Actually, you may have something there
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LCD Price Fixing?
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· Score: 1
What I'd say the solution would be would involve: (1) program USB driver for Linux, and small conversion card (2) design 2 new cases: one for a laptop motherboard backplane, one for LCD display (3) Buy laptops, split them into LCD / display, and rackmount the laptops into networked servers, kindof like blade servers. Sell LCD displays at a profit.
The only problem is, by the time you get the R&D done, will the situation still be around? For a company that builds cheap hardware, possibly. For a company like Gateway, definitely.
Now, one might think that a company like Gateway won't shoot someone else's cows -- but that does happen if a takeover attempt occurs. I remember a wonderful story about 2 train companies from Texas into Chicago. The big one was trying to undercut the little one even at a loss to put them out of business, but the little one always set their prices slightly cheaper. Turns out that the little one was at the same time buying up cattle, and shipping them north on their big friend's railway system.
So just wait around, and see what happens. It could be amusing. Or go get an axe, and start splitting up laptops immediately!
This is the real problem that I have with neoliberal capitalism. It isn't liberal, it isn't capitalism, and if I read history correctly, it isn't neo.
It's part of the privatize/nationalize cycle that wealthy and powerful people use to steal from not-so-wealthy and not-so-powerful people.
There is NO WAY that this form of dominance benefits those around the world. It's called stealing, and it's as old as the hills.
There's a huge diff: slashdotting, DOS/Owning
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4l-j4z333ra 0wn3d
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· Score: 1
There's a huge difference between slashdotting, and DOSsing, disconnecting, or hacking (0wning) a site.
In the case of slashdotting, there are a huge number of interested people who are going to actually *see* the site.
That means that the information gets out, and opinions are affected.
DOSsing a site, on the other hand, keeps people from seeing the original material at all. In the case of the US Government DOSsing a site, as it would seem to be here, opinions are not affected in the original way, but US citizens do learn that the US Government fears their having information.
Very important lesson, there. Remember it. [Espcially you government censors who may be reading this: remember it. Germans knew they were losing the war when the sites of German victories kept getting closer to Berlin. But the censors themselves were remembered with infamy.]
Now, hacking/owning a site is the most evil of the three, in my opinion, because that makes it appear that the original site was saying something that they did not want to say. That, too, eventually gets out. When it does, watch out.
Disclaimer: Right now, I consider Saddam to be evil, because of what I have seen on major media. I *could* be wrong. But I also consider our own government to be at least partly evil, based on what I have seen first-hand. I am much less likely to be wrong there. Anyhow, my wildest dreams involve the US putting aside its wars, returning home, and living peacably with whatever wealth or poverty peaceful living brings. Until then, I will live in exile. But golly gee, the US is a beautiful country, and it would be nice to return.
If you really want security through obscurity, you should be able to get it. Quite simply, if there are a number of sysadmins who want a black box solution, then CERT should provide parallel systems, with different sets of programmers.
One should be advertised as open-source, open-problem. The other should be advertised as security-through-obscurity, maybe open-source, but not open-problem.
Then let the users pick. At that point, well-intentioned hackers should leave the STO code obscure, and publicize the problems with the open-problem code.
Meanwhile, CERT *can* use their lessons from the open-problem code to improve the STO code, but it *is* more at risk to real cracking, perhaps less at risk to script kiddies. Perhaps.
I, for one, would probably use the Security-through-obscurity code if I didn't have time to really learn my system, or hadn't yet learned the system. Once I understood my system, though, I would upgrade to the open-source/open-problem code, in order to be able to maintain maximum security. (Just my $0.02.) By the way,
For example, my Mom sent me a link to www.iraqinews.com, run by a local student. He was compiling information that was *not* just the sanitized stuff put out by the US government.
By the time I got to it, it was gone.
Then today, it was reporting that it had undergone a DOS attack, and would be back up as soon as they could shake free.
I think that it really is a weapons STRIKE, not TEST. It's too bad, really, because I think that we are going to win this war, and I see no reason for truth to be a casualty. Oh well.
If a brick-and-mortar store mislabels an item, they don't have to honor the price. A lot of the department stores do, because they sell so many items, and they are all cheap, and the value of good will is more than the value of the item.
Also, if they mislabel the item, and sell it at price to whites, but not to blacks (or Catholics but not protestants, etc), they can get in trouble that way.
And if you *call* the store, and ask "Do you have a Black-n-Decker Stove-top drill with automatic surprise reverse torquing" and they say "yes", and you ask "What is your price", and they say "$25", and you ask "please check--all the other stores say $50", and they say "I know, it's $25, come and get it", then they can be bound by their verbal contract.
But if they mislabel an item (especially a boutique store) and you discover it, they can say "no, I'm sorry, that's $135, not $1.35." And if you don't like it, you can still buy it, or you can leave. Or you can break all their little hummel figures, and go to jail until you pay for them -- it's up to you.
That said, I think it would be *great* if the Amazon site was set up to every so often lower the price of one or two new items, drastically (especially open box items.) That way, you'd go there, just to check.
If I understand it correctly, you're trying to keep this as cheap as possible to build-your-own.
Now, if you want it cheap, just go out and get an 8055 microcontroller, and use its serial port to tie to your computer.
But the problem is that it is expensive to program the thing. The programmers for any chip can be $100-$200 -- a microcost for business production runs, but a serious expense if every person who's going to do this needs to get one.
I suppose you could buy 10k preprogrammed 8055s once you had developed the thing, and sell them along with your instructions, once you had developed it, but I don't think you want to do that either. Or if you have sales connections, maybe you do. Make it a College "gotta have" like lava lamps were in my day.
So the cheapest programming alternative is probably a basic-stamp computer.
The second cheapest alternative would be to build your own out of a few chips at Radio Shack, and not use programming, but I don't think that's real good either.
Aside from that, you might also want to check the fiber-optic method as well. I see all kinds of color-wheel art done with fiber-optics around Christmastime.
Way back (probably Oct 10, 1993), there was a Washington Post article that followed up on the winners of Maryland's first million-dollar lottery. Almost all of them said winning was the worst thing that ever happened to them.
But here's also a quote from the website that gives the typical scenario:
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"Paul McNabb was Maryland's first $1-million lottery winner 20 years ago. He has now seen his last check, the final $50,000 on his two-decade splurge. He now faces life after lottery. Has the money changed him for better or worse? The story is told by the Washington Post.21 "Today McNabb lives in a rented two-bedroom apartment near Lake Mead outside Las Vegas, where he drives taxi on the night shift. He doesn't own a car or any property. The lottery experience has ruined his ability to trust his fellow humanity. "For a year after his award, his story appeared in dozens of papers, on radio and television, including those in Canada, Britain, and Australia. He received thousands of letters from people wanting money. Religious groups, travel agents, investment counselors, budding film producers, literary groups, poor people all wanted a part of McNabb's good fortune. "One letter-writer threatened McNabb's two daughters, whose pictures had appeared in newspapers and on television, unless money was forthcoming. He turned the letters over to the FBI. He feared for himself, his daughters, his wife. His house in the Owings Mills area, near Baltimore, was broken into three times, presumably by people who thought $1 million might be lying around, he said. People came to the door, called on the phone, accosted him everywhere. Rather than to continue enjoying this limelight, he ran for cover, to the shores of Lake Mead, where he joined the military. "'If you had gone through what I went through that first year, you wouldn't have trusted your own mother,' he said. 'Do you realize I've lost 20 years of social life, of being human? I never got over the point that I always had to be on my guard.' "Stories like this, with variations, can be told about many instant millionaires. Many of gambling's big winners have had their lives turned topsy-turvy. They bear the scars for life.
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The real losers are the winners. But also losing are the losers. And the people who are taking something [state services] for nothing [lottery-style theft], since they are undermining their own society.
In line with fasting, people just might try giving up their little personal evils, and maybe we could all live with a little less government, a little less war,... I dunno.
Well, that option is out for my home system. Unfortunately, I have my home system on dos bootup, with a loadlin.exe startup, and the program can't read the new.BZ2 compressed files. So I can't recompile my kernel. Or, rather, I have recompiled my kernel a few times, but just can't install the new sources.
So on that system, when I run falconseye, for example, I get 'can't open/dev/dsp 'd'.'
But that doesn't explain why, having installed ALSA on my office system from the.debs, I still have no sound. Or maybe I have sound, and like Quake, the programs can't get to it (in which case, it might be nice to know a command line way to test the sound. Then I could start debugging the system.)
I've got two debian systems, neither one has working sound, and not for lack of trying.
I'd *love* to see an app that would just scan my log file, and tell me what was going wrong, and how to fix it.
Unfortunately, sound is completely broken in debian, using Murphy's original law: if you design something so that it *can* be misassembled, sooner or later someone will misassemble it.
Also unfortunately, ALSA is designed with so many misassemblable parts, that it is actually quite improbable that someone will assemble it correctly.
Actually, looking at what "lame" means, it's KDE.
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Has GNOME Become LAME?
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I have two Linux computers -- one at work [Woody/Gnome], and one at home [Woody/KDE].
I've noticed that KDE is significantly slower on a faster machine, and both KDE and its apps crash tons [kprinter corrupts often, resulting in a lot of wasted ink, Kwrite, like Abiword, can't stand to run; kformula just doesn't work; kpaint works for about 30 seconds before a crash]; Gnome doesn't crash.
So as far as I can tell, it is KDE that is lame. I've heard that it is because KDE doesn't take advantage of the Xserver capabilities, nor the graphic card capability. But boy, it really is feature rich; but feature rich and slow is still lame, especially if the features actually working must wait till a later version.
That said, I can't get the sound working on either system -- but after reading a lot about it, I think that's really a Debian problem. As one website puts it, "ALSA is Debian is completely broken". [Beyond that bit of wisdom, they still weren't any help.]
All of which may make it sound like I don't like Linux or Debian. Quite the contrary, Debian/Gnome is excellent at what it can do.
KDE isn't; but it *is* more user friendly, and belongs in the home environment. It is marginally better than Windows {95, 98, 2000, ME, Expectorate} in a lot of ways.
I'm glad you enjoyed my piece. There's something called a Freudian slip, and I can either let it take the credit and say "well, I noticed after I punched submit, but it actually was accidental", or I can try to claim "yeah, I thought it up myself, glad you liked it."
Nonetheless, it is truly precious when my post is funny enough to get the notice of *four* posters.
Should it be classed as flamebait?
Well, maybe it should. But at least it's high quality flamebait. Glad you enjoyed it -- we each do our best in our own way.
I opened both the article and the email itself -- but read the article first, and did *not* read the email. If she didn't intend for me to read it, and made it clear she still doesn't intend for me to read it, then I'm not going to read it.
I strongly suspect that her grammar was one of the reasons she did not want it read. She possibly *can't* spell or construct proper sentences when she rights, and depends on an editor to fix her writing. If so, then the change in public perception will damage her credibility as a journalist. It shouldn't, but it will. If she *can* spell, then the poorer level of writing may still make people assume she can't, with the same result.
But it really was her own fault. I have this problem myself, not only with email, but on Slashdot.
There are lots of times when I see an article, and write a post, and then think "I don't want to post this". Or "I don't want to post this in my name."
When I have those thoughts, I think about why. Usually, rather than clicking "Post anonymously", I simply click "x" in the upper right hand corner.
You see, often what I think I don't want to be associated with, shouldn't be said, even if it is is true.
It is for this same reason that within the Catholic Church, one of the things that can really hurt a person's candidacy for sainthood is their writings. People simply need to not be frivolous with things they write, because what they write can spread. And if it's wrong, or evil, or even right and good -- but in the wrong context to do good -- then it was a bad idea to write it down.
[But just so you know, I too later discover grammar errors in my writing, and I too use my writing skills professionally. My most common mistake is to use "to" where "two" or "too" belongs. My second most common mistake is broken sentence structure, that appears when I go back and edit my writing, and use the "Submit" butten instead of the the "Oewcuwq" button.]
It looks like what they patented is something I've been thinking of for a while.
We have a small prepublishing company, and it really would be ideal to let the authors request their changes right on the web, and then submit them. Then have a system that would send an alarm to my people, who would get on the job immediately, update the info, and then send an email ['Your work is ready'] to the authors.
But that isn't all I want. I want
(1) Secure password encoded, 128-bit at least
(2) Dating and timing of requests, backup of all previous versions
(3) Dating and timing of our new documents
(4) Access to Mac systems
And then what I'd really like:
(5) Online web-native/Postscript-native document manager that can handle templates [like equations], read postscript *FROM OTHER WORD PROCESSORS INCLUDING MS WORD*, reformat it into template-format work, do all the things that Quark XPress can do, allow mass updates with individual checks [so words and formulas must be stored in tree format].
I suppose this could be done with Acrobat files initially, including their form submission.
But the fact is, we don't have it done. Now, I'm not about to spend money to develop something that isn't mine, especially when I don't have a lot of money. But if they got a really good system going, there's an excellent chance that I would buy in, so long as the license was permanent. [I won't be held hostage, but I *will* pay money for the system].
So I really hope they do develop a halfway decent working model.
But if they don't develop it themselves, I'm not going to have a problem doing an artwork search and then developing what I wanted anyhow. Or if they have a hostage-data situation.
I won't pay money to put a noose around my neck voluntarily.
If you get the cheap version, for only half the price you can get a former humorist to counsel you.
Hi. I lost my data.
> Hee hee
No. You don't understand. My life is ruined.
> Haah hah.. . hoo... this is really good.
I think I'm going to call the other counselor
> "Over to you, Stange!"
Okay, but I've heard other reasons to not eat pork:
(1) [biggie, for me, discounted by most]: it is beginning to appear that all mammalian meat is subject to prion diseases, and may have prion-related illnesses spring from him. MS [Multiple Sclerosis], Alzhimers, and other things *look* enough like prion diseases, that I'm going to stay away from Mammal meat period.
(2) Bottom feeders and garbage eaters [including pork] have flesh that is typically more toxic than plant eaters. So shellfish have a greater risk than cod, for example. Hawk meat would be riskier than pigeon meat [remember DDT?]. And pork flesh will be typically more toxic than horse flesh.
That said, your highest concentrations of toxins, no matter what the animal, are going to be in the skin fats. Remember how LSD users can have flashbacks when they go on a diet? It's the toxins that have been packed away into the fats, being released again.
Anyhow, just a thought: sometimes blind obedience is better, even if you *think* you know the score. That said, I am all for learning the score better.
Those 3 downloaders each sell to twenty CD burner companies at $10000/pop.
Each CD burner company burns it on 10000 CDs and sells aboult half of the CDs at $1.50/ea, the other half at discount for $.50/ea. Of those, 2 of them also make MP3s available online, and sell those MP3s at $1 each.
The users exchange it freely on napster, and some people do get it for free -- others have to pay about $1.
Just so you know, I am not one of the "pie in the sky" libertarians. Rather, I believe that libertarianism is the best state for an economy to be in, but it is incredibly hard to maintain, because *it essentially requires both an inherent sense of honesty and charity in the daily life of each person*.
So it can exist where everyone is devoted to essentially being honest and charitable to others. Aside from that, as far as I can tell it *must decay* to violence and slavery of one form or another.
It is for this reason, in part, that I am such a reactionary [read religiously conservative and morally driven] in my viewpoints. I like Libertarianism, and I hate to see things get worse. That is not to say that I think that religious conservativism should be forced on anybody. I don't. Rather, I think that if people don't force themselves to religiously honest, conservative living, then they'll have something else forced on them that they like even less.
As for me, I can put up with either the one, or the other, or that brief period of immoral freedom between. And I'll live like a libertarian, not forcing my religion on others, even if it kills them to let them choose otherwise, even if it eventually kills me [which is quite possible] when others choose otherwise.
But anyhow, I like libertarianism the best. I just don't see any real action, except for moral living and urging others towards moral living, which will help get us there.
(1) I'm currently in Lithuania now. I am aware that there are different views about sex, the world over. Just so you know, in its typical viewpoint about morality, Lithuania is somewhere between America and Portugal: not so far as France [which is not extremely far in the opposite direction itself].
But the argument is irrelevant. [Or, I might say, it is a form of ad-hominem. It doesn't matter *which country* my viewpoint comes from, or *which burrough of the bronx* my voice comes from.] Your term "reactionary" falls in the same class, too.
(2) I am aware of JFK. I am aware that our current set of problems are rooted in the WWII era, or before. But Clinton is more immediate to people's memories.
(3) If you're going to say that Clinton (w/ Lewinsky) was answerable to his wife and nobody else, why even stop there? What's his wife got to do with it? I, on the other hand, say that he was answerable to *everyone* with whom he had a related contract, and that includes all Americans, voters or not. And God [remembering what a marriage vow is]. But that said, I go back to my original statement -- that the Clinton/Lewinsky issue is a symptom of the general state of America. It doesn't make him right, but *gosh*, the Americans did everything they could to get what they got.
First, I have to say that I am a libertarian who never sided with IP. So that's where I'm coming from. But I'm also a conservative (religious/libertarian conservative, not Military/Industrial conservative). That puts me in the Right.
However, I've got a question for you: you said that there are two kinds of Right: those that believe individual rights are an essential ingredient to morality and those that believe that individual rights are expendable in order to maintain public "morality."
Did you never stop to consider a third possibility? Those who believe that morality is an essential ingredient to individual rights?
Because that's where I am. I really and truly believe that we are losing our rights because we lost our morality -- and Clinton's cigar wasn't just about sex. It was rather a telltale sign of the lost morality that results in our lost rights.
I guess I'm just kindof surprised that that one didn't occur to you, because I'd tend to think that most biblical conservatives would fall into the same classification as I do. I tend to think it would only be fake biblical conservatives (there for the votes), who would say "rights are an essential ingredient to morality."
Anyhow, if you'd like to debate the issue from that point of view, I'd be happy to entertain your thoughts.
---- You might think this is a sig, but it isn't. I type this by hand every time, of course.
Just a question here... if I remember correctly, patents *only* apply to commercial use for sale. They do not apply to making a thing for yourself and using it. Is this correct?
Because if it is, then an obvious defensive position presents itself: the homestead.
You have enough money to set up your own self-sufficient, cash-free homestead, and stick it in a state that is free from land taxes (such as W Va, or California -- whoops, scratch California: that was a joke).
Then you can invent and use what you want and need, to your heart's content. Of course, a self sufficient homestead doesn't run on the power of just one family, so part of this will be that you allow others to live there if the contribute and fit in. But still, all cash free.
Now, this ends up being unprofitable for those who live and help out, but unprofitable does not equate to a loss, when real losses are occuring elsewhere. In other words, if that's the best deal they can get, then they will come.
My train of thought isn't to advocate anything -- but simply to note that if things are really progressing in this direction, it would seem a form of feudalism with petty kings will be next.
... well, I suppose you're not, because I can see you're not paying attention.
Not too far above your post, a poster (bninjapenguin, if I remember correctly) reported that he had to leave his job because he refused to sign a "we own you" contract.
Now, what exactly is to stop IBM from taking your ideas before you even have them, and thus making them useless to you? (Except common sense, of course). Nor was that an isolated case. This exact same thing happened to my brother. The boss said that it wasn't his preference -- the banks insisted upon it -- and I actually believe that, because the company is in debt, not up to their ears, but definitely up to their belly button.
So essentially what we are seeing at this point, is if there are going to be IP laws, then there will not be, in reality, any IP, because the IP will all be owned by whomever is the most powerful. Typically, the "most powerful entity" is called the government.
Think about that. These IP laws are taking you closer to being owned, as chattel, by your government, than you've ever been before. It's no different than in "communism", where everybody owning everything means nobody owns anything.
As for your question "what can a little guy do...?", Little guys can always fit in niches that big guys never notice. Sooner or later, of course, bug guys do notice if you do well. At that point, the smart big guys buy you out. You continue to look for more niches.
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You think this is a sig, but
it isn't. I type this by
hand each time, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
What I'd say the solution would be would involve:
(1) program USB driver for Linux, and small conversion card
(2) design 2 new cases: one for a laptop motherboard backplane, one for LCD display
(3) Buy laptops, split them into LCD / display, and rackmount the laptops into networked servers, kindof like blade servers. Sell LCD displays at a profit.
The only problem is, by the time you get the R&D done, will the situation still be around? For a company that builds cheap hardware, possibly. For a company like Gateway, definitely.
Now, one might think that a company like Gateway won't shoot someone else's cows -- but that does happen if a takeover attempt occurs. I remember a wonderful story about 2 train companies from Texas into Chicago. The big one was trying to undercut the little one even at a loss to put them out of business, but the little one always set their prices slightly cheaper. Turns out that the little one was at the same time buying up cattle, and shipping them north on their big friend's railway system.
So just wait around, and see what happens. It could be amusing. Or go get an axe, and start splitting up laptops immediately!
This is the real problem that I have with neoliberal capitalism. It isn't liberal, it isn't capitalism, and if I read history correctly, it isn't neo.
It's part of the privatize/nationalize cycle that wealthy and powerful people use to steal from not-so-wealthy and not-so-powerful people.
There is NO WAY that this form of dominance benefits those around the world. It's called stealing, and it's as old as the hills.
There's a huge difference between slashdotting, and DOSsing, disconnecting, or hacking (0wning) a site.
In the case of slashdotting, there are a huge number of interested people who are going to actually *see* the site.
That means that the information gets out, and opinions are affected.
DOSsing a site, on the other hand, keeps people from seeing the original material at all. In the case of the US Government DOSsing a site, as it would seem to be here, opinions are not affected in the original way, but US citizens do learn that the US Government fears their having information.
Very important lesson, there. Remember it.
[Espcially you government censors who may be reading this: remember it. Germans knew they were losing the war when the sites of German victories kept getting closer to Berlin. But the censors themselves were remembered with infamy.]
Now, hacking/owning a site is the most evil of the three, in my opinion, because that makes it appear that the original site was saying something that they did not want to say. That, too, eventually gets out. When it does, watch out.
Disclaimer: Right now, I consider Saddam to be evil, because of what I have seen on major media. I *could* be wrong. But I also consider our own government to be at least partly evil, based on what I have seen first-hand. I am much less likely to be wrong there. Anyhow, my wildest dreams involve the US putting aside its wars, returning home, and living peacably with whatever wealth or poverty peaceful living brings. Until then, I will live in exile. But golly gee, the US is a beautiful country, and it would be nice to return.
If you really want security through obscurity, you should be able to get it. Quite simply, if there are a number of sysadmins who want a black box solution, then CERT should provide parallel systems, with different sets of programmers.
One should be advertised as open-source, open-problem. The other should be advertised as security-through-obscurity, maybe open-source, but not open-problem.
Then let the users pick. At that point, well-intentioned hackers should leave the STO code obscure, and publicize the problems with the open-problem code.
Meanwhile, CERT *can* use their lessons from the open-problem code to improve the STO code, but it *is* more at risk to real cracking, perhaps less at risk to script kiddies. Perhaps.
I, for one, would probably use the Security-through-obscurity code if I didn't have time to really learn my system, or hadn't yet learned the system. Once I understood my system, though, I would upgrade to the open-source/open-problem code, in order to be able to maintain maximum security. (Just my $0.02.) By the way,
For example, my Mom sent me a link to www.iraqinews.com, run by a local student. He was compiling information that was *not* just the sanitized stuff put out by the US government.
By the time I got to it, it was gone.
Then today, it was reporting that it had undergone a DOS attack, and would be back up as soon as they could shake free.
I think that it really is a weapons STRIKE, not TEST. It's too bad, really, because I think that we are going to win this war, and I see no reason for truth to be a casualty. Oh well.
If a brick-and-mortar store mislabels an item, they don't have to honor the price. A lot of the department stores do, because they sell so many items, and they are all cheap, and the value of good will is more than the value of the item.
Also, if they mislabel the item, and sell it at price to whites, but not to blacks (or Catholics but not protestants, etc), they can get in trouble that way.
And if you *call* the store, and ask "Do you have a Black-n-Decker Stove-top drill with automatic surprise reverse torquing" and they say "yes", and you ask "What is your price", and they say "$25", and you ask "please check--all the other stores say $50", and they say "I know, it's $25, come and get it", then they can be bound by their verbal contract.
But if they mislabel an item (especially a boutique store) and you discover it, they can say "no, I'm sorry, that's $135, not $1.35." And if you don't like it, you can still buy it, or you can leave. Or you can break all their little hummel figures, and go to jail until you pay for them -- it's up to you.
That said, I think it would be *great* if the Amazon site was set up to every so often lower the price of one or two new items, drastically (especially open box items.) That way, you'd go there, just to check.
Can this method be applied to sonar, then?
[Sorry, I just *had* to take it out of the patentable field. Remember Slashdot, guys.]
If I understand it correctly, you're trying to keep this as cheap as possible to build-your-own.
Now, if you want it cheap, just go out and get an 8055 microcontroller, and use its serial port to tie to your computer.
But the problem is that it is expensive to program the thing. The programmers for any chip can be $100-$200 -- a microcost for business production runs, but a serious expense if every person who's going to do this needs to get one.
I suppose you could buy 10k preprogrammed 8055s once you had developed the thing, and sell them along with your instructions, once you had developed it, but I don't think you want to do that either. Or if you have sales connections, maybe you do. Make it a College "gotta have" like lava lamps were in my day.
So the cheapest programming alternative is probably a basic-stamp computer.
The second cheapest alternative would be to build your own out of a few chips at Radio Shack, and not use programming, but I don't think that's real good either.
Aside from that, you might also want to check the fiber-optic method as well. I see all kinds of color-wheel art done with fiber-optics around Christmastime.
Use the Parker-Sochacki solution to the Picard iteration. The orbital positions and therefore the gravity field [and thus the derivatives] become a simple matter of additions and multiplications, and everything comes out as a polynomial function of time.
The original method was published in Neural Computing.
http://www.users.voicenet.com/~eric/dennis4.html I think this says it all.
I got the date from this website.
But here's also a quote from the website that gives the typical scenario:
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"Paul McNabb was Maryland's first $1-million lottery winner 20 years ago. He has now seen his last check, the final $50,000 on his two-decade splurge. He now faces life after lottery. Has the money changed him for better or worse? The story is told by the Washington Post.21
"Today McNabb lives in a rented two-bedroom apartment near Lake Mead outside Las Vegas, where he drives taxi on the night shift. He doesn't own a car or any property. The lottery experience has ruined his ability to trust his fellow humanity.
"For a year after his award, his story appeared in dozens of papers, on radio and television, including those in Canada, Britain, and Australia. He received thousands of letters from people wanting money. Religious groups, travel agents, investment counselors, budding film producers, literary groups, poor people all wanted a part of McNabb's good fortune.
"One letter-writer threatened McNabb's two daughters, whose pictures had appeared in newspapers and on television, unless money was forthcoming. He turned the letters over to the FBI. He feared for himself, his daughters, his wife. His house in the Owings Mills area, near Baltimore, was broken into three times, presumably by people who thought $1 million might be lying around, he said. People came to the door, called on the phone, accosted him everywhere. Rather than to continue enjoying this limelight, he ran for cover, to the shores of Lake Mead, where he joined the military.
"'If you had gone through what I went through that first year, you wouldn't have trusted your own mother,' he said. 'Do you realize I've lost 20 years of social life, of being human? I never got over the point that I always had to be on my guard.'
"Stories like this, with variations, can be told about many instant millionaires. Many of gambling's big winners have had their lives turned topsy-turvy. They bear the scars for life.
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The real losers are the winners. But also losing are the losers. And the people who are taking something [state services] for nothing [lottery-style theft], since they are undermining their own society.
In line with fasting, people just might try giving up their little personal evils, and maybe we could all live with a little less government, a little less war, ... I dunno.
Well, that option is out for my home system. Unfortunately, I have my home system on dos bootup, with a loadlin.exe startup, and the program can't read the new .BZ2 compressed files. So I can't recompile my kernel. Or, rather, I have recompiled my kernel a few times, but just can't install the new sources.
/dev/dsp 'd'.'
.debs, I still have no sound. Or maybe I have sound, and like Quake, the programs can't get to it (in which case, it might be nice to know a command line way to test the sound. Then I could start debugging the system.)
So on that system, when I run falconseye, for example, I get 'can't open
But that doesn't explain why, having installed ALSA on my office system from the
I've got two debian systems, neither one has working sound, and not for lack of trying.
I'd *love* to see an app that would just scan my log file, and tell me what was going wrong, and how to fix it.
Unfortunately, sound is completely broken in debian, using Murphy's original law: if you design something so that it *can* be misassembled, sooner or later someone will misassemble it.
Also unfortunately, ALSA is designed with so many misassemblable parts, that it is actually quite improbable that someone will assemble it correctly.
I've noticed that KDE is significantly slower on a faster machine, and both KDE and its apps crash tons [kprinter corrupts often, resulting in a lot of wasted ink, Kwrite, like Abiword, can't stand to run; kformula just doesn't work; kpaint works for about 30 seconds before a crash]; Gnome doesn't crash.
So as far as I can tell, it is KDE that is lame. I've heard that it is because KDE doesn't take advantage of the Xserver capabilities, nor the graphic card capability. But boy, it really is feature rich; but feature rich and slow is still lame, especially if the features actually working must wait till a later version.
That said, I can't get the sound working on either system -- but after reading a lot about it, I think that's really a Debian problem. As one website puts it, "ALSA is Debian is completely broken". [Beyond that bit of wisdom, they still weren't any help.]
All of which may make it sound like I don't like Linux or Debian. Quite the contrary, Debian/Gnome is excellent at what it can do.
KDE isn't; but it *is* more user friendly, and belongs in the home environment. It is marginally better than Windows {95, 98, 2000, ME, Expectorate} in a lot of ways.
I'm glad you enjoyed my piece. There's something called a Freudian slip, and I can either let it take the credit and say "well, I noticed after I punched submit, but it actually was accidental", or I can try to claim "yeah, I thought it up myself, glad you liked it."
Nonetheless, it is truly precious when my post is funny enough to get the notice of *four* posters.
Should it be classed as flamebait?
Well, maybe it should. But at least it's high quality flamebait. Glad you enjoyed it -- we each do our best in our own way.
I opened both the article and the email itself -- but read the article first, and did *not* read the email. If she didn't intend for me to read it, and made it clear she still doesn't intend for me to read it, then I'm not going to read it.
I strongly suspect that her grammar was one of the reasons she did not want it read. She possibly *can't* spell or construct proper sentences when she rights, and depends on an editor to fix her writing. If so, then the change in public perception will damage her credibility as a journalist. It shouldn't, but it will. If she *can* spell, then the poorer level of writing may still make people assume she can't, with the same result.
But it really was her own fault. I have this problem myself, not only with email, but on Slashdot.
There are lots of times when I see an article, and write a post, and then think "I don't want to post this". Or "I don't want to post this in my name."
When I have those thoughts, I think about why. Usually, rather than clicking "Post anonymously", I simply click "x" in the upper right hand corner.
You see, often what I think I don't want to be associated with, shouldn't be said, even if it is is true.
It is for this same reason that within the Catholic Church, one of the things that can really hurt a person's candidacy for sainthood is their writings. People simply need to not be frivolous with things they write, because what they write can spread. And if it's wrong, or evil, or even right and good -- but in the wrong context to do good -- then it was a bad idea to write it down.
[But just so you know, I too later discover grammar errors in my writing, and I too use my writing skills professionally. My most common mistake is to use "to" where "two" or "too" belongs. My second most common mistake is broken sentence structure, that appears when I go back and edit my writing, and use the "Submit" butten instead of the the "Oewcuwq" button.]
It looks like what they patented is something I've been thinking of for a while.
We have a small prepublishing company, and it really would be ideal to let the authors request their changes right on the web, and then submit them. Then have a system that would send an alarm to my people, who would get on the job immediately, update the info, and then send an email ['Your work is ready'] to the authors.
But that isn't all I want. I want
(1) Secure password encoded, 128-bit at least
(2) Dating and timing of requests, backup of all previous versions
(3) Dating and timing of our new documents
(4) Access to Mac systems
And then what I'd really like:
(5) Online web-native/Postscript-native document manager that can handle templates [like equations], read postscript *FROM OTHER WORD PROCESSORS INCLUDING MS WORD*, reformat it into template-format work, do all the things that Quark XPress can do, allow mass updates with individual checks [so words and formulas must be stored in tree format].
I suppose this could be done with Acrobat files initially, including their form submission.
But the fact is, we don't have it done. Now, I'm not about to spend money to develop something that isn't mine, especially when I don't have a lot of money. But if they got a really good system going, there's an excellent chance that I would buy in, so long as the license was permanent. [I won't be held hostage, but I *will* pay money for the system].
So I really hope they do develop a halfway decent working model.
But if they don't develop it themselves, I'm not going to have a problem doing an artwork search and then developing what I wanted anyhow. Or if they have a hostage-data situation.
I won't pay money to put a noose around my neck voluntarily.
If you get the cheap version, for only half the price you can get a former humorist to counsel you. Hi. I lost my data. > Hee hee No. You don't understand. My life is ruined. > Haah hah .. . hoo ... this is really good.
I think I'm going to call the other counselor
> "Over to you, Stange!"
Okay, but I've heard other reasons to not eat pork:
(1) [biggie, for me, discounted by most]: it is beginning to appear that all mammalian meat is subject to prion diseases, and may have prion-related illnesses spring from him. MS [Multiple Sclerosis], Alzhimers, and other things *look* enough like prion diseases, that I'm going to stay away from Mammal meat period.
(2) Bottom feeders and garbage eaters [including pork] have flesh that is typically more toxic than plant eaters. So shellfish have a greater risk than cod, for example. Hawk meat would be riskier than pigeon meat [remember DDT?]. And pork flesh will be typically more toxic than horse flesh.
That said, your highest concentrations of toxins, no matter what the animal, are going to be in the skin fats. Remember how LSD users can have flashbacks when they go on a diet? It's the toxins that have been packed away into the fats, being released again.
Anyhow, just a thought: sometimes blind obedience is better, even if you *think* you know the score. That said, I am all for learning the score better.
1 song @ $70000 x 3 downloads = $210000
Those 3 downloaders each sell to twenty CD burner companies at $10000/pop.
Each CD burner company burns it on 10000 CDs and sells aboult half of the CDs at $1.50/ea, the other half at discount for $.50/ea. Of those, 2 of them also make MP3s available online, and sell those MP3s at $1 each.
The users exchange it freely on napster, and some people do get it for free -- others have to pay about $1.
Just so you know, I am not one of the "pie in the sky" libertarians. Rather, I believe that libertarianism is the best state for an economy to be in, but it is incredibly hard to maintain, because *it essentially requires both an inherent sense of honesty and charity in the daily life of each person*.
So it can exist where everyone is devoted to essentially being honest and charitable to others. Aside from that, as far as I can tell it *must decay* to violence and slavery of one form or another.
It is for this reason, in part, that I am such a reactionary [read religiously conservative and morally driven] in my viewpoints. I like Libertarianism, and I hate to see things get worse. That is not to say that I think that religious conservativism should be forced on anybody. I don't. Rather, I think that if people don't force themselves to religiously honest, conservative living, then they'll have something else forced on them that they like even less.
As for me, I can put up with either the one, or the other, or that brief period of immoral freedom between. And I'll live like a libertarian, not forcing my religion on others, even if it kills them to let them choose otherwise, even if it eventually kills me [which is quite possible] when others choose otherwise.
But anyhow, I like libertarianism the best. I just don't see any real action, except for moral living and urging others towards moral living, which will help get us there.
(1) I'm currently in Lithuania now. I am aware that there are different views about sex, the world over. Just so you know, in its typical viewpoint about morality, Lithuania is somewhere between America and Portugal: not so far as France [which is not extremely far in the opposite direction itself].
But the argument is irrelevant. [Or, I might say, it is a form of ad-hominem. It doesn't matter *which country* my viewpoint comes from, or *which burrough of the bronx* my voice comes from.] Your term "reactionary" falls in the same class, too.
(2) I am aware of JFK. I am aware that our current set of problems are rooted in the WWII era, or before. But Clinton is more immediate to people's memories.
(3) If you're going to say that Clinton (w/ Lewinsky) was answerable to his wife and nobody else, why even stop there? What's his wife got to do with it? I, on the other hand, say that he was answerable to *everyone* with whom he had a related contract, and that includes all Americans, voters or not. And God [remembering what a marriage vow is]. But that said, I go back to my original statement -- that the Clinton/Lewinsky issue is a symptom of the general state of America. It doesn't make him right, but *gosh*, the Americans did everything they could to get what they got.
First, I have to say that I am a libertarian who never sided with IP. So that's where I'm coming from. But I'm also a conservative (religious/libertarian conservative, not Military/Industrial conservative). That puts me in the Right.
However, I've got a question for you: you said that there are two kinds of Right: those that believe individual rights are an essential ingredient to morality and those that believe that individual rights are expendable in order to maintain public "morality."
Did you never stop to consider a third possibility? Those who believe that morality is an essential ingredient to individual rights?
Because that's where I am. I really and truly believe that we are losing our rights because we lost our morality -- and Clinton's cigar wasn't just about sex. It was rather a telltale sign of the lost morality that results in our lost rights.
I guess I'm just kindof surprised that that one didn't occur to you, because I'd tend to think that most biblical conservatives would fall into the same classification as I do. I tend to think it would only be fake biblical conservatives (there for the votes), who would say "rights are an essential ingredient to morality."
Anyhow, if you'd like to debate the issue from that point of view, I'd be happy to entertain your thoughts.
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You might think this is a sig,
but it isn't. I type this by
hand every time, of course.
Just a question here... if I remember correctly, patents *only* apply to commercial use for sale. They do not apply to making a thing for yourself and using it. Is this correct?
Because if it is, then an obvious defensive position presents itself: the homestead.
You have enough money to set up your own self-sufficient, cash-free homestead, and stick it in a state that is free from land taxes (such as W Va, or California -- whoops, scratch California: that was a joke).
Then you can invent and use what you want and need, to your heart's content. Of course, a self sufficient homestead doesn't run on the power of just one family, so part of this will be that you allow others to live there if the contribute and fit in. But still, all cash free.
Now, this ends up being unprofitable for those who live and help out, but unprofitable does not equate to a loss, when real losses are occuring elsewhere. In other words, if that's the best deal they can get, then they will come.
My train of thought isn't to advocate anything -- but simply to note that if things are really progressing in this direction, it would seem a form of feudalism with petty kings will be next.
Not too far above your post, a poster (bninjapenguin, if I remember correctly) reported that he had to leave his job because he refused to sign a "we own you" contract.
Now, what exactly is to stop IBM from taking your ideas before you even have them, and thus making them useless to you? (Except common sense, of course). Nor was that an isolated case. This exact same thing happened to my brother. The boss said that it wasn't his preference -- the banks insisted upon it -- and I actually believe that, because the company is in debt, not up to their ears, but definitely up to their belly button.
So essentially what we are seeing at this point, is if there are going to be IP laws, then there will not be, in reality, any IP, because the IP will all be owned by whomever is the most powerful. Typically, the "most powerful entity" is called the government.
Think about that. These IP laws are taking you closer to being owned, as chattel, by your government, than you've ever been before. It's no different than in "communism", where everybody owning everything means nobody owns anything.
As for your question "what can a little guy do...?", Little guys can always fit in niches that big guys never notice. Sooner or later, of course, bug guys do notice if you do well. At that point, the smart big guys buy you out. You continue to look for more niches.
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You think this is a sig, but
it isn't. I type this by
hand each time, of course.