic zones as well. If we just melted off that antarctic ice cap, we could get our hands on some prime, untouched realestate.
Get motivated, people!
This is a nice demo to show electrical resistance in wires. Take a decent sized battery, and some nicely fine steel wool. Apply electrical current so that it flows through the steel wool. The steel wool will glow and then burn due to the electrical resisance.
Sorry, I don't know the relevent math on this one.
Perform this expreiment on a non-flamable surface and use appropriate safety gear.
Do not allow students to wear necklaces or bracelets of steel wool and let the students apply electricty, (even if your back was turned for just a minute,) you may face diciplinary action from the administration.