What would happen if somebody bult a small RFID reader attached to a database stored in flash memory to this little sonar ranger for the blind?
It seems to me that most store owners could be easily persuaded to let some government agency or private group put hide a RFID tag near their door that would respond with a simple serial number. That way when the blind guy came up to the door he, or she, could not onl tell that the door was open, but he could tell that the door led to Victoria's Secret. Each individual bus could easily have it's own RFID tag, which could be linked to alive database telling the user where the bus is headed next.
It would cost very little to tag most important objects in the public sphere, like buses, major intersections, and public buildings, and the usefulness of the tag system would be limited only by the data and meta-data associated with each individual tag. Groups of blind users could, I assume, insert commentary into the databases that only they would know, or would care about. Updates would come as fast as the first blind person to find a mistake could get home and update the database. Other users could sync their sonar/RFID readers nightly.
The system could start small, and the basic infrastructure could be cheap. It's usefulness build as fast as it could attract a hard core of interested and dedicated hackers. This general strategy has worked before.
Just speculation, as I don't have the skills to execute the plan. I believe there are some RFID tag grid projects at some universities. Even at only a few dollars a tag for durable tags it might be better to go with point based system rather than a grid.
off the top of my head, fire rescue in thick smoke
From my small experience that particular application wouldn't be especially useful, as you usually can't hear a damn thing between machinery noises, air flow hissing, and the fire noises. It might be useful in industrial firefighting, or working in tunnels & the like, maybe.
A lot of work is being done to miniturize IR cameras and displays, and that has obvious extra benefits over an ultrasound ranging device, regardless of how it's data is displayed.
I'd like to get a hold of one of these things, just for fun. It's an idea with huge potential.
Not that it matters, but I was thinking about an actual movie, something with a plot that matters, character development, and maybe some psycho chainsaw weilding robots, just for fun.
A decent size chunk of a $100M "legitimate" movie will go to pay geeks or geek friendly people. That way our geekish friends can afford to take real women on reel dates, and have a real chance of really getting shot down.
I'm still working the arm-pit of the business, local television, but I'd like to hear what a geek that actually knows something about the big leagues would do.
Just my $.02.
Let's say that you come into posession of a large ( $100,000,000) stack of money and you have a burning desire to make a movie that you know your fellow geeks would enjoy; what would it be?
What is missing in most movies today, if anything? Is it possible to make a geeky movie that has a chance of commercial success? Are we stuck importing Japanese anime?
It is my understanding that the FTC is considering opening a hole in the "Do Not Call" registry to allow pre-recorded messages to be sent to people on the list as long as there is some kind of business relationship.
Please don't do this thing. Ordinary experience shows that companies will stretch the definition of "pre-existing business relationship" to nonsensical, illogical and reality defying lengths. Furthermore, it is obvious that any one actual business or group of interests can use a constantly shifting screen of fronts to keep pestering people. This kind of non-sense is a fact of life, and the Do-Not-Call registry offered a little blessed relief, and it had some minor teeth to help the reluctant get the idea.
Even a seemingly small hole like this will largely destroy one of the best bang-for-the-buck acts your group has done. It has brought a lot of credit to you and this kind of non-sense would take all of that away and then some. This kind of failure would be evidence of something that is worse than the ordinary malaise one expects out of a large government agency, that is actual treachery. One would be quite correct to point out that this is a rabid and emotional response, but in this citizen's view, this is exactly what is happening.
Really, If the offers being pitched in these pre-recorded assaults are that good, they should have the decency to use a human. If it is actually useful, I'll probably already know about it anyway.
There is a strong trend among people of a certain age to use a cellular phone as their primary if not only telephone, and to supplement that with VoIP and IM goodness. I can only assume that your group is well aware of this. Fine tuned control and convenience are two of the big reasons people are going this way. It is, therefore, obvious that anything that hurts this type of experience can only accelerate the trend. If you get any grief from the telephone companies because the proposed policy would hurt their business with tele-marketers you might point out that they will have many fewer targets if they don't behave themselves.
Please keep the Do-Not-Call registry what it is, a Do-Not-Call-Me-With-Your-Idiotic-Plan-To-Take-My-
Money-During-Supper list. Please act in the public interest, squash this political varmint immediately.
Did I miss anything? Who else actually said something other than "go-to-hell, you fascist pricks?" Regulatory agency findings are one of the greatest fountains of law, just like statutory and found law. We can't let this stuff slide!
I know that it's not the same thing, but I have found that naming the hard drives on my G4 & G5 with actual names helps. I name all the drives that are used to store media files after things I like to eat for breakfast. Cheese Omelette, Hashed Browns, Cold Pizza & the like. It is easier to remember where files are if I have a real name, not a number.
A number might seem more rational, but it hasn't worked out that way for me. If our shop keeps growing, we'll have to abandon that kind of naming scheme and go with a really expensive media management solution, or some kind of index, but this works for me.
Non-anonymous moderation by people that have earned mod points in particular subsections sounds good. But with that system it might be best it was not completely left up to the person with a fist full of mod points to select the posts that they moderate.
I think that a known mod system would devolve into clusters of moderatinf furballs, for better or worse. The reason being is that people will quite naturally pay attention to the people that are paying attention to them, rather than the discussion at large. People will mod up people that support them, and because they are also paying inordinate attention to the losers that are dinging them, spend an inordinate amount of the negative mods on said losers. Of course I'm amking a number of cynical assumptions about human nature, but that is my estimate of the situation.
Even if we do make people mod under their own names, we should keep the meta-mod system on an anonymous basis. I think it is important to have that low risk way to curb the worse mod abuses.
However i don't see a huge downside to your idea compartmentalizing karma, and it could be a great leap forward. I have no idea how to code it myself, and it sounds like a lot of work for those that might though, so that probably won't happen.
Because this board is a colossus, it will always attract whole herds of complete morons, as well as part-time morons like myself. Lucky for us, a few gurus still check in and the system does keep the worst of it under control, IMO.
My new G5 dual 2.0Ghz is replacing a three year old dual 500mhz G4. It is so worth it because it saves time in rendering video. My case is completely different than the average home user's case.
For ordinary use a 1.4 G4 is indeed a sweet machine and will do just fine for another 3 years, probably. Even if it wouldn't, having OS X of any flavor is worth it.
I'm a little bit foggy on this one, but didn't one of the old (early 90s) computer rags distribue their freebie utilities using a couple of pages printed with one of those codes? I am not sure.
This page has a number of public domain schemes that might work. Some are fault more fault tolerant than others, but many of them should work.
Serious use of these schemes would require some kind of "Rosetta Stone" document or sculpture to make breaking the codes easy. If the archivist was to act carefully, I bet it would be possible for great-hoevermanygenerations-grandkid to break the bar code scheme, just by knowing a that the pattern is a rational symbology and by having enough repetition, of course. Automating the process would of course take some Perl scripting genius, or whatever they will be using.
I'd be willing to bet my lunch money that at least one person working at SCO is quietly preparing to write a book and/or squeal on network television.
Think about it, how many people do you know are totally and completely, hard core, Zen-like, and totally uninterested in money? Sure, it would be a bit scary and depressing, but I think a number of people would pay for an insider's view of the meltdown.
Futhermore, I wouldn't doubt it if the said author-to-be is carefully stashing documents and other fun evidence away. He or she probably has a bunch of USB flash drives wrapped in plastic baggies and hidden in the toilet tanks.
If the person is smart and waits a couple of years to publish, and can prove every single accusation or unflattering remark, they should be golden. They will have to be a servile dog for a while, and they will be able to tell nobody, but it could work.
The prospect of a big hunk o'change could brighten the mood. Not that the person would be trusted ever again.
I'm seriously out of my depth in this discussion, but what would an asynchronous chipset and processor do for those overclocking lunatics that like to play with liquid nitrogen? It is my understanding that some of the more extreme efforts are actually running the clocks so fast that signals can't propagate across the chip in time and that the synchronicity gets munged.
If these "handshaking" asynchronous chips take off, each part of the chip could be cranked way up, and just wait for the slowpoke, right?
Ubergrendle and those of like sentiment are probably right, and they are almost certainly the mature, sensible people around here. I have a little bit of a different view.
First off, I doubt "cooler heads" had much to do with Nintendo's apology. Sensible process and competence seem to be a much more likely explaination. The person that wrote the apology may have felt bad about the issue, but I don't know and don't care all that much. They were rightly exercising the powers of their office. That's it. They weren't being neighborly. Graciousness has nothing to do with it.
We all have to give those around us some slack, but a giant corporation is so much unlike my neighbors that I can't quite stretch far enough to include them. Therefore they don't get the same courtesies.
Second, the situation was not rectified. Sure they backed off and offered an apology and a freebie. That just doesn't cover the offense. They threatened to bring down an awfully large hammer on the suicidegirls group. It could have cost them serious amounts of time and grief, and would almost certainly have wiped the suicidegirls website out. That's the core offense, and they haven't acknowledged that in a real way and haven't even come close to making up for it.
Raising a hand against some one is a serious offense, even if no actual damage occurs. I know that criminal and civil issues are handled differently, but I don't see that the analogy is completely irrelevant.
Another slashdot poster was commenting on an ex-hacker/script kiddie type that was trying to get a job, and said that if we totally shun and persecute these people, they will have no incentive to reform and come clean. They will have no friends to draw them to the light side. Somehow we have to not completely ignore and alienate companies that pull these stunts, or they will have no reason to try to be better. I'm not quite sure how this problem should be balanced.
Maybe it's just me, but a cheap game system that you get at cost anyway isn't fair compensation for being threatened with bankruptcy and oblivion. Nintendo, as a company, is still in the moral red here.
But if you can define goals for the rat, you can probably train it to do a lot of things, including a subset of the plane-flying challenge.
Rats are pretty much interested in eating and screwing. Now that's pretty much true of many pilots I know, but they, unlike the rats, can concentrate for hours at a time. These neural nets could be useful for piloting type tasks. A real rat probably won't be very useful. These neural nets won't get the hots for the next next petri dish over. A minor point, really.
Wengert argues that Microsoft is a more attractive option than Linux or other free or open-source operating systems: "
Car companies want their supplier to have skin in the game. Who would Ford go to for support and help if they adopted Linux?"
Red Hat, Novell, and other commercial internet distros don't?
I'm still dinking around with Knoppix and a few FOSS type utilities, plus I'm getting used to OpenOffice.org. I'm a newbie and haven't paid a dime to any Linux developer. That being said, even I can see that some people can and do pay for their Linux goodness. The companies that supply them must therefore have "skin" in the game. The fact that some of the development is done free is quite irrelevant.
Maybe this is not important, or everyone is just used to it, but it irritated me. It gives us freeloaders a bad name.
Would it be a good idea to bang out a few more of these telescopes and stick them on the same mountain, once the kinks in the first one are worked out?
Surely they would be much cheaper, but would that be regarded as a good use of astro-bucks by the observing community?
A close relative of mine fell for a phishing attack lately. I was really surprised as this person is meticulous in record keeping and normally careful in business. He is thorough enough that his records will tell him instantly if something is going on, so he'll be able to contain the damage.
These turkeys are criminals and do need to spend time in jail. It would be emotionally satisfying to castrate these bastards, but of course that's just talk. Still, I bet I could come up with a dull spey blade on short notice.
How about freezing all their accounts and tack welding shut most of the doors on the buildings and factories? It sounds like prison to me. The "person" couldn't move and couldn't earn. It sounds like a good idea to me. Of course it would screw over innocent workers, but that would just have to be too bad. I bet that would happen exactly once, in one corporation before workers everywhere would lose their fear of their bosses and keep said bosses honest.
In this case i think that the argument won't be over whether he did something that is fireable or not, but whether other people did similiar things and didn't get fired. The guy is 63, and he was personally insulted. That might give his lawyers enough of a finger hold to make a lawsuit last longer than one day.
Still, I bet he never works at his old job again. Having someone that's that close to the end and that pissed can't be healthy. I bet he gets early retirement on a substantial portion of his expected pension. I'm pretty much guessing here, of course.
Water and other liquids are normally considered incompressable. How else could hydraulic systems function? For all practical purposes at small volumes water can be considered incompressable.
Just to keep it real, you're basically right about water's properties and I have no freakin' idea how to do the math on the page.
Slashdot Mirror
You, Sir, are my new god, or at least a major player in the pantheon. Pain for them, profit for you, I can't think of a better combination.
how did it work out?
What would happen if somebody bult a small RFID reader attached to a database stored in flash memory to this little sonar ranger for the blind?
It seems to me that most store owners could be easily persuaded to let some government agency or private group put hide a RFID tag near their door that would respond with a simple serial number. That way when the blind guy came up to the door he, or she, could not onl tell that the door was open, but he could tell that the door led to Victoria's Secret. Each individual bus could easily have it's own RFID tag, which could be linked to alive database telling the user where the bus is headed next.
It would cost very little to tag most important objects in the public sphere, like buses, major intersections, and public buildings, and the usefulness of the tag system would be limited only by the data and meta-data associated with each individual tag. Groups of blind users could, I assume, insert commentary into the databases that only they would know, or would care about. Updates would come as fast as the first blind person to find a mistake could get home and update the database. Other users could sync their sonar/RFID readers nightly.
The system could start small, and the basic infrastructure could be cheap. It's usefulness build as fast as it could attract a hard core of interested and dedicated hackers. This general strategy has worked before.
Just speculation, as I don't have the skills to execute the plan. I believe there are some RFID tag grid projects at some universities. Even at only a few dollars a tag for durable tags it might be better to go with point based system rather than a grid.
From my small experience that particular application wouldn't be especially useful, as you usually can't hear a damn thing between machinery noises, air flow hissing, and the fire noises. It might be useful in industrial firefighting, or working in tunnels & the like, maybe.
A lot of work is being done to miniturize IR cameras and displays, and that has obvious extra benefits over an ultrasound ranging device, regardless of how it's data is displayed.
I'd like to get a hold of one of these things, just for fun. It's an idea with huge potential.
Not that it matters, but I was thinking about an actual movie, something with a plot that matters, character development, and maybe some psycho chainsaw weilding robots, just for fun. A decent size chunk of a $100M "legitimate" movie will go to pay geeks or geek friendly people. That way our geekish friends can afford to take real women on reel dates, and have a real chance of really getting shot down. I'm still working the arm-pit of the business, local television, but I'd like to hear what a geek that actually knows something about the big leagues would do. Just my $.02.
Let's say that you come into posession of a large ( $100,000,000) stack of money and you have a burning desire to make a movie that you know your fellow geeks would enjoy; what would it be?
What is missing in most movies today, if anything? Is it possible to make a geeky movie that has a chance of commercial success? Are we stuck importing Japanese anime?
Hello,
It is my understanding that the FTC is considering opening a hole in the "Do Not Call" registry to allow pre-recorded messages to be sent to people on the list as long as there is some kind of business relationship.
Please don't do this thing. Ordinary experience shows that companies will stretch the definition of "pre-existing business relationship" to nonsensical, illogical and reality defying lengths. Furthermore, it is obvious that any one actual business or group of interests can use a constantly shifting screen of fronts to keep pestering people. This kind of non-sense is a fact of life, and the Do-Not-Call registry offered a little blessed relief, and it had some minor teeth to help the reluctant get the idea.
Even a seemingly small hole like this will largely destroy one of the best bang-for-the-buck acts your group has done. It has brought a lot of credit to you and this kind of non-sense would take all of that away and then some. This kind of failure would be evidence of something that is worse than the ordinary malaise one expects out of a large government agency, that is actual treachery. One would be quite correct to point out that this is a rabid and emotional response, but in this citizen's view, this is exactly what is happening.
Really, If the offers being pitched in these pre-recorded assaults are that good, they should have the decency to use a human. If it is actually useful, I'll probably already know about it anyway.
There is a strong trend among people of a certain age to use a cellular phone as their primary if not only telephone, and to supplement that with VoIP and IM goodness. I can only assume that your group is well aware of this. Fine tuned control and convenience are two of the big reasons people are going this way. It is, therefore, obvious that anything that hurts this type of experience can only accelerate the trend. If you get any grief from the telephone companies because the proposed policy would hurt their business with tele-marketers you might point out that they will have many fewer targets if they don't behave themselves.
Please keep the Do-Not-Call registry what it is, a Do-Not-Call-Me-With-Your-Idiotic-Plan-To-Take-My- Money-During-Supper list. Please act in the public interest, squash this political varmint immediately.
Did I miss anything? Who else actually said something other than "go-to-hell, you fascist pricks?" Regulatory agency findings are one of the greatest fountains of law, just like statutory and found law. We can't let this stuff slide!
I know that it's not the same thing, but I have found that naming the hard drives on my G4 & G5 with actual names helps. I name all the drives that are used to store media files after things I like to eat for breakfast. Cheese Omelette, Hashed Browns, Cold Pizza & the like. It is easier to remember where files are if I have a real name, not a number.
A number might seem more rational, but it hasn't worked out that way for me. If our shop keeps growing, we'll have to abandon that kind of naming scheme and go with a really expensive media management solution, or some kind of index, but this works for me.
Yes, it is dorky. No doubt about it.
Non-anonymous moderation by people that have earned mod points in particular subsections sounds good. But with that system it might be best it was not completely left up to the person with a fist full of mod points to select the posts that they moderate.
I think that a known mod system would devolve into clusters of moderatinf furballs, for better or worse. The reason being is that people will quite naturally pay attention to the people that are paying attention to them, rather than the discussion at large. People will mod up people that support them, and because they are also paying inordinate attention to the losers that are dinging them, spend an inordinate amount of the negative mods on said losers. Of course I'm amking a number of cynical assumptions about human nature, but that is my estimate of the situation.
Even if we do make people mod under their own names, we should keep the meta-mod system on an anonymous basis. I think it is important to have that low risk way to curb the worse mod abuses.
However i don't see a huge downside to your idea compartmentalizing karma, and it could be a great leap forward. I have no idea how to code it myself, and it sounds like a lot of work for those that might though, so that probably won't happen.
Because this board is a colossus, it will always attract whole herds of complete morons, as well as part-time morons like myself. Lucky for us, a few gurus still check in and the system does keep the worst of it under control, IMO.
My new G5 dual 2.0Ghz is replacing a three year old dual 500mhz G4. It is so worth it because it saves time in rendering video. My case is completely different than the average home user's case.
For ordinary use a 1.4 G4 is indeed a sweet machine and will do just fine for another 3 years, probably. Even if it wouldn't, having OS X of any flavor is worth it.
I'm a little bit foggy on this one, but didn't one of the old (early 90s) computer rags distribue their freebie utilities using a couple of pages printed with one of those codes? I am not sure.
This page has a number of public domain schemes that might work. Some are fault more fault tolerant than others, but many of them should work.
Serious use of these schemes would require some kind of "Rosetta Stone" document or sculpture to make breaking the codes easy. If the archivist was to act carefully, I bet it would be possible for great-hoevermanygenerations-grandkid to break the bar code scheme, just by knowing a that the pattern is a rational symbology and by having enough repetition, of course. Automating the process would of course take some Perl scripting genius, or whatever they will be using.
Quality paper can last a really really long time.
I'd be willing to bet my lunch money that at least one person working at SCO is quietly preparing to write a book and/or squeal on network television. Think about it, how many people do you know are totally and completely, hard core, Zen-like, and totally uninterested in money? Sure, it would be a bit scary and depressing, but I think a number of people would pay for an insider's view of the meltdown. Futhermore, I wouldn't doubt it if the said author-to-be is carefully stashing documents and other fun evidence away. He or she probably has a bunch of USB flash drives wrapped in plastic baggies and hidden in the toilet tanks. If the person is smart and waits a couple of years to publish, and can prove every single accusation or unflattering remark, they should be golden. They will have to be a servile dog for a while, and they will be able to tell nobody, but it could work. The prospect of a big hunk o'change could brighten the mood. Not that the person would be trusted ever again.
I'm seriously out of my depth in this discussion, but what would an asynchronous chipset and processor do for those overclocking lunatics that like to play with liquid nitrogen? It is my understanding that some of the more extreme efforts are actually running the clocks so fast that signals can't propagate across the chip in time and that the synchronicity gets munged.
If these "handshaking" asynchronous chips take off, each part of the chip could be cranked way up, and just wait for the slowpoke, right?
Ubergrendle and those of like sentiment are probably right, and they are almost certainly the mature, sensible people around here. I have a little bit of a different view.
First off, I doubt "cooler heads" had much to do with Nintendo's apology. Sensible process and competence seem to be a much more likely explaination. The person that wrote the apology may have felt bad about the issue, but I don't know and don't care all that much. They were rightly exercising the powers of their office. That's it. They weren't being neighborly. Graciousness has nothing to do with it.
We all have to give those around us some slack, but a giant corporation is so much unlike my neighbors that I can't quite stretch far enough to include them. Therefore they don't get the same courtesies.
Second, the situation was not rectified. Sure they backed off and offered an apology and a freebie. That just doesn't cover the offense. They threatened to bring down an awfully large hammer on the suicidegirls group. It could have cost them serious amounts of time and grief, and would almost certainly have wiped the suicidegirls website out. That's the core offense, and they haven't acknowledged that in a real way and haven't even come close to making up for it.
Raising a hand against some one is a serious offense, even if no actual damage occurs. I know that criminal and civil issues are handled differently, but I don't see that the analogy is completely irrelevant.
Another slashdot poster was commenting on an ex-hacker/script kiddie type that was trying to get a job, and said that if we totally shun and persecute these people, they will have no incentive to reform and come clean. They will have no friends to draw them to the light side. Somehow we have to not completely ignore and alienate companies that pull these stunts, or they will have no reason to try to be better. I'm not quite sure how this problem should be balanced.
Maybe it's just me, but a cheap game system that you get at cost anyway isn't fair compensation for being threatened with bankruptcy and oblivion. Nintendo, as a company, is still in the moral red here.
We all know how geeks like progress and the latest thing, but it might be best not to name your next cat "6e."
Pronounce it slow, when your tired. You thought you have class issues...
Rats are pretty much interested in eating and screwing. Now that's pretty much true of many pilots I know, but they, unlike the rats, can concentrate for hours at a time. These neural nets could be useful for piloting type tasks. A real rat probably won't be very useful. These neural nets won't get the hots for the next next petri dish over. A minor point, really.
Says the Microsoft person:
Red Hat, Novell, and other commercial internet distros don't?I'm still dinking around with Knoppix and a few FOSS type utilities, plus I'm getting used to OpenOffice.org. I'm a newbie and haven't paid a dime to any Linux developer. That being said, even I can see that some people can and do pay for their Linux goodness. The companies that supply them must therefore have "skin" in the game. The fact that some of the development is done free is quite irrelevant.
Maybe this is not important, or everyone is just used to it, but it irritated me. It gives us freeloaders a bad name.
Would it be a good idea to bang out a few more of these telescopes and stick them on the same mountain, once the kinks in the first one are worked out?
Surely they would be much cheaper, but would that be regarded as a good use of astro-bucks by the observing community?
It does seem that NASA and friends does this kind of thing often. I don't think any other agency of any size, anywhere, could do it better though.
Many of the good points made in the current discussion were already made in the above referenced discussion.
A close relative of mine fell for a phishing attack lately. I was really surprised as this person is meticulous in record keeping and normally careful in business. He is thorough enough that his records will tell him instantly if something is going on, so he'll be able to contain the damage.
These turkeys are criminals and do need to spend time in jail. It would be emotionally satisfying to castrate these bastards, but of course that's just talk. Still, I bet I could come up with a dull spey blade on short notice.
How about freezing all their accounts and tack welding shut most of the doors on the buildings and factories? It sounds like prison to me. The "person" couldn't move and couldn't earn. It sounds like a good idea to me. Of course it would screw over innocent workers, but that would just have to be too bad. I bet that would happen exactly once, in one corporation before workers everywhere would lose their fear of their bosses and keep said bosses honest.
Is this halfway reasonable?
Sure he does, but not his spelling
Now, if we could get him to lay off the funky color schemes in the sub-sections we'd be getting somewhere!
In this case i think that the argument won't be over whether he did something that is fireable or not, but whether other people did similiar things and didn't get fired. The guy is 63, and he was personally insulted. That might give his lawyers enough of a finger hold to make a lawsuit last longer than one day.
Still, I bet he never works at his old job again. Having someone that's that close to the end and that pissed can't be healthy. I bet he gets early retirement on a substantial portion of his expected pension. I'm pretty much guessing here, of course.
The site referenced in my comment above also says
Just to keep it real, you're basically right about water's properties and I have no freakin' idea how to do the math on the page.