gBay! To place an item for sale, you just send a Gmail to yourself:
subject:gBay - Craftsman Table Saw Model 2075 - $65
The body of the message can contain attached pictures and a detailed description.
Anyone searching for any of those terms will turn up your item. From there, the 2 parties can consummate the deal through gmail and gwallet. Google gets a small cut, and eBay/PayPal go into receivership.
The government should be required to provide open-source software that reflects the tax code. The software would essentially do your taxes for you. If the tax code is so obscure, arbitrary, or convoluted that it can't be expressed properly in software, eliminate it.
Maintaining a 3-year-old Woody has been quite er...hard.
Re:Before the Micrsoft bashers ejaculate all over
on
Korean MSN Site Hacked
·
· Score: 1
They don't do all of their development inhouse either. A bit of their minor product and web development is also outsourced.
Why DON'T they do all their stuff in-house? Why let some two-bit company handle it? - aren't Microsoft supposed to be the world's experts on all things computing? Especially when it comes to Windows software?
But Microsoft is still gets the blame when their software is found to be insecure, no matter who they contracted to maintain it. They won't even identify the other company.
We don't know for sure if there even IS another company involved. It's a lot easier to pass the blame than to say, "Uh...Our best people and our best products let this happen."
It's a blast to ride and saves tons of time and money on the many short trips we all take that are too far to walk...grab a burger, drop off a video, pick up a case of beer, etc. 25 mile range on 5-10 cents worth of juice. You've got a 2-HP motor that can carry 400+ pounds up some pretty steep hills. That's pretty efficient.
It's also a reliable commuter. You can make unbelievable time on this during rush hour. Using back streets, sidewalks, alleys, parking lots, and other cut-throughs, traffic is never a problem. And if you can recharge it at work, your total range can be quite excellent.
IMO, the battery weight can actually be an asset. Putting the batteries low in the design deck, the Ego2 is super-maneuverable, even at 1 or 2 MPH, because of the low C-of-G.
Also, I was loading it into my wife's nice leather-interior SUV the other day, thinking, "I could NEVER do this with a gas vehicle." No leaks, no fumes, no grease, no hot muffler.
For a college campus, inner-city, small town, beach community, resort area, the Ego2 is hard to beat. If there was any sanity in the world, they'd be selling 3 million of these a year.
A teenage kid figured out how to do all this - Bill Gates testified it couldn't be done without breaking Windows. What actually happens is, it FIXES Windows. Just LOOK at the list of stuff you can choose to uninstall.
I'm running Win2k with NO Service Packs, and my system has been stripped of nearly every MSFT component. A fresh install is only about 220 MB and it's extremely fast and secure. I run no anti-virus software, yet I've never had a virus, worm, spyware, adware, and have not seen a BSOD in at least 2 years. The memory footprint is tiny without all those extra MSFT components being loaded, and without all the programs I'd normally need to protect myself from those MSFT components.
Ever since IE4 MSFT has been purposely breaking things...breaking html, breaking Windows, breaking laws, breaking compatibility with its own file formats. They do not fear the government because they have given the government unlimited power....a backdoor into hundreds of millions of computers. Look it up, it's spelled out in the Anti-trust settlement.
WindowsXP, IE7, Longhorn, the Service Packs...it's all sewage. If you read the EULA for the Service Packs you will never install them. Windows Update? I don't have it and don't need it, since 99% of what it offers are patches for the insecure components I already removed.
Win2k is a pretty good OS when you just use it to access the hardware and launch other programs. There's a ton of great Windows software out there, much of it freeware and open source. All we need is a stable, secure Windows OS...and Win2k is that, once you clean up the cesspool of bundled "features".
One or the other will get a foothold and catch on, the other will go away.
For somebody to gain a foothold, there will have to be millions of players and billions of discs purchased. Which means the people who picked wrong will again get the shaft. Anybody wanna buy some 8-tracks, laserdiscs, or Beta tapes?
Can we all take a minute to think what the true implications will be?
For one thing, it creates an immediate "class" system - those WITH National IDs, and those WITHOUT them. Now, anyone who chooses not to get a Real-ID will be classed with terrorists, criminals, and illegal aliens. Refusing a Real-ID will be like giving up your citizenship. You might as well just deport yourself.
Also, think about the RFID aspect. Every building and business will require a scan of your Real-ID. Covering it with tinfoil doesn't accomplish much if you have to uncover it every few minutes to gain access to some "public" place.
How long until the "black boxes" in modern cars are equipped to scan and report the Real-ID information on all passengers?
How long until all kinds of machines and appliances will require an ID scan and will keep a running log of your activities? (think DVD players, TVs, cars, computers)
The scanners will become so cheap and ubiquitous, there will be one installed on the pole outside every home. All movements of all citizens will be logged. Game over. The perfect police state. All political opposition can be instantly crushed.
The only (t)reason I can come up with is for MSFT to get a lot of prominent Linux people into a large room, then show them a presentaion consisting of - SURPRISE! - Windows source code.
Sure, the OSS attendees will all run screaming from the room - still, when the next Linux kernal is released, MSFT can search the code for a few common strings and claim Linux is corrupt with Windows code. And they'd have "proof" that the main developers had viewed Windows code.
Copyright holders say they won't release content into the wilds unless it is protected with DRM.
CALL THEIR BLUFF!
If we never buy DRM'ed content then they'll never be able to sell us DRM'ed content. The only choice they'll have is to play nice, or fold their tents and go away.
I'm using a pure electric vehicle for 90% of my travel. It's a $1000 electric scooter with a 25 mile range and a 25 MPH top speed.
www.egovehicles.com
Living in Florida, this thing is usable year-round. I use it for virtually all local trips. It takes only 5 cents worth of juice to recharge, and gets about 700 miles "per gallon" (700 miles per $2 worth of energy).
If there was any sanity in the world, they would sell 10 million of these a year, and the technology would improve rapidly. If a tiny New Hampshire company can make a practical electric vehicle, imagine what Honda or Toyota could do with this form factor.
There's a useful amount of info and discussion forums on all types of electric vehicles at:
visforvoltage.com
When will they get around to indexing blogspot?
on
Google Index Doubles
·
· Score: 1
Looks like Google doesn't even index their own blog hosting site. The title of my blogspot blog is nowhere to be found in a Google search, and that blog is over 6 months old.
These elections have really underlined the vast amount of dirty tricks that occur, and how easy it is to beat the system.
There needs to be a simple system for registering, casting ballots, and counting the results. Using encryption and the internet, it should be fairly easy.
My idea is to have all the serious scrutiny (proof of identidy and residence) done during registration, then give each registered voter a USB device with an embedded encryption key tied to you and you alone. On election day, stick the key in any internet connected computer, anywhere in the world, and cast your vote. The votes are tabulated immediately.
Or maybe you'd have to go to a polling place and provide a thumbprint, then you'd use your USB device to activate the voting machine and authenticate your vote. There needs to be some authentication on election day, or anyone who owned your USB key would own your vote.
"I don't want to yank my player out of the dash when I want to add songs."
I'm envisioning something like an indash deck with no hard drive, but maybe 4 USB 2.0 slots - use it like a 4-disc changer for flash drives! Have simple logic like when you remove a drive it automatically plays from the next drive. Adding features like the ability to read text files aloud would be trivial.
25 cents a track is reasonable, but here's what I'd like for my 25 cents:
Lossless format. I want full quality so I can play it on my main stereo without it sounding murky or flat. mp3 is a great format, but a good playback system reveals its limitations. FLAC should be the standard for paid downloads; if you want an mp3 or ogg, you can transcode the flac at whatever bitrate you wish - but anything less than full quality is too much of a compromise.
Meta-data. I want a full compliment of accompanying information embedded in the file - all the standard tags, plus lyrics, album art, recording and mastering details, and links to web resources like an Amazon and IMDB. Hey, maybe even a PayPal link in case I want to tip the artist directly.
A license. When we buy music we're actually paying for the right to listen to it. I want a lifetime license to listen to the song, including the right to obtain a replacement copy without paying any additional fees.
Give me these things at a reasonable price, and I'll buy stuff all the time. I've spent thousands on CDs in my life, and would spend thousands more filling in my collection with lossless downloads if they were available.
"like combining a watch list with nationality comparisons, face recognition, and instant background checks, for starters."
This is the problem. You're ready to give up all your freedom and privacy just to hop a plane. The system is so ripe for abuse it's not funny - you see how easily political opponents can be harassed.
The most distressing thing is, the system actually teaches terrorists how to beat it. It allows them to study who gets flagged and who gets passed.
Computers and the Internet have made scarcity of certain things needless. There's no reason why anyone in the world couldn't have easy access to any text, song, film, or image. The technology is there, it's affordable, and the only thing holding it back is a last-century power grab that attempted to eliminate the public domain so a few dozen fat cats could forever squeeze us whenever we watched, read, or listened.
If some future technology turns garbage into weatherproof, self-sufficient homes, would society allow current home-builders to make such technology illegal, just so they could continue to build homes the inefficient, expensive way? Or should we safely house the world and move on to solving the next problem?
I can just hear the photographer...could you guys move over that way for this next shot? Yes, over beyond my assistant, away from the CDR deck, that's right, now look over that way...hold it...hold it....*FLASH* - got it!
There is/was a Windows mp3 player called Apollo37, which featured "Apollo Advanced Playlists". In these playlists you don't need to define the entry explicitly, but instead you set conditions for the track and the player picks the respective track randomly according to the conditions.
Suppose you are a fan of female artists, especially Joan Osborne, but you hate long songs. Your playlist could be something like this:
You can specify YEAR, GENRE, DURATION, FILESIZE, etc. It's a way to use randomness while maintaining some control. IMO, this is the next level of shuffle technology.
Slashdot Mirror
www.slimdevices.com
The Squeezebox is an excellent low-cost solution, especially if you already have amps and speakers, music ripped on a server, and a home network.
gBay! To place an item for sale, you just send a Gmail to yourself:
subject:gBay - Craftsman Table Saw Model 2075 - $65
The body of the message can contain attached pictures and a detailed description.
Anyone searching for any of those terms will turn up your item. From there, the 2 parties can consummate the deal through gmail and gwallet. Google gets a small cut, and eBay/PayPal go into receivership.
The government should be required to provide open-source software that reflects the tax code. The software would essentially do your taxes for you. If the tax code is so obscure, arbitrary, or convoluted that it can't be expressed properly in software, eliminate it.
Maintaining a 3-year-old Woody has been quite er...hard.
Why DON'T they do all their stuff in-house? Why let some two-bit company handle it? - aren't Microsoft supposed to be the world's experts on all things computing? Especially when it comes to Windows software?
But Microsoft is still gets the blame when their software is found to be insecure, no matter who they contracted to maintain it. They won't even identify the other company.
We don't know for sure if there even IS another company involved. It's a lot easier to pass the blame than to say, "Uh...Our best people and our best products let this happen."
http://www.vectrixusa.com/index2.html
250 parts vs 2500 for a comparable gas vehicle.
I own a $1200 electric vehicle that is possibly the first practical electric transportation:
http://www.egovehicles.com/
It's a blast to ride and saves tons of time and money on the many short trips we all take that are too far to walk...grab a burger, drop off a video, pick up a case of beer, etc. 25 mile range on 5-10 cents worth of juice. You've got a 2-HP motor that can carry 400+ pounds up some pretty steep hills. That's pretty efficient.
It's also a reliable commuter. You can make unbelievable time on this during rush hour. Using back streets, sidewalks, alleys, parking lots, and other cut-throughs, traffic is never a problem. And if you can recharge it at work, your total range can be quite excellent.
IMO, the battery weight can actually be an asset. Putting the batteries low in the design deck, the Ego2 is super-maneuverable, even at 1 or 2 MPH, because of the low C-of-G.
Also, I was loading it into my wife's nice leather-interior SUV the other day, thinking, "I could NEVER do this with a gas vehicle." No leaks, no fumes, no grease, no hot muffler.
For a college campus, inner-city, small town, beach community, resort area, the Ego2 is hard to beat. If there was any sanity in the world, they'd be selling 3 million of these a year.
IE can be completely removed from Win2k and XP. So can WMP, Scripting Host, Outlook Express, Windows Address Book, and all the other nasties:
http://www.litepc.com/xplite.html
A teenage kid figured out how to do all this - Bill Gates testified it couldn't be done without breaking Windows. What actually happens is, it FIXES Windows. Just LOOK at the list of stuff you can choose to uninstall.
I'm running Win2k with NO Service Packs, and my system has been stripped of nearly every MSFT component. A fresh install is only about 220 MB and it's extremely fast and secure. I run no anti-virus software, yet I've never had a virus, worm, spyware, adware, and have not seen a BSOD in at least 2 years. The memory footprint is tiny without all those extra MSFT components being loaded, and without all the programs I'd normally need to protect myself from those MSFT components.
Ever since IE4 MSFT has been purposely breaking things...breaking html, breaking Windows, breaking laws, breaking compatibility with its own file formats. They do not fear the government because they have given the government unlimited power....a backdoor into hundreds of millions of computers. Look it up, it's spelled out in the Anti-trust settlement.
WindowsXP, IE7, Longhorn, the Service Packs...it's all sewage. If you read the EULA for the Service Packs you will never install them. Windows Update? I don't have it and don't need it, since 99% of what it offers are patches for the insecure components I already removed.
Win2k is a pretty good OS when you just use it to access the hardware and launch other programs. There's a ton of great Windows software out there, much of it freeware and open source. All we need is a stable, secure Windows OS...and Win2k is that, once you clean up the cesspool of bundled "features".
For somebody to gain a foothold, there will have to be millions of players and billions of discs purchased. Which means the people who picked wrong will again get the shaft. Anybody wanna buy some 8-tracks, laserdiscs, or Beta tapes?
Can we all take a minute to think what the true implications will be?
For one thing, it creates an immediate "class" system - those WITH National IDs, and those WITHOUT them. Now, anyone who chooses not to get a Real-ID will be classed with terrorists, criminals, and illegal aliens. Refusing a Real-ID will be like giving up your citizenship. You might as well just deport yourself.
Also, think about the RFID aspect. Every building and business will require a scan of your Real-ID. Covering it with tinfoil doesn't accomplish much if you have to uncover it every few minutes to gain access to some "public" place.
How long until the "black boxes" in modern cars are equipped to scan and report the Real-ID information on all passengers?
How long until all kinds of machines and appliances will require an ID scan and will keep a running log of your activities? (think DVD players, TVs, cars, computers)
The scanners will become so cheap and ubiquitous, there will be one installed on the pole outside every home. All movements of all citizens will be logged. Game over. The perfect police state. All political opposition can be instantly crushed.
The only (t)reason I can come up with is for MSFT to get a lot of prominent Linux people into a large room, then show them a presentaion consisting of - SURPRISE! - Windows source code.
Sure, the OSS attendees will all run screaming from the room - still, when the next Linux kernal is released, MSFT can search the code for a few common strings and claim Linux is corrupt with Windows code. And they'd have "proof" that the main developers had viewed Windows code.
Copyright holders say they won't release content into the wilds unless it is protected with DRM.
CALL THEIR BLUFF!
If we never buy DRM'ed content then they'll never be able to sell us DRM'ed content. The only choice they'll have is to play nice, or fold their tents and go away.
The list of 325 movies will be the ones taking up the most space in MGM's warehouse. We've seen this drill before, from the RIAA, and from Microsoft.
I'm using a pure electric vehicle for 90% of my travel. It's a $1000 electric scooter with a 25 mile range and a 25 MPH top speed.
www.egovehicles.com
Living in Florida, this thing is usable year-round. I use it for virtually all local trips. It takes only 5 cents worth of juice to recharge, and gets about 700 miles "per gallon" (700 miles per $2 worth of energy).
If there was any sanity in the world, they would sell 10 million of these a year, and the technology would improve rapidly. If a tiny New Hampshire company can make a practical electric vehicle, imagine what Honda or Toyota could do with this form factor.
There's a useful amount of info and discussion forums on all types of electric vehicles at:
visforvoltage.com
Looks like Google doesn't even index their own blog hosting site. The title of my blogspot blog is nowhere to be found in a Google search, and that blog is over 6 months old.
These elections have really underlined the vast amount of dirty tricks that occur, and how easy it is to beat the system.
There needs to be a simple system for registering, casting ballots, and counting the results. Using encryption and the internet, it should be fairly easy.
My idea is to have all the serious scrutiny (proof of identidy and residence) done during registration, then give each registered voter a USB device with an embedded encryption key tied to you and you alone. On election day, stick the key in any internet connected computer, anywhere in the world, and cast your vote. The votes are tabulated immediately.
Or maybe you'd have to go to a polling place and provide a thumbprint, then you'd use your USB device to activate the voting machine and authenticate your vote. There needs to be some authentication on election day, or anyone who owned your USB key would own your vote.
Churchill said it best:
"One who is 20 and not a liberal has no heart; one who is 40 and not a conservative has no brain."
"I don't want to yank my player out of the dash when I want to add songs."
I'm envisioning something like an indash deck with no hard drive, but maybe 4 USB 2.0 slots - use it like a 4-disc changer for flash drives! Have simple logic like when you remove a drive it automatically plays from the next drive. Adding features like the ability to read text files aloud would be trivial.
25 cents a track is reasonable, but here's what I'd like for my 25 cents:
Lossless format. I want full quality so I can play it on my main stereo without it sounding murky or flat. mp3 is a great format, but a good playback system reveals its limitations. FLAC should be the standard for paid downloads; if you want an mp3 or ogg, you can transcode the flac at whatever bitrate you wish - but anything less than full quality is too much of a compromise.
Meta-data. I want a full compliment of accompanying information embedded in the file - all the standard tags, plus lyrics, album art, recording and mastering details, and links to web resources like an Amazon and IMDB. Hey, maybe even a PayPal link in case I want to tip the artist directly.
A license. When we buy music we're actually paying for the right to listen to it. I want a lifetime license to listen to the song, including the right to obtain a replacement copy without paying any additional fees.
Give me these things at a reasonable price, and I'll buy stuff all the time. I've spent thousands on CDs in my life, and would spend thousands more filling in my collection with lossless downloads if they were available.
Exactly. Plus, when you get right down to it, it doesn't really matter who you are, what matters is what you bring on the plane.
"like combining a watch list with nationality comparisons, face recognition, and instant background checks, for starters."
This is the problem. You're ready to give up all your freedom and privacy just to hop a plane. The system is so ripe for abuse it's not funny - you see how easily political opponents can be harassed.
The most distressing thing is, the system actually teaches terrorists how to beat it. It allows them to study who gets flagged and who gets passed.
Another arrow shot in the big battle of our age.
Computers and the Internet have made scarcity of certain things needless. There's no reason why anyone in the world couldn't have easy access to any text, song, film, or image. The technology is there, it's affordable, and the only thing holding it back is a last-century power grab that attempted to eliminate the public domain so a few dozen fat cats could forever squeeze us whenever we watched, read, or listened.
If some future technology turns garbage into weatherproof, self-sufficient homes, would society allow current home-builders to make such technology illegal, just so they could continue to build homes the inefficient, expensive way? Or should we safely house the world and move on to solving the next problem?
I can just hear the photographer...could you guys move over that way for this next shot? Yes, over beyond my assistant, away from the CDR deck, that's right, now look over that way...hold it...hold it....*FLASH* - got it!
Yep, totally stupid product.
I guess we know the content people at Sony won out over the hardware design team.
Do they have any idea how bad mp3 will sound after it's been converted to another lossless format?
This thing's dead in the water, with Sony not far behind.
There is/was a Windows mp3 player called Apollo37, which featured "Apollo Advanced Playlists". In these playlists you don't need to define the entry explicitly, but instead you set conditions for the track and the player picks the respective track randomly according to the conditions.
Suppose you are a fan of female artists, especially Joan Osborne, but you hate long songs. Your playlist could be something like this:
1. (DURATION 300) & (LEADARTIST ~ "Joan Osborne")
2. (DURATION 300) & ((LEADARTIST ~ "Alanis Morissette") | (LEADARTIST ~ "Des'ree") | (LEADARTIST ~ "Patricia Kaas"))
You can specify YEAR, GENRE, DURATION, FILESIZE, etc. It's a way to use randomness while maintaining some control. IMO, this is the next level of shuffle technology.
You're kidding, right? Master and Commander is a series of 20 books. Get ready for a new M&C film every 2 or 3 years for the rest of your life...