Here's where this really leads. If more sites start doing this, you will see HTTP_REFERRER disappear in a heartbeat. Why should I be generous enough to tell you where I've been, only to be denied access? I can just as easily make my browser tell you I came from somewhere on your site.
OK, the budget is only 60% what it was duing the space race. What disappoints me is that by your figures the cost of launching people into orbit around the Earth has only decreased by 40% since the 60's. And even more, that we're still just launching people into orbit around the Earth.
From what I can tell most of NASA's interesting work (like the mars missions) is done with only a fraction of its *current* budget. Most is poured into the pointless ISS and the Shuttle whose main purpose is now to service the ISS. They can forget about a bigger budget so long as they squander what they get now.
In this case they've addresssed the issue by combining a large (for a "wristwatch") form factor, with nonexistant technologies: working voice recognition and a screen with the resolution of paper (in fact the "screen" appears to be a cutout of an AtoZ map).
If and when speech recognition and speech production do work, I don't see why you couldn't have a pda the size of a normal wristwatch. After all you can interface with a real, human assistant effectively using only speech.
Am I off-base here? Has Simonyi cracked this problem with something entirely new?
No, of course he hasn't. This is just a whinging session. Some people have some fantasies and every once in a while they like to complain about how reality doesn't live up to their fantasies. Like when people say, "AI is a failure" (because it hasn't lived up to the baseless expectations we once had).
No, I had lost my Comcast password (needed to retrieve email), and the support person reset my Comcast password so I could choose another one. The only thing happening on my computer was running the chat Java applet to talk to the support person. To run the applet I first had to make Java and Flash work, which is on my own computer and unrelated to Comcast tech support. I mentioned it because it shows that chat support can have technical issues.
Comcast does this. (In fact I can't even find their phone number on their support website).
The Comcast system requires BOTH flash and Java. For me it took quite a bit of work to get that going. (I had disabled Flash because it often uses up 100% cpu under Mozilla, and java wouldn't work because my old Mozilla looked under/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins for java and my new one looked under/opt/mozilla/plugins).
Once working, the online support person was able to solve my problem easily, then again all I needed was to reset my password. It's almost like chatting with a bot, because 95%+ of what the tech "says" is obviously hotkeys assigned to common phrases.
Although I'm a good typist, many people aren't so that could slow things down. Meanwhile the tech is just firing off a prescripted phrase every now and then, which hardly takes any time at all. So I wonder if the techs must try to juggle a several calls all at one time! That would explain why Comcast seems so intent on this. I suppose it's also a way around accents, eliminating one disadvantage of offshoring.
The problem is that you have to decide what it means to be "adult content".
OK, so make it optional, but with the stipulation that a page with a.sex url cannot also have a non.sex url. My guess is that most of the sex sites *want* to be readily identifiable. Not bulletproof but I bet it would do most of the job. Those of us who'd prefer to avoid porn popups could tell our browsers not follow.sex links and so forth.
I'm no mathematician, but I've often wondered what math/physics today would be like if physicists refused to use concepts like infinity and even time in equations. After all, AFAIK, we haven't proven either of them exists and there is very little science to suggest that they do. You should be able to use physical concepts like time and infinity in equations until you at least have a solid scientific basis for positing their existence.
IMHO Your whole premise is wrong. Lack of understanding something is a terribly poor argument against the existence of the thing. Science is simply an attempt to interrelate various observations as elegantly as possible. And ultimately all of math and physics are based on axioms, which are simply "thoughts that seem true." If a theory fails to explain observation, it's the theory that's wrong. Analysis usually comes later to validate intuition and relate it to other facts, not the other way 'round.
The scenes in Armaggedon of rocks tumbling down were silly; in reality you would barely have time to blink before you were dead from the shock wave. FLASH: blink: dead
The shock wave would travel at the speed of sound. That's not so fast. Commercial airliners cruise at about Mach 0.8 and certainly don't cross the sky in the blink of an eye.
Ok, I have a question. How can SuSE or RedHat (not Fedora) require people to pay for all of this software written by the community at large? Don't they have to redistribute as per the GPL? Or does it all hinge on a proprietary closed-source installer or what?
The big problem I see is the "... or other lawful authorization" part. From the EFF's analysis of the partriot act:
# Be careful what you put in that Google search. The government may now spy on web surfing of innocent Americans, including terms entered into search engines, by merely telling a judge anywhere in the U.S. that the spying could lead to information that is "relevant" to an ongoing criminal investigation. The person spied on does not have to be the target of the investigation. This application must be granted and the government is not obligated to report to the court or tell the person spied upon what it has done.
# Nationwide roving wiretaps. FBI and CIA can now go from phone to phone, computer to computer without demonstrating that each is even being used by a suspect or target of an order. The government may now serve a single wiretap, FISA wiretap or pen/trap order on any person or entity nationwide, regardless of whether that person or entity is named in the order. The government need not make any showing to a court that the particular information or communication to be acquired is relevant to a criminal investigation. In the pen/trap or FISA situations, they do not even have to report where they served the order or what information they received. The EFF believes that the opportunities for abuse of these broad new powers are immense. For pen/trap orders, ISPs or others who are not named in the do have authority under the law to request certification from the Attorney General's office that the order applies to them, but they do not have the authority to request such confirmation from a court.
The basic problem here is loss of judicial oversight.
And you if think ** anything ** going across the internet is private you are quite mistaken.
Well, there's no technical measure stopping people from climbing onto my roof and looking down into the bathroom through the skylight, either. But there's a law against it, which covers the police too unless there's legal justification. I like that law.
The real problem with bittorrent is that by enabling efficient transfer of large files, people are transferring larger files. And the service providers simply do not have the capacity for everyone to be sending those large files.
So long as the provider is implementing reasonable QoS so that occasional downloaders get instant bandwidth, I don't see the problem with this at all. People have always found use for more computing power than was readily available.
If Intel were Comcast, 15 years ago Intel would have said, "Quit hogging cycles. We didn't intend the 286 for raytracing, if you want to do raytracing buy a Cray."
So long as there is competition in the market for bandwidth, providers will upgrade their equipment every now and then, after subscriptions have paid off the previous generation of equipment. If there is no competition, you're going to see a stagnant level of service for ever-inflating prices (see Cable TV).
...and reimplement the "rest" of your code differently on each platform. Which is rather like defending a
To say that C++ is cross-platform compatible is rather pedantic when C++ cannot open a network connection, spawn a thread, access a database, or create a window without the help of platform-specific libraries.
It's hard to think of a language that *isn't* cross-platform compatible simply for flow control and data structure manipulation.
The sad thing is that "computer controlled" has become synonymous with "hood welded shut." A computer controlled car should be MORE tweakable!
Make me a computer controlled car with an onboard webserver and a USB port under the dash that can plug into a laptop. Now I can get all my error codes, remap the fuel injection, whatever. This stuff is already computer controlled, and if a $30 router can have a web administration interface, there's no reason a car couldn't either.
It's unclear whether any of the persons extradited were US citizens.
Here you go, "Improvements in the relationship over the same period have enabled the United States to extradite 82 fugitives, 12 of them our own citizens, to Mexico." So yes it can happen.
I don't see your point. Anybody can learn anything if they put in the time and effort to do so. Why do you pay somebody to bring your dinner and wipe the table afterwards at a restauraunt, are you too lazy?
and please mod this person up. (S)He is correct in stating that the AMD model numbers are derived NOT from the Pentium 4, the Athlon classic, the Centrino, Celeron, PIII, Crusoe, 8088, or any other God-forsaken chip, but from the Thunderbird core Athlon CPUs.
That's just as laughable as the notion that the "Athlon XP" name was merely a coincidence, and not directly related to the release of Windows XP. It couldn't be any more transparent. They only make up these silly stories for the benefit of their most loyal (and gullible) fanboys.
It might seem like 7 miles to 250 miles is a big jump, but I'm not so sure. Remember learning to ride a bicycle? You struggle at first, but if you can ride around the block you can ride 5 miles just as easily. Similarly, getting to the moon isn't much harder than getting into orbit.
I hope they make the contest an annual event and keep it just the same. I like the "Grand Challenge" approach is a good one, precisely because it implies some long-term commitment.
Much thanks for the info. I'm disappointed playback doesn't work better, because I've become convinced that playback on a time-sharing CPU will always have jitter. Also I want to use a cool, cheap CPU and hardware encoding AND decoding is important to that. I'm loathe to shell out $200 for card that I can't fully harness.
Too bad Hauppauge won't release some OSS drivers, or at least assign an engineer to help ivtv. Linux users may not be much of the overall computer market, but I bet they're a huge chunk of the "build my own recording box instead of buying a TiVO" market.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's where this really leads. If more sites start doing this, you will see HTTP_REFERRER disappear in a heartbeat. Why should I be generous enough to tell you where I've been, only to be denied access? I can just as easily make my browser tell you I came from somewhere on your site.
Most of us aren't discussing whether they can, we're discussing whether they ought to.
From what I can tell most of NASA's interesting work (like the mars missions) is done with only a fraction of its *current* budget. Most is poured into the pointless ISS and the Shuttle whose main purpose is now to service the ISS. They can forget about a bigger budget so long as they squander what they get now.
If and when speech recognition and speech production do work, I don't see why you couldn't have a pda the size of a normal wristwatch. After all you can interface with a real, human assistant effectively using only speech.
No, I had lost my Comcast password (needed to retrieve email), and the support person reset my Comcast password so I could choose another one. The only thing happening on my computer was running the chat Java applet to talk to the support person. To run the applet I first had to make Java and Flash work, which is on my own computer and unrelated to Comcast tech support. I mentioned it because it shows that chat support can have technical issues.
The Comcast system requires BOTH flash and Java. For me it took quite a bit of work to get that going. (I had disabled Flash because it often uses up 100% cpu under Mozilla, and java wouldn't work because my old Mozilla looked under /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins for java and my new one looked under /opt/mozilla/plugins).
Once working, the online support person was able to solve my problem easily, then again all I needed was to reset my password. It's almost like chatting with a bot, because 95%+ of what the tech "says" is obviously hotkeys assigned to common phrases.
Although I'm a good typist, many people aren't so that could slow things down. Meanwhile the tech is just firing off a prescripted phrase every now and then, which hardly takes any time at all. So I wonder if the techs must try to juggle a several calls all at one time! That would explain why Comcast seems so intent on this. I suppose it's also a way around accents, eliminating one disadvantage of offshoring.
There are lessons to learn from the iPod, but I don't think "undercut the market" is one of them.
Would you rather such an important mission turned out like the 60's race to the Moon, or like the POS International Space Station?
Ok, I have a question. How can SuSE or RedHat (not Fedora) require people to pay for all of this software written by the community at large? Don't they have to redistribute as per the GPL? Or does it all hinge on a proprietary closed-source installer or what?
Not with an AK47.
If Intel were Comcast, 15 years ago Intel would have said, "Quit hogging cycles. We didn't intend the 286 for raytracing, if you want to do raytracing buy a Cray."
So long as there is competition in the market for bandwidth, providers will upgrade their equipment every now and then, after subscriptions have paid off the previous generation of equipment. If there is no competition, you're going to see a stagnant level of service for ever-inflating prices (see Cable TV).
I liked it better in the old days.
To say that C++ is cross-platform compatible is rather pedantic when C++ cannot open a network connection, spawn a thread, access a database, or create a window without the help of platform-specific libraries.
It's hard to think of a language that *isn't* cross-platform compatible simply for flow control and data structure manipulation.
Make me a computer controlled car with an onboard webserver and a USB port under the dash that can plug into a laptop. Now I can get all my error codes, remap the fuel injection, whatever. This stuff is already computer controlled, and if a $30 router can have a web administration interface, there's no reason a car couldn't either.
I don't see your point. Anybody can learn anything if they put in the time and effort to do so. Why do you pay somebody to bring your dinner and wipe the table afterwards at a restauraunt, are you too lazy?
Extracted from the US to:
Ireland
Hong Kong
Yugoslavia
I am by no means an expert on this, these are just some google results.
I hope they make the contest an annual event and keep it just the same. I like the "Grand Challenge" approach is a good one, precisely because it implies some long-term commitment.
Too bad Hauppauge won't release some OSS drivers, or at least assign an engineer to help ivtv. Linux users may not be much of the overall computer market, but I bet they're a huge chunk of the "build my own recording box instead of buying a TiVO" market.