Many people have written that this is a social problem not a technical one. Here's why they are wrong.
I have been to Egypt on many trips and have seen firsthand the problems described above. In egypt, there is rampant corruption in the government. That trickles down to all agencies. The people who pay taxes do not get anything in return. Nobody obeys traffic laws there. People frequently cram 6 cars into the equivalent of 3 lanes of traffic. People believe the lines are for decoration. In the areas where there are traffic lights, nobody obeys them. The only person people obey is soldier with the machine gun directing traffic. They are groomed with the understanding that as long as they don't piss him off they get away with everything else.
What people are asking him is to essentially revolutionize the government and make it work. The people only understand money. If you have money, you get what you want. If you don't, you end up with the above situation.
As an example, a number of years ago I witness a car accident on a busy street which backed up traffic for miles. It was between a guy on a motorcycle and a guy in a car. The two drivers started fighting in the middle of the street and a crowd of people developed. The soldier didn't care about the people involved or the damage to the vehicles. He pointed his gun at the crowd and told them to move the cars or else. The crowd moved the vehicles on the sidewalk and they to got on the sidewalk. The fight continued but traffic started moving again.
For your technical solution, there are going to be lots of caveats. In Egypt, for example people will steal just about anything. I have seen people steal electricity, phone lines, natural gas, side-view mirrors on cars just about anything. If you create this system, theft will be a big issue. If you can guarantee that know one will steal your system that is your first hurdle. Soldiers in egypt are paid so little that they may not care for your system - especially if the guy who broke the law will pay them a bribe directly on the spot versus paying a fine to a higher up agency where he will never see his cut.
If you can start with the block that you live on and mount webcams (*note -- In egypt, this will run you afoul of the government and the soldiers regardless of your intent!) on your building to prevent theft then you can log all the cars coming and going. This would make it easier to identify who the parties in the accidents are in case someone flees.
Speedingwise, I have seen stories of how people take apart optical mice and use them as sensors. There is probably a cheap way to rig this to give you timings of start/stop points. You could then time how long it takes a vehicle to cross two of these sensors to determine rate of travel. If you take snapshots of the clock time at both locations, you could do a look up against the snapshots from your webcam. Or you could use this to determine when to take snapshots on the webcam.
This is basically how the toll road cameras work here in the states. Even if the driver gets away, you can at least identify the driver in the future.
I just had a look at their study and found several flaws. I own two priuses by the way a 2002 and a 2010.
First of all, they are comparing a toyota matrix with a toyota prius. These two vehicles are not remotely equivalent. The only thing they have in common is the fact that they are both built on the same platform. This same platform also encludes the echo and the corolla. The prius also has a lot more combinations of features and models. They didn't identify whether it was a Prius 1 package 1 or a Prius 5 package 4. They arbitrarily look one at $27K and compared it to a $21K matrix. They should have taken a Prius 1 Model 1 ($21,000) and compared that to a Matrix or specified the features so that a direct comparison could be made.
Second, they assumed 20,000 KM which is roughly 12,400 miles a year in driving. Maybe in Canada they can get away with driving that many miles but in California, I drive at least 15,000 miles a year. I see at least a 20 mpg discrepance between the two cars. 3000 miles / 20 mpg X $4.68 per gallon ($1.17 per litre assumption in study) = $702.00 a year savings in fuel. I have had my prius for 8 years and 120,000 miles on my 2002 which translates to at least $5600 saved in fuel over the matrix.
Third, they haven't taken maintenace into account. Hybrids suffer a lot less wear and tear on the engine than normal vehicles. Services that you get at 30,000 miles transmission filter, brake fluid flush, throttle and fuel injection flush, etc don't need to be done until 90,000 miles on a prius. That was my experience and I took the car to the dealer for everything.
I know they included 5 year estimates, but even if you looked at 5 year estimate using an apples to apples comparison here in the United States you would see they hybrid is much more cost effective. The devil is in the details.
While I am tempted to agree with you, I don't think punishing the patent examiners is the issue. According the to the reports I have read is that the patent office is overworked, underfunded and suffering from huge turnover. What we need is more support for reform projects such as the Peer to Patent Project.
There should be a better framework for weeding out the bogus patents by allowing experts in the field to decided what is obvious rather than a patent examiner with 5 years of work experience and little knowledge in the field of the patent.
If it wasn't board games or card games, then the old Nintendo Game & Watch hand held games were the first for me. My cousins had bought some in the late 70's early 80's that I use to play. The one I remember had mickey mouse and four chickens that would lay eggs. You would get 1 point for every egg you caught in mickey's basket. On the console side, it was either an atari 2600 or a nintendo entertainment system. I don't particularly remember which I came across first even though the atari is older.
Give a kid a truckload of rice and fee him for a year. Give a kid a pc with proper education and that kid will be able to feed himself for the rest of his life. Dvorak's comments are short-sighted. Yes, people are hungry and need to be fed. However, the issue is whether you fix the symtoms of the problem [poverty] or the problem itself.
The truth is that no one living today was around when the world was created.
The truth is that no one living today was around when Jesus was supposedly killed on a cross.
Yes, but there were people living at that time. There is historical record before and after Jesus's time. If you deny historical accounts of Jesus existence, you deny all historical records. However, this is a discussion for another time.
It is like saying you have the number 4 and telling me that it came about definitively by adding 2 and 2 together. However, you can also get 4 by adding 1 and 3. Either way you still have 4. The same is true of the universe.
Not really but your simplifications are cute.
In the scientific method, people formulate hypothesis. Time and time again these hypothesis are discovered to be incorrect and reformulated. Evolution will never be able to answer this particular question you will end up refactoring it indefinitely.
evolution is not valid as the only answer.
It is the only valid scientific one despite protests to the contrary.
This is just your personal opinion. Just the facts jack, just the facts.
The problem with the evolution debate as it stands in schools is that it pushes an atheistic belief system on to everyone under the guise of science.
The atheistic 'belief system' doesn't include gods. Neither does any scientific hypotheses. Science is atheistic. Deal with it. You can include any gods you want on your own time.
Science preceded evolution. The Roman Catholic church preceded evolution. Before evolutioon came along, science was not athiestic. Just because a few people decided that science can only be athiestic does not make it so. You other comments are irrelevant from a scientific perspective.
This is not reasonable, rational or correct.
I'm afraid it is. The personal heartfelt beliefs of people don't get to trump the cold unemotional world of numbers just because people like that story better.
Personal opinion. Science takes into consideration all facts and all variables. In true science, you do not pick and choose what you want and ignore the rest. All data is pertinent. Otherwise, you are doctoring the results. That didn't play well for the Korean Cloning Scientist who was outed and it will not work in this argument.
I don't really see anyone ever trying to refute Creationism.
Well if you will go ahead and posit and unfalsifiable hypothesis, well, I guess we just have to accept it as true then...
If you take that route, you are doing science a disservice. I never told you to just accept it as true. I only said to consider it as an option. The person who manages proves this hypotheiss false, also proves that there is no God. Science is about formulating hypothesis and then testing whether they are true or false. There is no unfalsifiable hypothesis. If there is, science in itself is a failure.
The approach seems to be I don't believe in God, therefore you are wrong and people stop there. However, that does not use the scientific method.
No, the scientific method says that if you posit a 'god' you're the one with the responsibility to attach meaning to that jumble of letters.
Not sure where this comment came from but I don't see any fact behind it. Science is about finding answers and the scientific method explains a method for finding answers that is standardized and which is repeatable. If you are no
The truth is that no one living today was around when the world was created.
The truth is that no one living today was around when Jesus was supposedly killed on a cross.
Yes, but there were people living at that time. There is historical record before and after Jesus's time. If you deny historical accounts of Jesus existence, you deny all historical records. However, this is a discussion for another time.
It is like saying you have the number 4 and telling me that it came about definitively by adding 2 and 2 together. However, you can also get 4 by adding 1 and 3. Either way you still have 4. The same is true of the universe.
Not really but your simplifications are cute.
In the scientific method, people formulate hypothesis. Time and time again these hypothesis are discovered to be incorrect and reformulated. Evolution will never be able to answer this particular question you will end up refactoring it indefinitely.
evolution is not valid as the only answer.
It is the only valid scientific one despite protests to the contrary.
This is just your personal opinion. Just the facts jack, just the facts.
The problem with the evolution debate as it stands in schools is that it pushes an atheistic belief system on to everyone under the guise of science.
The atheistic 'belief system' doesn't include gods. Neither does any scientific hypotheses. Science is atheistic. Deal with it. You can include any gods you want on your own time.
Science preceded evolution. The Roman Catholic church preceded evolution. Before evolutioon came along, science was not athiestic. Just because a few people decided that science can only be athiestic does not make it so. You other comments are irrelevant from a scientific perspective.
This is not reasonable, rational or correct.
I'm afraid it is. The personal heartfelt beliefs of people don't get to trump the cold unemotional world of numbers just because people like that story better.
Personal opinion. Science takes into consideration all facts and all variables. In true science, you do not pick and choose what you want and ignore the rest. All data is pertinent. Otherwise, you are doctoring the results. That didn't play well for the Korean Cloning Scientist who was outed and it will not work in this argument.
I don't really see anyone ever trying to refute Creationism.
Well if you will go ahead and posit and unfalsifiable hypothesis, well, I guess we just have to accept it as true then...
If you take that route, you are doing science a disservice. I never told you to just accept it as true. I only said to consider it as an option. The person who manages proves this hypotheiss false, also proves that there is no God. Science is about formulating hypothesis and then testing whether they are true or false. There is no unfalsifiable hypothesis. If there is, science in itself is a failure.
The approach seems to be I don't believe in God, therefore you are wrong and people stop there. However, that does not use the scientific method.
No, the scientific method says that if you posit a 'god' you're the one with the responsibility to attach meaning to that jumble of letters.
Not sure where this comment came from but I don't see any fact behind it. Science is about finding answers and the scientific method explains a method for finding answers that is standardized and which is repeatable. If you are not sure what those letters mean, then you need to go back and reformulate your hypothesis.
It seems to be a double standard that you can try to apply the scientific method to show that evolution is possible while creation is not.
That's not a double standard - that's applying one standard. It would be using double standards to shoehorn a 'god' into the equation when nothing scientific can be said about such a thing.
Again, personal opinion, not science.
I don't know anyone who believes in God and yet does not believe in Creation.
You lack of knowledge o
It seems to me that your comment is more of a flame than an actual question but being that I am on slashdot that should be expected. You can have science without having evolution. The real problems conservatives have with liberals is that you have a secret agenda and you try to push it as fact. The truth is that no one living today was around when the world was created. Here is the definition of the scientific method according to wikipedia:
It is based on gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning,[1] the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses. [2]
The truth is that no one can actually observe the creation of the universe. All you can observe is the aftermath and make attempts to formulate how it became that way. It is like saying you have the number 4 and telling me that it came about definitively by adding 2 and 2 together. However, you can also get 4 by adding 1 and 3. Either way you still have 4. The same is true of the universe.
If the questions is how the universe came into existence, evolution is not valid as the only answer. No one truely knows. If the question is: "is evolution taking place", then you can say yes as an answer. The whole creation vs evolution debate answers the question of how it happened not what continues to happen. It is perfectly plausible to say God created the universe and used evolution as the means to do so. This is why the Roman Catholic church does not step into the debate. Both creation and evolution are simultaneously possible. The problem with the evolution debate as it stands in schools is that it pushes an atheistic belief system on to everyone under the guise of science. Then you have people saying that if you don't believe in evolution, you don't believe in science and you are a lunatic. This is not reasonable, rational or correct.
I don't really see anyone ever trying to refute Creationism. The approach seems to be I don't believe in God, therefore you are wrong and people stop there. However, that does not use the scientific method. It seems to be a double standard that you can try to apply the scientific method to show that evolution is possible while creation is not. There is a deeper issue at root and that is whether you even believe in God. I don't know anyone who believes in God and yet does not believe in Creation. This is really illogical. If people tell you they do, then something is not kosher. God is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipowerful. He is infinite. Therefore there is no time period in which God does not exist. If God is outside the bounds of time, God would have been around when our universe was created. There is nothing else that is known to be infinite but God. Therefore, for something finite to be created it would have to come from something infinite. Otherwise, that too would also be a god. Evolution is a process, it is not a start. Something had to get the ball rolling. The only answer is some sort of creation. To a believer, there is historical fact in the Bible that Creation did occur. If one chooses not to believe, it does not make it any less true. If you don't believe in God, you are either athiest or agnostic. To the athiest, I ask you to prove to me the non-existence of God. I have never found anyone who can do this. If you are agnostic, you don't really know if God exists or not. Since you can prove that beyond a shadow of a doubt either way, it is quite possible that there is a God or there is not a god. Without proof, both methods of the birth of Universe are possible and thus both should be taught.
Flame me if you must but keep the attacks on the argument not the person as that is what you are asking the candidates to do.
Too much online advertisement these days is more obstruction than advertisement. I strip off all gui ads but leave google style text ads in place. Too many flash animations are just too heavy. Advertisers don't seem to consider the impact their ads will have on the user. I have seen many pages that eat up several megs when you count all the ads. In addition, there should be some sort of style guidelines that can be applied to ads. People buy Mitsubishi tv's because you can guarantee the same volume when you turn the channels. If someone is obnoxious and yelling at the top of their lungs, the tv resets the volume to an acceptable level. Adblockers allow me to do the same thing. Loud is not necessarily sound, it can be an obnoxious color scheme, annoying flashing ads or animated gifs, punch the monkey flash ads that suffer from memory leaks. Ads should be unobstrusive, relevant, and blend in with the site.
I think it was the DNA lounge that was playing with the wrist strap idea up in San Jose. Anyways, your idea is a good one but it only allows data to be tracked in one dimension. Other examples where this might be useful would be"
1) Determing body temperature for better gauging ventilation and utlity consumption
2) What songs or sounds lead to more beverage consumption
3) The general well being of the customers, for example if it too guys blood pressure is rising but they are not moving in step -- could this mean a fight is going to break out?
4) If the club has merchandising, it could better gauge what to stock whether it is food, alcohol or merchandise
5) Ratio of guys to girls so you don't have sausage parties unless you are into that.
6) Control of the ambient environment, so the crowd could suggest the lighting scheme based on the music played. Images could be displayed with music playing.
The possibilities are endless..
Geeks can run the club, but real people (e.g. non geeks actually go to clubs). Its a novel idea actually. Trance, House, Electronica or some other version of music is played. People then dance to the beat on the dancefloor. Sometimes so many people show up and so many dance that the temperature on the dancefloor actually outpaces the air conditioning. As a result of this and some chemical reactions in the bodies of the people dancing, heat is given off and sweat is produced. So some people task themselves to find other ways to cool off. In the course of doing this, they search for some fluid to replace that lost as sweat. Water is usually in ample supply and the people excuse themselves to search for it. I am sure Encyclopedia Brittanica has some enlightening discussions on "Water" and you can probably consult your local social engineer on the idea of a "Water Break".
has anyone ever thought about using a write-once circuit board like the ones in the direct tv cards? the cards are not too easy to reproduce, and if the entries in the database are written directly to them, we would have a verifiable, unmodifiable, difficult to reproduce audit trail.
So the solution to this one involves strong cryptography with 2 different public keys. The benefit of the current ballot system is it guarantees the integrity of the ballots until it arrives at the "counter" person. With the electronic machines, anyone with access to the machine or database can tweak the outcome. Either way it is safe to say that we don't have an australian ballot system and it can be determined who voted for who, otherwise, we would have nested ballots. The outer ballot would be official, the inner ballot anonymous.
The point I am getting at is that we could do the same thing with public key cryptography. We could package the clear text vote with a version that is encrypted with a person's private key. This way we can verify who voted and if there is a question about the integrity of the ballot count, we can always go back and decrypt all the encrypted ballots.
If someone says that this infringes on their liberties, we can do it the other way around and use their public key to prevent it and store all the encrypted versions on a server. Then when a recount is requested, everyone can go back and "revote" or "recount" from the previous election by decrypting the vote with their private key. Build all this on an open source, freely auditable system and everyone wins.
could the government actually convince its people that by punching a chad through a hole on a piece of paper you have a democracy
i don't think most people will think there is a difference. For the record, I didn't make this comment to take sides in any of the past elections and their court battles.
I know geeks don't dance but I forsee this being used in nightclubs on dancefloors. I remember someone a while back trying to give people wristbands that would track vitals and transfer them to a computer to control the music at a niteclub. Something like this floor could be used as a voting system to automatically determine whether the crowd at a club or party likes the music or not based on the number of "connections" on the dancefloor. It could also rate the music or any other live entertainment for that matter based on whether the people were moving or standing around. So if you have a pretty decent beat, the people move. If it sucks, the people will stop dancing or even get off the dancefloor for a water break. I think it is pretty cool.
Personally, I'm bloody scared. It's only a matter of time before the computer and the robot get together. First the computer won't let me do what I want. Then, when I do it again, it's gonna whup my ass. Talk about getting some sense beat into you.
me: $ rm -rf *
robot: I'll show you "rm -rf *"
I draw the line at Johnny 5 singing and playing music.
Why would different drives/software affect the md5 hash though? Assuming it is really digital (A premise the RIAA depends on to count file sharing as piracy and thus different from tape copying), every cd [ being that in mass production are probably stamped rather than burned ] should be identical.
For example, take a iso of your favorite distro. If you burn the iso and then re-hash the new cd it should be equal to the original image. This is not a sign of uniqueness.
Meaning that if you take an MD5 Hash of the iso of the whole cd should be identical. Then in order for cd rom drives to be considered iso 9660 compliant, they must follow the same spec and read the disc the same way.
In addition, if you have the same software on different machines, it should still rip it the same way. The only difference should come from the bit rate you choose to rip at and whether you alter the name/tags. If you choose a common ripping program (Say MP3 Strip-It-Digital on Windows), an iso 9660 compliant drive (Like my Lite-On 52X), and CDDB meta tag generation (Which MP3 Strip-It-Digital does for me automatically) then it should be possible for different people with the same cd and different cd drives/software to generate the same md5 hash sums.
If they are not generating the same hashes, then the RIAA can not argue that the copies are truely digital quality (sorry for the side argument) and it should still be legal. However, if the hashes are coming out equal, then you truely can't say that the files are unique.
I propose a new type of peer 2 peer network based on distributed computing such as seti@home merged with a quality of service metric similar to slashdot's. Basically everyone who connects to this network will reserve a chunch of hard disk (say 100mb) for the use of the network, a slice of memory (say 16mb), and a portion of their bandwith (say 10%). These reserved objects can be used to keep a protected hash database running live 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Redundancy should be build into the network so that as people log on and off, a large percent of the hashes are still available such as 90%. These hashes could use md5 or some other secure network and the moderation would handle filtering the good from the bad. Initially it would have a lot of duplicates. This is not a bad thing. It would cause greater numbers of people to listen to duplicate songs until the best quality ones are modded up and the lower quality ones are modded down.
If the reserved space is encrypted we should be able to isolate source ip's and make it look as if the traffic is coming from everyone. So instead of a song coming from 3 sources, it looks like it comes from 1000 sources because the protected share is part of every client. Similar to the Borg.
We could still give preference to faster pipes such as T3/T1/OC whatever. In addition with a node/supernode algorithm, we could figure out more efficient routes for transmitting the songs based on the users already connected to the network. For example, choosing to get a song from a user at your "isp" vs "the nearest supernode".
The protected share should handle the md5 checksum and thus the client's distributed client program would devote cpu cycles to checking the validity of the content in the protected share. I like the idea of hashed based searching but I wonder, even if we store the hashes in a protected share, does this open the door to any form of legal liability?
I realize that the record cartel could come in and do an initial flood of crap and then maintain a network of computers to saturate it with bad data. A solution would be to have the client upload a valid file and then have the network (protected share) validate the file. The network could then keep running times of valid source ip's. The source IP does not have to be sharing data (it can if it wants, and most clients probably would) it just is needed to prevent the record cartel and their minions from setting up hordes of dhcp machines spitting out bad data because they would have to revalidate everytime an ip is changed. This may effect others who are on dhcp but their moderated accounts would be able to act as a form of credit at time of validation. People with good history who switch ip's but don't disconnect would not have to be revalidated because a trust would be established. Whild someone who disconnects and changes IP is no longer trusted. By having a protected share, high quality data could go into replication quicker.
If we know it is trusted and we see a concentration of requests coming from a particular area/isp, we can broadcast data to other clients near area/isp for the purpose of retransmission during peak times. Maybe we could build in requirements such as if a song is downloaded, it must be kept on the machine for 24 hours, so people don't just download and delete. This way retransmission could be quicker during peak times. People who download and delete or log off would be modded down as potential sources while others would continue to keep good credit. Thus, in addition to having metrics for quality of service, we could also have metrics for the quality of the source.
As much as this sounds like a hot idea, this might also mean that people would just leave their tv's on 24 hours a day. I think that the revenue generated from the tv watching the ads on the channels would easily offset the cost of the tv itself. So if you get a nice cheap $100 black and white tv set and leave it on 24-7 for a few months, you could easily hit 10,000 commercials. Then, instead of skipping the commercials you don't like, you would just be paid for not watching them while you would watch the ones you do like. In effect, this would mean that one company could actually subsidize you to watch another company's commercials and maybe even buy a rival's products. Interesting.
We should have done this long ago
on
Haiku vs Spam
·
· Score: 1
So this number is, once again, the player key: (trade secret haiku?)
"Eighty-one; and then one hundred three -- two times; then two hundred (less three);
two hundred twenty four; and last (of course not least) the humble zero."
My company uses WinRunner for Windows GUI testing. I know that Mercury Interactive which makes WinRunner and LoadRunner another GUI Testing utility creates Unix version of their software in addition to the Windows versions. I don't know about Mac though. Mercury Interactive Hope that helps Joe
Some useful texts from college and others...
on
General IT Books?
·
· Score: 1
Introduction to Algorithms -- Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, C++ How To Program -- Deitel & Deitel, Programming in Prolog -- Clocksin & Mellish, Programming in Perl -- Larry Wall et al, The Art of Programming -- Kernighan & Pike, Database Management Systems -- Ramakrishnan & Gehrke, Art of Assembly -- Randy Hyde
I also like the Oreilly books as well as the Unleashed books. I have the Java Oreilly books and I have an old edition of Red Hat Linux Unleashed which I have found useful when developing on Linux. Pretty much you could also ask any cs college student right now to figure out the most popular college texts.
Slashdot Mirror
Would love to see someone hack the firmware and get it to work on a playstation or wii. That would be a wonderful hack. =)
Many people have written that this is a social problem not a technical one. Here's why they are wrong.
I have been to Egypt on many trips and have seen firsthand the problems described above. In egypt, there is rampant corruption in the government. That trickles down to all agencies. The people who pay taxes do not get anything in return. Nobody obeys traffic laws there. People frequently cram 6 cars into the equivalent of 3 lanes of traffic. People believe the lines are for decoration. In the areas where there are traffic lights, nobody obeys them. The only person people obey is soldier with the machine gun directing traffic. They are groomed with the understanding that as long as they don't piss him off they get away with everything else.
What people are asking him is to essentially revolutionize the government and make it work. The people only understand money. If you have money, you get what you want. If you don't, you end up with the above situation.
As an example, a number of years ago I witness a car accident on a busy street which backed up traffic for miles. It was between a guy on a motorcycle and a guy in a car. The two drivers started fighting in the middle of the street and a crowd of people developed. The soldier didn't care about the people involved or the damage to the vehicles. He pointed his gun at the crowd and told them to move the cars or else. The crowd moved the vehicles on the sidewalk and they to got on the sidewalk. The fight continued but traffic started moving again.
For your technical solution, there are going to be lots of caveats. In Egypt, for example people will steal just about anything. I have seen people steal electricity, phone lines, natural gas, side-view mirrors on cars just about anything. If you create this system, theft will be a big issue. If you can guarantee that know one will steal your system that is your first hurdle. Soldiers in egypt are paid so little that they may not care for your system - especially if the guy who broke the law will pay them a bribe directly on the spot versus paying a fine to a higher up agency where he will never see his cut.
If you can start with the block that you live on and mount webcams (*note -- In egypt, this will run you afoul of the government and the soldiers regardless of your intent!) on your building to prevent theft then you can log all the cars coming and going. This would make it easier to identify who the parties in the accidents are in case someone flees.
Speedingwise, I have seen stories of how people take apart optical mice and use them as sensors. There is probably a cheap way to rig this to give you timings of start/stop points. You could then time how long it takes a vehicle to cross two of these sensors to determine rate of travel. If you take snapshots of the clock time at both locations, you could do a look up against the snapshots from your webcam. Or you could use this to determine when to take snapshots on the webcam.
This is basically how the toll road cameras work here in the states. Even if the driver gets away, you can at least identify the driver in the future.
I just had a look at their study and found several flaws. I own two priuses by the way a 2002 and a 2010.
First of all, they are comparing a toyota matrix with a toyota prius. These two vehicles are not remotely equivalent. The only thing they have in common is the fact that they are both built on the same platform. This same platform also encludes the echo and the corolla. The prius also has a lot more combinations of features and models. They didn't identify whether it was a Prius 1 package 1 or a Prius 5 package 4. They arbitrarily look one at $27K and compared it to a $21K matrix. They should have taken a Prius 1 Model 1 ($21,000) and compared that to a Matrix or specified the features so that a direct comparison could be made.
Second, they assumed 20,000 KM which is roughly 12,400 miles a year in driving. Maybe in Canada they can get away with driving that many miles but in California, I drive at least 15,000 miles a year. I see at least a 20 mpg discrepance between the two cars. 3000 miles / 20 mpg X $4.68 per gallon ($1.17 per litre assumption in study) = $702.00 a year savings in fuel. I have had my prius for 8 years and 120,000 miles on my 2002 which translates to at least $5600 saved in fuel over the matrix.
Third, they haven't taken maintenace into account. Hybrids suffer a lot less wear and tear on the engine than normal vehicles. Services that you get at 30,000 miles transmission filter, brake fluid flush, throttle and fuel injection flush, etc don't need to be done until 90,000 miles on a prius. That was my experience and I took the car to the dealer for everything.
I know they included 5 year estimates, but even if you looked at 5 year estimate using an apples to apples comparison here in the United States you would see they hybrid is much more cost effective. The devil is in the details.
While I am tempted to agree with you, I don't think punishing the patent examiners is the issue. According the to the reports I have read is that the patent office is overworked, underfunded and suffering from huge turnover. What we need is more support for reform projects such as the Peer to Patent Project.
http://www.peertopatent.org/
There should be a better framework for weeding out the bogus patents by allowing experts in the field to decided what is obvious rather than a patent examiner with 5 years of work experience and little knowledge in the field of the patent.
Maybe we can get China to help us blow it up with their laser.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/18/0235229
If it wasn't board games or card games, then the old Nintendo Game & Watch hand held games were the first for me. My cousins had bought some in the late 70's early 80's that I use to play. The one I remember had mickey mouse and four chickens that would lay eggs. You would get 1 point for every egg you caught in mickey's basket. On the console side, it was either an atari 2600 or a nintendo entertainment system. I don't particularly remember which I came across first even though the atari is older.
Give a kid a truckload of rice and fee him for a year. Give a kid a pc with proper education and that kid will be able to feed himself for the rest of his life. Dvorak's comments are short-sighted. Yes, people are hungry and need to be fed. However, the issue is whether you fix the symtoms of the problem [poverty] or the problem itself.
The truth is that no one living today was around when the world was created.
The truth is that no one living today was around when Jesus was supposedly killed on a cross.
Yes, but there were people living at that time. There is historical record before and after Jesus's time. If you deny historical accounts of Jesus existence, you deny all historical records. However, this is a discussion for another time.
It is like saying you have the number 4 and telling me that it came about definitively by adding 2 and 2 together. However, you can also get 4 by adding 1 and 3. Either way you still have 4. The same is true of the universe.
Not really but your simplifications are cute.
In the scientific method, people formulate hypothesis. Time and time again these hypothesis are discovered to be incorrect and reformulated. Evolution will never be able to answer this particular question you will end up refactoring it indefinitely.
evolution is not valid as the only answer.
It is the only valid scientific one despite protests to the contrary.
This is just your personal opinion. Just the facts jack, just the facts.
The problem with the evolution debate as it stands in schools is that it pushes an atheistic belief system on to everyone under the guise of science.
The atheistic 'belief system' doesn't include gods. Neither does any scientific hypotheses. Science is atheistic. Deal with it. You can include any gods you want on your own time.
Science preceded evolution. The Roman Catholic church preceded evolution. Before evolutioon came along, science was not athiestic. Just because a few people decided that science can only be athiestic does not make it so. You other comments are irrelevant from a scientific perspective.
This is not reasonable, rational or correct.
I'm afraid it is. The personal heartfelt beliefs of people don't get to trump the cold unemotional world of numbers just because people like that story better.
Personal opinion. Science takes into consideration all facts and all variables. In true science, you do not pick and choose what you want and ignore the rest. All data is pertinent. Otherwise, you are doctoring the results. That didn't play well for the Korean Cloning Scientist who was outed and it will not work in this argument.
I don't really see anyone ever trying to refute Creationism.
Well if you will go ahead and posit and unfalsifiable hypothesis, well, I guess we just have to accept it as true then...
If you take that route, you are doing science a disservice. I never told you to just accept it as true. I only said to consider it as an option. The person who manages proves this hypotheiss false, also proves that there is no God. Science is about formulating hypothesis and then testing whether they are true or false. There is no unfalsifiable hypothesis. If there is, science in itself is a failure.
The approach seems to be I don't believe in God, therefore you are wrong and people stop there. However, that does not use the scientific method.
No, the scientific method says that if you posit a 'god' you're the one with the responsibility to attach meaning to that jumble of letters.
Not sure where this comment came from but I don't see any fact behind it. Science is about finding answers and the scientific method explains a method for finding answers that is standardized and which is repeatable. If you are no
The truth is that no one living today was around when the world was created. The truth is that no one living today was around when Jesus was supposedly killed on a cross. Yes, but there were people living at that time. There is historical record before and after Jesus's time. If you deny historical accounts of Jesus existence, you deny all historical records. However, this is a discussion for another time. It is like saying you have the number 4 and telling me that it came about definitively by adding 2 and 2 together. However, you can also get 4 by adding 1 and 3. Either way you still have 4. The same is true of the universe. Not really but your simplifications are cute. In the scientific method, people formulate hypothesis. Time and time again these hypothesis are discovered to be incorrect and reformulated. Evolution will never be able to answer this particular question you will end up refactoring it indefinitely. evolution is not valid as the only answer. It is the only valid scientific one despite protests to the contrary. This is just your personal opinion. Just the facts jack, just the facts. The problem with the evolution debate as it stands in schools is that it pushes an atheistic belief system on to everyone under the guise of science. The atheistic 'belief system' doesn't include gods. Neither does any scientific hypotheses. Science is atheistic. Deal with it. You can include any gods you want on your own time. Science preceded evolution. The Roman Catholic church preceded evolution. Before evolutioon came along, science was not athiestic. Just because a few people decided that science can only be athiestic does not make it so. You other comments are irrelevant from a scientific perspective. This is not reasonable, rational or correct. I'm afraid it is. The personal heartfelt beliefs of people don't get to trump the cold unemotional world of numbers just because people like that story better. Personal opinion. Science takes into consideration all facts and all variables. In true science, you do not pick and choose what you want and ignore the rest. All data is pertinent. Otherwise, you are doctoring the results. That didn't play well for the Korean Cloning Scientist who was outed and it will not work in this argument. I don't really see anyone ever trying to refute Creationism. Well if you will go ahead and posit and unfalsifiable hypothesis, well, I guess we just have to accept it as true then... If you take that route, you are doing science a disservice. I never told you to just accept it as true. I only said to consider it as an option. The person who manages proves this hypotheiss false, also proves that there is no God. Science is about formulating hypothesis and then testing whether they are true or false. There is no unfalsifiable hypothesis. If there is, science in itself is a failure. The approach seems to be I don't believe in God, therefore you are wrong and people stop there. However, that does not use the scientific method. No, the scientific method says that if you posit a 'god' you're the one with the responsibility to attach meaning to that jumble of letters. Not sure where this comment came from but I don't see any fact behind it. Science is about finding answers and the scientific method explains a method for finding answers that is standardized and which is repeatable. If you are not sure what those letters mean, then you need to go back and reformulate your hypothesis. It seems to be a double standard that you can try to apply the scientific method to show that evolution is possible while creation is not. That's not a double standard - that's applying one standard. It would be using double standards to shoehorn a 'god' into the equation when nothing scientific can be said about such a thing. Again, personal opinion, not science. I don't know anyone who believes in God and yet does not believe in Creation. You lack of knowledge o
It seems to me that your comment is more of a flame than an actual question but being that I am on slashdot that should be expected. You can have science without having evolution. The real problems conservatives have with liberals is that you have a secret agenda and you try to push it as fact. The truth is that no one living today was around when the world was created. Here is the definition of the scientific method according to wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
It is based on gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning,[1] the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses. [2]
The truth is that no one can actually observe the creation of the universe. All you can observe is the aftermath and make attempts to formulate how it became that way. It is like saying you have the number 4 and telling me that it came about definitively by adding 2 and 2 together. However, you can also get 4 by adding 1 and 3. Either way you still have 4. The same is true of the universe.
If the questions is how the universe came into existence, evolution is not valid as the only answer. No one truely knows. If the question is: "is evolution taking place", then you can say yes as an answer. The whole creation vs evolution debate answers the question of how it happened not what continues to happen. It is perfectly plausible to say God created the universe and used evolution as the means to do so. This is why the Roman Catholic church does not step into the debate. Both creation and evolution are simultaneously possible. The problem with the evolution debate as it stands in schools is that it pushes an atheistic belief system on to everyone under the guise of science. Then you have people saying that if you don't believe in evolution, you don't believe in science and you are a lunatic. This is not reasonable, rational or correct.
I don't really see anyone ever trying to refute Creationism. The approach seems to be I don't believe in God, therefore you are wrong and people stop there. However, that does not use the scientific method. It seems to be a double standard that you can try to apply the scientific method to show that evolution is possible while creation is not. There is a deeper issue at root and that is whether you even believe in God. I don't know anyone who believes in God and yet does not believe in Creation. This is really illogical. If people tell you they do, then something is not kosher. God is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipowerful. He is infinite. Therefore there is no time period in which God does not exist. If God is outside the bounds of time, God would have been around when our universe was created. There is nothing else that is known to be infinite but God. Therefore, for something finite to be created it would have to come from something infinite. Otherwise, that too would also be a god. Evolution is a process, it is not a start. Something had to get the ball rolling. The only answer is some sort of creation. To a believer, there is historical fact in the Bible that Creation did occur. If one chooses not to believe, it does not make it any less true. If you don't believe in God, you are either athiest or agnostic. To the athiest, I ask you to prove to me the non-existence of God. I have never found anyone who can do this. If you are agnostic, you don't really know if God exists or not. Since you can prove that beyond a shadow of a doubt either way, it is quite possible that there is a God or there is not a god. Without proof, both methods of the birth of Universe are possible and thus both should be taught.
Flame me if you must but keep the attacks on the argument not the person as that is what you are asking the candidates to do.
Too much online advertisement these days is more obstruction than advertisement. I strip off all gui ads but leave google style text ads in place. Too many flash animations are just too heavy. Advertisers don't seem to consider the impact their ads will have on the user. I have seen many pages that eat up several megs when you count all the ads. In addition, there should be some sort of style guidelines that can be applied to ads. People buy Mitsubishi tv's because you can guarantee the same volume when you turn the channels. If someone is obnoxious and yelling at the top of their lungs, the tv resets the volume to an acceptable level. Adblockers allow me to do the same thing. Loud is not necessarily sound, it can be an obnoxious color scheme, annoying flashing ads or animated gifs, punch the monkey flash ads that suffer from memory leaks. Ads should be unobstrusive, relevant, and blend in with the site.
I think it was the DNA lounge that was playing with the wrist strap idea up in San Jose. Anyways, your idea is a good one but it only allows data to be tracked in one dimension. Other examples where this might be useful would be"
1) Determing body temperature for better gauging ventilation and utlity consumption
2) What songs or sounds lead to more beverage consumption
3) The general well being of the customers, for example if it too guys blood pressure is rising but they are not moving in step -- could this mean a fight is going to break out?
4) If the club has merchandising, it could better gauge what to stock whether it is food, alcohol or merchandise
5) Ratio of guys to girls so you don't have sausage parties unless you are into that.
6) Control of the ambient environment, so the crowd could suggest the lighting scheme based on the music played. Images could be displayed with music playing.
The possibilities are endless..
Geeks can run the club, but real people (e.g. non geeks actually go to clubs). Its a novel idea actually. Trance, House, Electronica or some other version of music is played. People then dance to the beat on the dancefloor. Sometimes so many people show up and so many dance that the temperature on the dancefloor actually outpaces the air conditioning. As a result of this and some chemical reactions in the bodies of the people dancing, heat is given off and sweat is produced. So some people task themselves to find other ways to cool off. In the course of doing this, they search for some fluid to replace that lost as sweat. Water is usually in ample supply and the people excuse themselves to search for it. I am sure Encyclopedia Brittanica has some enlightening discussions on "Water" and you can probably consult your local social engineer on the idea of a "Water Break".
has anyone ever thought about using a write-once circuit board like the ones in the direct tv cards?
the cards are not too easy to reproduce, and if the entries in the database are written directly to them, we would have a verifiable, unmodifiable, difficult to reproduce audit trail.
So the solution to this one involves strong cryptography with 2 different public keys. The benefit of the current ballot system is it guarantees the integrity of the ballots until it arrives at the "counter" person. With the electronic machines, anyone with access to the machine or database can tweak the outcome. Either way it is safe to say that we don't have an australian ballot system and it can be determined who voted for who, otherwise, we would have nested ballots. The outer ballot would be official, the inner ballot anonymous.
The point I am getting at is that we could do the same thing with public key cryptography. We could package the clear text vote with a version that is encrypted with a person's private key. This way we can verify who voted and if there is a question about the integrity of the ballot count, we can always go back and decrypt all the encrypted ballots.
If someone says that this infringes on their liberties, we can do it the other way around and use their public key to prevent it and store all the encrypted versions on a server. Then when a recount is requested, everyone can go back and "revote" or "recount" from the previous election by decrypting the vote with their private key. Build all this on an open source, freely auditable system and everyone wins.
could the government actually convince its people that by punching a chad through a hole on a piece of paper you have a democracy
i don't think most people will think there is a difference. For the record, I didn't make this comment to take sides in any of the past elections and their court battles.
I know geeks don't dance but I forsee this being used in nightclubs on dancefloors. I remember someone a while back trying to give people wristbands that would track vitals and transfer them to a computer to control the music at a niteclub. Something like this floor could be used as a voting system to automatically determine whether the crowd at a club or party likes the music or not based on the number of "connections" on the dancefloor. It could also rate the music or any other live entertainment for that matter based on whether the people were moving or standing around. So if you have a pretty decent beat, the people move. If it sucks, the people will stop dancing or even get off the dancefloor for a water break. I think it is pretty cool.
Personally, I'm bloody scared. It's only a matter of time before the computer and the robot get together. First the computer won't let me do what I want. Then, when I do it again, it's gonna whup my ass. Talk about getting some sense beat into you.
me: $ rm -rf *
robot: I'll show you "rm -rf *"
I draw the line at Johnny 5 singing and playing music.
Why would different drives/software affect the md5 hash though? Assuming it is really digital (A premise the RIAA depends on to count file sharing as piracy and thus different from tape copying), every cd [ being that in mass production are probably stamped rather than burned ] should be identical.
For example, take a iso of your favorite distro. If you burn the iso and then re-hash the new cd it should be equal to the original image. This is not a sign of uniqueness.
Meaning that if you take an MD5 Hash of the iso of the whole cd should be identical. Then in order for cd rom drives to be considered iso 9660 compliant, they must follow the same spec and read the disc the same way.
In addition, if you have the same software on different machines, it should still rip it the same way. The only difference should come from the bit rate you choose to rip at and whether you alter the name/tags. If you choose a common ripping program (Say MP3 Strip-It-Digital on Windows), an iso 9660 compliant drive (Like my Lite-On 52X), and CDDB meta tag generation (Which MP3 Strip-It-Digital does for me automatically) then it should be possible for different people with the same cd and different cd drives/software to generate the same md5 hash sums.
If they are not generating the same hashes, then the RIAA can not argue that the copies are truely digital quality (sorry for the side argument) and it should still be legal. However, if the hashes are coming out equal, then you truely can't say that the files are unique.
Am I missing something here?
I propose a new type of peer 2 peer network based on distributed computing such as seti@home merged with a quality of service metric similar to slashdot's. Basically everyone who connects to this network will reserve a chunch of hard disk (say 100mb) for the use of the network, a slice of memory (say 16mb), and a portion of their bandwith (say 10%). These reserved objects can be used to keep a protected hash database running live 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Redundancy should be build into the network so that as people log on and off, a large percent of the hashes are still available such as 90%. These hashes could use md5 or some other secure network and the moderation would handle filtering the good from the bad. Initially it would have a lot of duplicates. This is not a bad thing. It would cause greater numbers of people to listen to duplicate songs until the best quality ones are modded up and the lower quality ones are modded down.
If the reserved space is encrypted we should be able to isolate source ip's and make it look as if the traffic is coming from everyone. So instead of a song coming from 3 sources, it looks like it comes from 1000 sources because the protected share is part of every client. Similar to the Borg.
We could still give preference to faster pipes such as T3/T1/OC whatever. In addition with a node/supernode algorithm, we could figure out more efficient routes for transmitting the songs based on the users already connected to the network. For example, choosing to get a song from a user at your "isp" vs "the nearest supernode".
The protected share should handle the md5 checksum and thus the client's distributed client program would devote cpu cycles to checking the validity of the content in the protected share. I like the idea of hashed based searching but I wonder, even if we store the hashes in a protected share, does this open the door to any form of legal liability?
I realize that the record cartel could come in and do an initial flood of crap and then maintain a network of computers to saturate it with bad data. A solution would be to have the client upload a valid file and then have the network (protected share) validate the file. The network could then keep running times of valid source ip's. The source IP does not have to be sharing data (it can if it wants, and most clients probably would) it just is needed to prevent the record cartel and their minions from setting up hordes of dhcp machines spitting out bad data because they would have to revalidate everytime an ip is changed. This may effect others who are on dhcp but their moderated accounts would be able to act as a form of credit at time of validation. People with good history who switch ip's but don't disconnect would not have to be revalidated because a trust would be established. Whild someone who disconnects and changes IP is no longer trusted. By having a protected share, high quality data could go into replication quicker.
If we know it is trusted and we see a concentration of requests coming from a particular area/isp, we can broadcast data to other clients near area/isp for the purpose of retransmission during peak times. Maybe we could build in requirements such as if a song is downloaded, it must be kept on the machine for 24 hours, so people don't just download and delete. This way retransmission could be quicker during peak times. People who download and delete or log off would be modded down as potential sources while others would continue to keep good credit. Thus, in addition to having metrics for quality of service, we could also have metrics for the quality of the source.
As much as this sounds like a hot idea, this might also mean that people would just leave their tv's on 24 hours a day. I think that the revenue generated from the tv watching the ads on the channels would easily offset the cost of the tv itself. So if you get a nice cheap $100 black and white tv set and leave it on 24-7 for a few months, you could easily hit 10,000 commercials. Then, instead of skipping the commercials you don't like, you would just be paid for not watching them while you would watch the ones you do like. In effect, this would mean that one company could actually subsidize you to watch another company's commercials and maybe even buy a rival's products. Interesting.
So this number is,
once again, the player key:
(trade secret haiku?)
"Eighty-one; and then
one hundred three -- two times; then
two hundred (less three);
two hundred twenty
four; and last (of course not least)
the humble zero."
-- DeCSS haiku
My company uses WinRunner for Windows GUI testing. I know that Mercury Interactive which makes WinRunner and LoadRunner another GUI Testing utility creates Unix version of their software in addition to the Windows versions. I don't know about Mac though.
Mercury Interactive
Hope that helps
Joe
Introduction to Algorithms -- Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest,
C++ How To Program -- Deitel & Deitel,
Programming in Prolog -- Clocksin & Mellish,
Programming in Perl -- Larry Wall et al,
The Art of Programming -- Kernighan & Pike,
Database Management Systems -- Ramakrishnan & Gehrke,
Art of Assembly -- Randy Hyde
I also like the Oreilly books as well as the Unleashed books. I have the Java Oreilly books and I have an old edition of Red Hat Linux Unleashed which I have found useful when developing on Linux.
Pretty much you could also ask any cs college student right now to figure out the most popular college texts.