I had heard a lot about compact fluorescent light bulbs in recent years and switched to using them exclusively in my home. I've known a good number of people who have switched to using them over incandescent bulbs and were all talking it up, myself included, about how our power bills were lower and how we were much more comfortable not changing bulbs a few times a year. This made me think, why don't more people use compact fluorescent bulbs? Switching is largely a non-issue, as the CF bulbs screw right in to the same Edison bases (at least here in the U.S.)
So given all of this, why don't more people switch? Is it that most people just can't be bothered to make the change, even when its more efficient and more comfortable? Is it mostly due to the fact that most people habitually replace incandescent bulbs with incandescent bulbs, and hence don't bother to learn anything else?
Personally, I'm of the mindset that replacing two 100 watt bulbs that I use all the time with two 23 watt CF's--a task that cost at most 2 hours, counting the time to drive to the store--to save about $100 per year (0.2KW * 12hr/day * 365 days * US$0.11/KWH) was a worthwhile tradeoff.
However, if I look at the amount of time I wish I could type faster at all (probably an hour a month when I'm in a hurry ["Stupid hands!"]) versus the cost of entry (2 months at an average speed of 50%, so the 100 hours a month I spend actually typing is now 200 hours) I think it's not worth it at all. Admittedly, I'm manually doing an analysis of what an automatic gut reaction, but I think they're pretty honest... anyway, if I save five minutes a month wishing I could type faster, it'll take 100 years (100 hours [cost] / 5 minutes per month [gain]) to recover my investment.
I tell you what... when I'm 132, I'll call and let you know I would have broken even if I switched to DVORAK.
Plus, if someone were, say, to find a way to defeat the system with a fake fingerprint, you can just issue a new fingerprint to the person who should have legitimate access. With a card-based system, if a card is lost, it's in the system forever and the person with a stolen card will always be able to get in.
Just to spin what you've said--I think it's very sad that the organization of information is the afterthought in most documentation projects. The first question everyone seems to have is, "should command names be in Courier or Arial?" Come on... if you're staring at the prospect of handling some quantity of information equivalent to (at a minimum) hundreds of pages of printed text, don't you think it should be your first priority to get a handle on how to organize that information?
I'm mired deep in that territory now. I am desperately trying to attack the problem from the wrong side--I'm starting with our established desktop publishing package and trying to define meaningful styles that could be used in the future for content parsing.
The battles I fight are so far removed from what's important, it makes me miserable--our document templates actually include a style called "Bold," for instance. Bold??? Why define the style at all if it's a built-in function? In programming C, it's like defining "TRUE" to 1 so you can write comparisons like (x==1)==TRUE instead of (x==1)==1. Whether you define a "style" or just click the little "B" icon, it's the same problem.
The fact that we're using a desktop publishing package at all for data entry should be at issue--why not an editor to enter content in a hierarchy which will later be rendered by whatever appearance template we chooose? I wish I had a reasonable chance of ditching the desktop publishing package all together for something more pertinent.
I think that like you, I'm also looking forward to the industry of documentation--or more likely--information organziation and presentation. I just hope I'm not dead first.
I'm not sure I understand the point--this search would probably return about 80% of all web pages because they contain an e-mail address like string. I think spammers will still just crawl pages and use that form of regex to collect addresses, not to search for pages that contain those addresses.
The original post is sounding more and more like FUD to me.
I'd just like to not clarify my skeptical position, should I have one. Basically, I don't believe in everything, but phrase it in the negative. For instance, "How do we know cattle mutilations are not the work of extraterrestrials?" In other words, "How do we know cattle mutilations do not have terrestrial causes."
If you're confused, just remember, you're not confused. Figure that one out, brainac.
Man, mod this one up. I know that Froze (and followers) think it's awsome fun to waste time hunting down a ROT-13 translator, pasting something in, and getting the results. Maybe they're too dumb to cut and paste the results which would be _actually useful_.
I've got a triad of those, but the squeeze switches tend to go bad and you end up needing too much force to get them to go on.
While I'm here riding on the coattails of a +5... my pick is the Princeton Tec Aurora headband light. Three LED's, three brightness settings, useless blink settings, comfortable headband, and the lamp tilts away from the headband. The absolute best for doing work with line-of-sight light hands-free.
Like what?
on
Google Hacks
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Ok, could anyone who's seen the book give an example of something that is not:
Using "+" and "-", and the iterative derivatives thereof (search for Heisenberg; add -"Star Trek"; etc.)
Using the keyword: features already documented at Google, such as "site:".
Thinking about what words might appear in the text of your desired results rather than the topic at hand.
I think the point is that pseudo-science ideas tend to obey many of the rules while real science ideas tend to obey few. Although you can create counter examples of each rule--demonstrations of real science which follow one or more of the rules--I claim it is impossible to produce a valid scientific principle that violates all seven. Likewise, I think it's unlikely to produce an idea accepted as pseudo-science which follows none of the rules.
Alternatively, one could say, "The Business Software Alliance (BSA) declares that OpenOffice is identical to Microsoft Office." Wow! That's how to sell software!
The reason credit card companies charge a minimum fee per transaction is because it isn't really worth it for them to charge less.
Let's say you were handing transactions like a credit card company does and charging a flat 5% per transaction. What you'd find is that you make all your money on the large number of middle transactions ($10-$100, say) and also on the small number of large ones (over $1,000.) Given that your network has a finite amount of space, you'd favor the transactions that make the most money. However, instead of denying transactions below $10 because they don't make money, you just charge a flat fee of $0.25 on every transaction which makes it worth your while--no transaction ever nets less than 5% of $5. You're happy because it's just like you're getting no transactions under $5 and the merchant is happy because they can charge $4.90 if they wanted.
However, from a merchant standpoint you really get screwed when things get down to $0.25--the transaction fee is 100%. What if you could sell stuff right down to a fraction of a penny and still only pay a 10% fee?
PepperCoin is just like a credit card company, in a way, in that they don't want their network plugged with a million $0.001 transactions, but instead of making an effective minimum charge, merchants buy in bulk. However, they can't be a credit card company because the Internet-based transaction of passing a PepperCoin token around is much orders of magnitude cheaper than the telephone-based system used by credit cards today--why would you want a PepperCoin credit card if you _couldn't_ use it in brick-and-mortar stores? In other words, the existing credit card infrastructure wouldn't support this kind of system because the data transfer costs are too high.
For the user, sign up for a PepperCoin account, providing your credit card number, and when you want to make a purchase:
Open the PepperPanel.
Create a token for the amount of the purchase (i.e. $0.50.)
Provide the merchant with the token.
The token is a digitally signed token with the merchants "name," the consumer's "name," the amount of the transaction, and a value of either $0 or $10 (to the merchant.) Your PepperCoin account is charged $0.50.
The merchant, upon receiving a token, sends you the product, and if the token is worth $10, keeps it for later.
At the end of the [day / week / month / quarter] send all the $10 tokens to PepperCoin. PepperCoin sends back the money for the total value of the tokens. What you'll find is that (money received) / (total number of tokens collected) is $0.50. The merchant will be charged a fee for the service, so you might see something like $0.45 per purchase (10% fee.)
Back to the consumer... over time you'll accumulate $10 or more in purchases at which point your credit card will be charged. If, let's say, 6 months elapse, and you still haven't accumulated $10, you'll be charged your current balance.
See... PepperCoin makes about 10% of all the purchases minus the cost of credit card transactions to the consumers (about 5%), the merchant gets $0.45 instead of $0.20 on a $0.50 purchase, and the consumer is charged dollar-for-dollar what they spent.
I've always wanted this kind of advertising...
on
Should you Fear Google?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
My supermarket gives me discounts in exchange for knowing what I buy regularly. Amazon.com remembers my name and address so I don't have to type it anymore. I make several trade-offs already with my personal data--and I exchange my searching habits so Google can make their service better.
What do I get in return? Perfect advertising. When I go on the Internet looking to buy something, I'm only interested in that one thing. Undirected target marketing tells me I want to travel, lower my credit card debt, or to change auto insurance companies, but I almost never want those things. When I want to find an analog integrated circuit that decodes the timing signals from NTSC composite video, I go to Google and put in
"NTSC composite pin vsync burst chip"
and I'm graced with "advertising" for the exact product I'm looking for.
Hopefully they'll set this "guy" up as a designer in the android-woman factory. Of course, once in full production, one would hope they give him a really good personality to compensate for his hideous silver Pac-Man head. Then again, maybe that thick neck will gives him enough of the Henry Rollins look.
It makes you wonder what would happen if they had it look at Michael Jackson. Perhaps "now" and "then" and tell the machine it's the same person.
One might construe the audible "pop" to be affirmation that Mr. Jackson is the King of Pop.
(sorry)
Scripts are easy! Security and testing is a sham!
on
F'd Companies
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· Score: 0, Informative
"Why does this photograph cost $500? It's about a $50 frame and maybe $18 for the reprint..."
Now we get to be in the same boat with website design. "Why will it be several months at $150 per hour to make my e-commerce site? I read this book where the guy said he could write a script to do the whole thing."
Just what we need. Someone promoting the idea that testing and security isn't necessary and that writing a script to do something is a zero-time proposition to do once. I wish I knew which companies he advised to work this way...
At least he says "fuck" a lot which makes it funny.
You are being watched
on
Ask Kevin Mitnick
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I assume there are people who are watching your actions now... even this interview and its responses. Who do you know is watching you and who do you suspect is watching? As someone experiencing government surveillance first hand, just how bad is it?
Slashdot Mirror
Just wait until Microsoft copies this service.
However, if I look at the amount of time I wish I could type faster at all (probably an hour a month when I'm in a hurry ["Stupid hands!"]) versus the cost of entry (2 months at an average speed of 50%, so the 100 hours a month I spend actually typing is now 200 hours) I think it's not worth it at all. Admittedly, I'm manually doing an analysis of what an automatic gut reaction, but I think they're pretty honest ... anyway, if I save five minutes a month wishing I could type faster, it'll take 100 years (100 hours [cost] / 5 minutes per month [gain]) to recover my investment.
I tell you what ... when I'm 132, I'll call and let you know I would have broken even if I switched to DVORAK.
</sarcasm>
Well, that's how they did it--they just took the same sled design from 1982 and painted "Type-R" on it to get it to go faster.
I'm mired deep in that territory now. I am desperately trying to attack the problem from the wrong side--I'm starting with our established desktop publishing package and trying to define meaningful styles that could be used in the future for content parsing.
The battles I fight are so far removed from what's important, it makes me miserable--our document templates actually include a style called "Bold," for instance. Bold??? Why define the style at all if it's a built-in function? In programming C, it's like defining "TRUE" to 1 so you can write comparisons like (x==1)==TRUE instead of (x==1)==1. Whether you define a "style" or just click the little "B" icon, it's the same problem.
The fact that we're using a desktop publishing package at all for data entry should be at issue--why not an editor to enter content in a hierarchy which will later be rendered by whatever appearance template we chooose? I wish I had a reasonable chance of ditching the desktop publishing package all together for something more pertinent.
I think that like you, I'm also looking forward to the industry of documentation--or more likely--information organziation and presentation. I just hope I'm not dead first.
The original post is sounding more and more like FUD to me.
Don't you know, were' on MST now--you should have set your calendar ahead 30 years on the first of April.
They don't mention it in the article but Martin Cooper is only 2 feet tall. The phone he's holding is actually a mere six inches long.
If you're confused, just remember, you're not confused. Figure that one out, brainac.
Thanks, gnuadam.
Boy have I got a flashlight to sell you ... it lasts forever on batteries you'd consider completely dead! ...
While I'm here riding on the coattails of a +5 ... my pick is the Princeton Tec Aurora headband light. Three LED's, three brightness settings, useless blink settings, comfortable headband, and the lamp tilts away from the headband. The absolute best for doing work with line-of-sight light hands-free.
I think the point is that pseudo-science ideas tend to obey many of the rules while real science ideas tend to obey few. Although you can create counter examples of each rule--demonstrations of real science which follow one or more of the rules--I claim it is impossible to produce a valid scientific principle that violates all seven. Likewise, I think it's unlikely to produce an idea accepted as pseudo-science which follows none of the rules.
Too good to be true.
Alternatively, one could say, "The Business Software Alliance (BSA) declares that OpenOffice is identical to Microsoft Office." Wow! That's how to sell software!
(at least one person got it, eh?)
So let me get this straight: a digital guitar is one you play with your fingers, right?
Let's say you were handing transactions like a credit card company does and charging a flat 5% per transaction. What you'd find is that you make all your money on the large number of middle transactions ($10-$100, say) and also on the small number of large ones (over $1,000.) Given that your network has a finite amount of space, you'd favor the transactions that make the most money. However, instead of denying transactions below $10 because they don't make money, you just charge a flat fee of $0.25 on every transaction which makes it worth your while--no transaction ever nets less than 5% of $5. You're happy because it's just like you're getting no transactions under $5 and the merchant is happy because they can charge $4.90 if they wanted.
However, from a merchant standpoint you really get screwed when things get down to $0.25--the transaction fee is 100%. What if you could sell stuff right down to a fraction of a penny and still only pay a 10% fee?
PepperCoin is just like a credit card company, in a way, in that they don't want their network plugged with a million $0.001 transactions, but instead of making an effective minimum charge, merchants buy in bulk. However, they can't be a credit card company because the Internet-based transaction of passing a PepperCoin token around is much orders of magnitude cheaper than the telephone-based system used by credit cards today--why would you want a PepperCoin credit card if you _couldn't_ use it in brick-and-mortar stores? In other words, the existing credit card infrastructure wouldn't support this kind of system because the data transfer costs are too high.
For the user, sign up for a PepperCoin account, providing your credit card number, and when you want to make a purchase:
The token is a digitally signed token with the merchants "name," the consumer's "name," the amount of the transaction, and a value of either $0 or $10 (to the merchant.) Your PepperCoin account is charged $0.50.
The merchant, upon receiving a token, sends you the product, and if the token is worth $10, keeps it for later.
At the end of the [day / week / month / quarter] send all the $10 tokens to PepperCoin. PepperCoin sends back the money for the total value of the tokens. What you'll find is that (money received) / (total number of tokens collected) is $0.50. The merchant will be charged a fee for the service, so you might see something like $0.45 per purchase (10% fee.)
Back to the consumer ... over time you'll accumulate $10 or more in purchases at which point your credit card will be charged. If, let's say, 6 months elapse, and you still haven't accumulated $10, you'll be charged your current balance.
See ... PepperCoin makes about 10% of all the purchases minus the cost of credit card transactions to the consumers (about 5%), the merchant gets $0.45 instead of $0.20 on a $0.50 purchase, and the consumer is charged dollar-for-dollar what they spent.
What do I get in return? Perfect advertising. When I go on the Internet looking to buy something, I'm only interested in that one thing. Undirected target marketing tells me I want to travel, lower my credit card debt, or to change auto insurance companies, but I almost never want those things. When I want to find an analog integrated circuit that decodes the timing signals from NTSC composite video, I go to Google and put in "NTSC composite pin vsync burst chip" and I'm graced with "advertising" for the exact product I'm looking for.
Hopefully they'll set this "guy" up as a designer in the android-woman factory. Of course, once in full production, one would hope they give him a really good personality to compensate for his hideous silver Pac-Man head. Then again, maybe that thick neck will gives him enough of the Henry Rollins look.
One might construe the audible "pop" to be affirmation that Mr. Jackson is the King of Pop.
(sorry)
Now we get to be in the same boat with website design. "Why will it be several months at $150 per hour to make my e-commerce site? I read this book where the guy said he could write a script to do the whole thing."
Just what we need. Someone promoting the idea that testing and security isn't necessary and that writing a script to do something is a zero-time proposition to do once. I wish I knew which companies he advised to work this way ...
At least he says "fuck" a lot which makes it funny.
I assume there are people who are watching your actions now ... even this interview and its responses. Who do you know is watching you and who do you suspect is watching? As someone experiencing government surveillance first hand, just how bad is it?