SCO's board of directors appears to include two accountants and a graphic artist... truly enlightened leadership for a software company. What creative accounting picture would you like them to paint for you today?
Why ANYONE would obtain software from a company headed by a dufus with the name DARL is beyond me....
Valley Forge coulda used a sensor web
on
NASA's Sensor Web
·
· Score: 1
Freeman Lowell would have wished he'd had a sensor web on board the Valley Forge and that last remaining bio-dome (in the movie "Silent Running", 1972), rather than rely on one remaining little robot to care for it!
Sensor webs could be an environmentalist's dream come true, among many other things.
This is all quite true, and I've been aware and concerned about that for years (never mind the enormous waste of energy and fossil fuel and pollution that creating all that needless light causes). However, they completely missed the growing impact of saturation of one of our other senses: HEARING. Sound pollution is a severe problem now; for instance does anyone know the true impact of a 400W car stereo on a developing fetus? What effect does grossly exaggerated low-frequency sound, often carrying kinetic energy equivalent to a gunshot or worse, have on human physiology or neurochemstry? I know that in my case, it triggers a clear "fight or flight" response.
What the fellow predicts sounds just like the "nanolathing" process as described and animated in the RTS game "Total Annihilation" and its two sequels. Perhaps Mr. Pescovitz has really just been playing too many hours of TA and is reluctant to confess?;-)
The BEST thing about having Linux and other OSS appearing in school classrooms is that it eliminates one avenue for corporations to "economically indoctrinate" our children even before they've had a chance to develop/learn good critical thinking. It's bad enough that Apple, IBM, Intel and other hardware manufacturers will continue to wage this propaganda battle for years to come, but at least there's hope on the software front!
While I enjoyed reading about Ron's creative engineering, it would have been more pragmatic to buy a Koolance Exos water-cooling system, as I did. I have a PC at home that runs 24/7 as a server, which is in a room that has limited cooling, and during the summer temperatures in that room can reach or exceed 100F (38C). I have had my Exos system for about a month now; we've already had several over-38C days, and the CPU temperature of that system has never exceeded 40C.
It took me about an hour and a half to set up, fill, and start my Exos system, which sits on top of the tower case and produces less noise than my 120GB WD hard drive (I hear the drive but not the three Exos fans). I can only guess that Ron spent a fairly large multiple of that amount of time on his project. My (billable) time is worth enough that saving so much of it in exchange for $290 (Exos and three blocks, cooling CPU AND VIDEO AND M/B CHIPSET, with an HDD block waiting for insertion) was a worthwhile trade-off. I *am* a bit jealous of the creative fun he must have had doing it, though.:-)
George Carlin beat this fellow Jeffries to it....
on
Robots Without a Cause
·
· Score: 1
George Carlin copyrighted at least a big chunk of Jeffries' rant, what... almost twenty years ago, with his "Place to keep my stuff" routine. George's take was a heckuva lot funnier, too.:-)
SFX sounds like a good way to expose a new generation to sci-fi. It's a Good Thing when kids are made to think, consider possibilities, and imagine... something they'll get none of by watching Survivor, The Batchelor or Married by America! Most TV and movies these days shrivel young minds instead of expanding them.
Actually, THEY HAVE NOT recanted, entirely. The Privacy Policy that is linked to their registration form is dated August 20, 2002, and contains the most disturbing clauses; however, I found another one, dated March 17, 2003, that STILL contains this clause:
"Not now, but in the future, Mailblocks may permit third parties, such as advertisers, to furnish our members, through the Services and otherwise, with information from time to time. In these cases, your personally identifiable information is not transferred to the advertiser."
We all know what that legal-speak really means, don't we? It still translates to "advertising-supported", doesn't it?
I started to sign up for Mailblocks myself, paused to read the TOS and Privacy Policy, and then aborted the process and sent them a complaint when I saw the provisions about "sponsored" advertising. However, to my surprise I received the following reply:
Before you give up on Mailblocks, please check out our Terms of Service again. See below:
Dear Mailblocks Customer,
Our apologies, we picked up an old version of our TOS when we went live. We will NOT be allowing 3rd parties to send unsolicted email to our userbase. Please check the site for the updated and correct TOS. We apologize for any confusion or inconvenience.
Thank you for using Mailblocks. If we can be of further assistance, please don't hesitate to contact us.
Regards,
The Mailblocks Team
> Gentlemen:
> I've read your Privacy Policy, in detail, as I was preparing to subscribe to your service. However,
> in light of what I learned from reading it, I aborted the process. It's clear that your service
> intends, in large part, to be supported by unsolicited advertising just as Juno, AOL, Yahoo, and
> other such services have been. However, your service provides only POP3 services and no points of
> presence, NNTP, or other services, yet you expect subscribers to PAY for the service AND suffer
> "sponsored" advertising?
> Until you endeavor to make an HONEST living, I won't be helping you do so. I have the skills to
> nearly duplicate the filtering service you provide, and in fact have been considering a private
> challenge-response system in addition to my existing naive Bayesian filtering for more a while.
> What's more, I expect that in due time spammers would use symbol-recognition techniques to defeat
> your challenge-response system and once again flood your subscribers with digital trash.
>
> But, hey, I'm only a single angry and disappointed lost customer, so don't let that be a reason to
> reconsider your Privacy Policy.
>
So, it appears there's hope for this service after all? I just checked their posted Privacy Policy, though, and it hasn't been updated yet; I wonder if the fact that their tech people are saying otherwise in private mail is good enough, or does one have to wait to "see it in writing" at their Web site first?
If researchers really want to understand the mechanism of human face recognition, they should be looking at the cases where it *doesn't* work: autistic people with face blindness.
If an Elevator ever did get built here before we've evolved ourselves a bit more, I'd be holding my breath just waiting for the first kamikaze lunatic to try to crash a plane into the thing and send it hurtling!
Here's a twist on that scenario, though:
For months now I've been receiving RECORDED telemarketer calls again, which I thought were to supposed to be illegal by Federal statute (right?); there's no human involved in the call at all. If you're right that it's the receiver of a call who has control of termination (I can never recall which it is), refusing to hang up would hafta be especially ugly in this case because there's no one listening on their end! It could be quite a long time before their telecom guru figured out what was wrong....
Actually not long at all, because Castel's software is only installed ONCE: on the predictive-dialer computer system that handles all the dialing for an entire telemarketing staff. If each telemarketer has a computer at their desk at all, it's only to log call results into a database or place orders or whatever; they have no control or responsibility these days for actually placing the calls. That's progress for ya.
-- Mark
More than a decade ago, when I was working at a repair shop, I serviced a Toshiba laptop that was infested with a small colony of tiny spiders! The owner was a woman, a freelance journalist, from the Maldive Islands, and the spiders were native to the Maldives. They had stowed away in the nice, warm, comfy laptop's innards and made the trip to California with her. Did any of them escape my big squishing thumb, to naturalize in sunny SoCal? Only time will tell....
I have a raging case of ADD myself, so I don't have to ever worry about overspecializing... I simply can't. I'm a borderline failure in the industry for being an unspecialized jack-of-all-trades, but if I'd been born 200 years ago I'd have been a *god* in whatever village I inhabited.
Slashdot Mirror
SCO's board of directors appears to include two accountants and a graphic artist... truly enlightened leadership for a software company. What creative accounting picture would you like them to paint for you today?
Why ANYONE would obtain software from a company headed by a dufus with the name DARL is beyond me....
Freeman Lowell would have wished he'd had a sensor web on board the Valley Forge and that last remaining bio-dome (in the movie "Silent Running", 1972), rather than rely on one remaining little robot to care for it! Sensor webs could be an environmentalist's dream come true, among many other things.
This is all quite true, and I've been aware and concerned about that for years (never mind the enormous waste of energy and fossil fuel and pollution that creating all that needless light causes). However, they completely missed the growing impact of saturation of one of our other senses: HEARING. Sound pollution is a severe problem now; for instance does anyone know the true impact of a 400W car stereo on a developing fetus? What effect does grossly exaggerated low-frequency sound, often carrying kinetic energy equivalent to a gunshot or worse, have on human physiology or neurochemstry? I know that in my case, it triggers a clear "fight or flight" response.
What the fellow predicts sounds just like the "nanolathing" process as described and animated in the RTS game "Total Annihilation" and its two sequels. Perhaps Mr. Pescovitz has really just been playing too many hours of TA and is reluctant to confess? ;-)
The very first paragraph of their site's index page has an obvious spelling error. Good webmasters must REALLY be hard to find these days?
The BEST thing about having Linux and other OSS appearing in school classrooms is that it eliminates one avenue for corporations to "economically indoctrinate" our children even before they've had a chance to develop/learn good critical thinking. It's bad enough that Apple, IBM, Intel and other hardware manufacturers will continue to wage this propaganda battle for years to come, but at least there's hope on the software front!
While I enjoyed reading about Ron's creative engineering, it would have been more pragmatic to buy a Koolance Exos water-cooling system, as I did. I have a PC at home that runs 24/7 as a server, which is in a room that has limited cooling, and during the summer temperatures in that room can reach or exceed 100F (38C). I have had my Exos system for about a month now; we've already had several over-38C days, and the CPU temperature of that system has never exceeded 40C. It took me about an hour and a half to set up, fill, and start my Exos system, which sits on top of the tower case and produces less noise than my 120GB WD hard drive (I hear the drive but not the three Exos fans). I can only guess that Ron spent a fairly large multiple of that amount of time on his project. My (billable) time is worth enough that saving so much of it in exchange for $290 (Exos and three blocks, cooling CPU AND VIDEO AND M/B CHIPSET, with an HDD block waiting for insertion) was a worthwhile trade-off. I *am* a bit jealous of the creative fun he must have had doing it, though. :-)
George Carlin copyrighted at least a big chunk of Jeffries' rant, what... almost twenty years ago, with his "Place to keep my stuff" routine. George's take was a heckuva lot funnier, too. :-)
... and no sensors on the seatbelts, either. Lojack? Nope. They got nuthin' on me!
SFX sounds like a good way to expose a new generation to sci-fi. It's a Good Thing when kids are made to think, consider possibilities, and imagine... something they'll get none of by watching Survivor, The Batchelor or Married by America! Most TV and movies these days shrivel young minds instead of expanding them.
These are the URLs to them:
https://app1.mailblocks.com/helplet/privacy-polic
http://www.mailblocks.com/helplet/privacy-policy.
I have also saved local copies, FWIW.
I started to sign up for Mailblocks myself, paused to read the TOS and Privacy Policy, and then aborted the process and sent them a complaint when I saw the provisions about "sponsored" advertising. However, to my surprise I received the following reply:
So, it appears there's hope for this service after all? I just checked their posted Privacy Policy, though, and it hasn't been updated yet; I wonder if the fact that their tech people are saying otherwise in private mail is good enough, or does one have to wait to "see it in writing" at their Web site first?If researchers really want to understand the mechanism of human face recognition, they should be looking at the cases where it *doesn't* work: autistic people with face blindness.
If an Elevator ever did get built here before we've evolved ourselves a bit more, I'd be holding my breath just waiting for the first kamikaze lunatic to try to crash a plane into the thing and send it hurtling!
Here's a twist on that scenario, though: For months now I've been receiving RECORDED telemarketer calls again, which I thought were to supposed to be illegal by Federal statute (right?); there's no human involved in the call at all. If you're right that it's the receiver of a call who has control of termination (I can never recall which it is), refusing to hang up would hafta be especially ugly in this case because there's no one listening on their end! It could be quite a long time before their telecom guru figured out what was wrong....
Actually not long at all, because Castel's software is only installed ONCE: on the predictive-dialer computer system that handles all the dialing for an entire telemarketing staff. If each telemarketer has a computer at their desk at all, it's only to log call results into a database or place orders or whatever; they have no control or responsibility these days for actually placing the calls. That's progress for ya. -- Mark
More than a decade ago, when I was working at a repair shop, I serviced a Toshiba laptop that was infested with a small colony of tiny spiders! The owner was a woman, a freelance journalist, from the Maldive Islands, and the spiders were native to the Maldives. They had stowed away in the nice, warm, comfy laptop's innards and made the trip to California with her. Did any of them escape my big squishing thumb, to naturalize in sunny SoCal? Only time will tell....
Mark
I have a raging case of ADD myself, so I don't have to ever worry about overspecializing... I simply can't. I'm a borderline failure in the industry for being an unspecialized jack-of-all-trades, but if I'd been born 200 years ago I'd have been a *god* in whatever village I inhabited.