There is already a great site for this type of smart content. YouTube for Braniacs, if you will. Check out Mediasite.com There are over 13,000 presentations available to peruse through, and even cooler, you can search within these presentations and it will find the words you search both in the OCR text of the supporting materials (powerpoint, doc cam, or whatever) and even within the spoken text! Really cool tech.
I am affiliated with the site, as I work for the manufacturer, Sonic Foundry, of the technology that creates the content that all of this is made from. But it's still way cool, and certainly the search tech is really cool, and it's really available, right now. Sweet.
I'm interested in hearing how you plan on knowing when anyone in your state connects to a webserver in some other part of the country or world, via an encrypted connection, and causes some money to be transferred from a bank in some other state to a bank in some other completely unrelated state, and then downloads some data.
I would say that a vast majority of these purchases are made with Credit cards. Every credit card transaction includes the originating zip code of the purchaser to verify. It's not all that dificult to figure the state from that, and even the municipality if they want to get in on the game. Is it an additional pain initially? Of course, but it's certainly not that dificult if it's a combined thing. I sense a great business opportunity for a bank to come in as middleware to facilitate. As far as enforcement, yeah, the eBay sellers probably won't unless eBay facilitated it, which is very tough, but do you really think Amazon, BestBuy.com (which already taxes), NewEgg, etc, wouldn't implement this? Of course they would if it was law. If an individual state decreed it, maybe they would dodge it for a bit, but if it was nationwide, it would definitely be covered.
Like you state, use tax is already required, but no one reports it. So this is not a "new tax". It's always been there! Just because they want to increase enforcement, doesn't mean they are twisting the law. They are just trying to make it work. As much as I don't like the idea of more taxes, this doesn't seem like such a huge deal. It's not like it will cripple online retailers, just a bit more of a burden, but certainly not unworkable. And I would definitely be creeped out if it was done through tracking at the feds, but they would just put the burden on the retailer to do it, and hopefully put a system in place to make it workable. And something tells me that the government can already easily datamine my Citibank Card if they wanted to.
This is the equivalent of a virtual sit in, and it has been used in the past. Is it a denial of service attack? Yes in some ways, but it's also an act of civil disobedience that in many ways should be protected. Would it be different if people decided to try and take down whitehouse.gov in a concerted effort to show the will of the people? I think it's incredibly important that this sort of act, online, be treated for what it is. Is it criminal trespass? Possibly, but that gets very murky when the "offenders" are students at the school, likely the target audience of the website itself. So then comes intent, but even if the intent was to cause some harm, that does not make it fair to compare to a regular denial of service attack using autonomous methods. Obviously one kid doing it won't cause much of a disruption, but tens or hundreds. That's the same power of a sit in. It shows the will (to sit and refresh - refresh - refresh or sit - sit - sit), the resolve (stay refreshing or sitting for a long period) and numbers (it takes a fair number of people to get either to work).
What was the slashdot response? To continue the same DOS attack. And I think it's incredibly appropriate. Hopefully no script kiddies are automating it. That defeats the purpose. Show the will of the people by showing that this is a valid way to show defiance. We need this sort of free speech, so long as it is not automated, available online as an act of public defiance.
Saying that it's statistically unlikely that the polling would change after 4PM seems a little bit extreme, especially with such a huge turnout.
Let's be really, painfully, stereotypical here (it's statistics, after all)...
Who can vote before 4PM:
1. Stay at home Mom's
2. College kids between classes
3. Old retired people
4. Unemployed
And political leanings:
1. Women, especially mom's, tend to vote heavily democratic.
2. College kids, and the exuberance of youth often leans democratic.
3. Retired peeps often vote for the dems, due to health care topics.
4. Unemployed are unlikely to be happy with the loss of jobs with Bush.
Of course there are others that would vote before 4PM, like those who's offices let them take off, or those on their lunch breaks, or those who vote in the morning, but really it seems like the 1-4 noted above would likely be enough to throw off any sort of polling. Without any basic demographic info in the polls, I think it's hard to judge this polling information as anything special.
I think there is certainly a chance for some sort of descrepincy, and they should certainly be scrutinized, but this 4 PM poll just seems a likely case of cherry picking. Perhaps not, but there needs to be much more data before any idea about what it means.
And, by the way, I am SOOOO not a bush fan. I just think that there is enough funny business that it should be discussed in truth, not in cherry picked hyperbole. That only distracts from the search for truth. Search out all truth, that which supports both sides of the story. That should be everyone's goal in an open democracy.
Actually that's because the role of the theatre showings of movies is no longer to make money. By far, and growing, the most money a film makes is made from DVD sales. The theatre showing role has become that of promotion, and building word of mouth. There is certainly some money still made during that time, but essentially even a moderate "blockbuster" will only make a bit more than cost over it's run, but the word of mouth and buzz built up will pay off imeasurably in the DVD sales market. People will go to movies, but that isn't the sales source that the MPAA is worried about stifling with piracy. It's purely the DVD sales.
Anyway, I must admit that I am much happier with the way the MPAA has run business than that of the RIAA. They embraced the DVD format, sell them at, what I would consider, fair prices, and try to give consumers what they want. Are there still crappy movies? Of course, but they aren't just pushing out crap 24/7 and stifling independent movies. Rather they embrace any indie movies that are deemed worthy by the public. And again, selling at a fair price in a format that consumers overwhelmingly approve of.
The RIAA is struggling for their lives, and pissing off customers in the process. The MPAA, on the other hand, is testing the waters to see what sort of threat there is to movie downloading. Admittedly, this could all change as the MPAA deems the threat, perceived or real, as large enough, but until that time, I think it's a bit too soon to deem them as pure evil...
Though the broadcast flag is a whole other story...
Well, my version had no drinking straws up the nose. That guy did that to make a plaster cast of his head, around which he could form his own helmet. I went the cheap/easy way and got a damn used hockey helmet from play it again sports. Mine is all set up to be "good enough". So if I could make it look 80% as good in 10% the time and energy, then that's all good.
Yep, that's me as the second TRON suit creator...
on
Make Your Own TRON Costume
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I suppose my response for a wish for a tron Light cycle in the Akira bike thread kicked this off. Tron Light Cycle Thread
Woops. But, yeah, I did make a Tron suit for Halloween a couple of years ago. Have worn it for each Halloween since. It turned out great, and I'm sorry to the guy at Tron-Sector that got slashdotted. It's a great site and I recommend it to all once it gets back up and running. Anyway, the full text of my description on how I made it is posted in here somewhere. My name in that is BaumSquad as well. I'm just sorry that you guys can't see the final products!! It's pretty damn cool, if you like TRON. If you guys are nuts to see it, someone with webspace can post an e-mail address or e-mail me at paul(at)thebaumsquad.com and I'll send you the pics from my version. Pretty rad.
Anyway, thanks for enjoying the work! And honestly, if any of you are interested in doing something like this, it's not THAT hard. Just take a weekend or so and about $50 in materials, and have a pretty damn kick ass costume, if I do say so myself.
The light cycle, however, will take a little more time and energy. (And no I haven't made one... YET!)
But they'd have to watch out when the invading countries prepare for the onslaught by blasting some pop music to confuse and diffuse the robot mecha defenders.
(alternate ending quote in Tora! Tora! Tora!)
"I fear all we've done is to awaken a sleeping Minmae attack"
Yeah, that'll be the day.:)
All I need now is a Light Cycle from TRON!
on
Real 'Akira' Motorcycle
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
And this thing and my collection of Kick Azz Moto Bikes would be complete!
I've been watching American Chopper and just dreaming of the day I could have enough cash to order a custom light cycle.
And a little googling, here's a little write up. It looks like some states allow free for alls, where you can vote for any primary on one ballot, others have you choose a single party ballot at the time of polling, and still others require you to be a registered voter under the party that you choose.
http://www.vote-smart.org/resource_govt101_06.php
Well, this was for a primary. So basically you could only choose one political party to vote for the party's candidate. I believe that there is nothing checking what your REAL political party is. So I believe that you can still grab a different party than your own to vote for a different candidate. So, say, if you were a republican and didn't want to waste your primary vote for George Bush since he'll clearly win, you could cross parties at the polling place, and put in a vote for whichever democrat you think Bush has the best chance to beat. There's a word for it, but I don't recall, as I think I learned about it 7 or 8 years ago in high school...
They need to complete the package. These things were intended to be sort of like removable monitors. At least that was the initial intention.
Picture this: Instead of buying a plain Jane 15" LCD panel, you pay $100 more and get the new version airpanel XP yada yada model. Now here's the key. You setup the monitor like any other LCD panel. DVI connected to your computer and all that jazz. You use it as normal, and it sits in a little docking station at your desk, which makes the connection to the DVI connection and power for battery charging...
Nature calls! You have to go drop a deuce, but you don't want to stop reading the most recent Slashback. What do you do! Well, since you upgraded to the newfangeled peripheral, you just pull your monitor out of it's docking station, and, ideally, it would automatigically connect over wi-fi just as the current model does to the account you were just logged into. So maybe it blanks out for a few seconds as it transitions to the XP remote desktop mode and the Windows CE control. Or maybe it just switches to the login screen as soon as you unhook it.
How cool would that be? You have the best of both worlds, and it doesn't cost all THAT much as you are getting a full monitor that works at full speed as well. Now how HARD could it be to make a hardware bypass for this thing? I swear, make this work, and quickly and easily, and these will actually sell! NOone will pay that kind of cash for a glorified gigantic PDA.
The really missed the boat on this one. The original concept was "a monitor you can take with you" but instead they just made a weak-ass remote desktop unit.
Get me in that think tank and I'd have set them straight...
-BaumSquad
Yeah, you can do it too. I'd post the proof, but I don't really have any web space, and it's more fun to do yourself, and, hey, it only takes 20 seconds. Well, you need photoshop first.
Basically just load up the supposed screen shot, go to Image-Ajust-Levels. In the levels drag the middle slider underneath the little graphic representation all the way to the left.
What do you see? Just as I expected, a clear differentiation between the copy/pasted text from a real game and the pure black background. It looks like little rectangles of colored blocks around the text that fills the rectangle, and outside of that it is pure black.
Basically the pure black background can't get any blacker, and no matter how much brightness/contrast/saturation you add to pure black, it stays pure black. Well, the real background from the screen grabs this faker got to copy-paste the letters together to make the words, or really whatever method he used, have a speckled background. There is a clear rectangular border around all three parts. It's oddly shaped, too. Not evenly surrounding each part of text, which could conceivably be jpg encoding artifacts, but it's a clear border that extends about 2 times the size of the bottom text below the bottom chuck. About 1 times the size of the middle text above that text, and the size of the middle text extended above the top title text. It's a clean line, and very obvious when viewed under these circumstances. An obvious hoax.
Of course this doesn't disprove the whole thing, but it totally debunks by far the best "evidence" that is available.
Try it! It's kinda fun in a nerdy CSI kinda way...
-BaumSquad
Yeah, but it's not 4:3, like the GBA. It's 16:9 widescreen, so that 4.5 doesn't cover as much area. I think this point alone shows the greater promise of this unit being used for a portable DVD format. Like minidisc tried to do for the CD, this UMD will likely try to do to the DVD... With a good compression standard, this thing ought to have no problem with a full length movie. That makes it a real successor to the "walkman" as is stated in the article. ANd it gives it a real future. THey just need to fight the problems that the original read only MD players had... Lack of content...
Especially when this was intended to be a casual e-mail to a few friends. Who actually writes e-mail to friends at the same level as what they write in a real report? I know I don't. E-mail is much more casual, and thus, I would expect such typos.
Though I do agree, it is important to question the authenticity of this thing. But not for the reasons you mention.
Slashdot Mirror
I am affiliated with the site, as I work for the manufacturer, Sonic Foundry, of the technology that creates the content that all of this is made from. But it's still way cool, and certainly the search tech is really cool, and it's really available, right now. Sweet.
Like you state, use tax is already required, but no one reports it. So this is not a "new tax". It's always been there! Just because they want to increase enforcement, doesn't mean they are twisting the law. They are just trying to make it work. As much as I don't like the idea of more taxes, this doesn't seem like such a huge deal. It's not like it will cripple online retailers, just a bit more of a burden, but certainly not unworkable. And I would definitely be creeped out if it was done through tracking at the feds, but they would just put the burden on the retailer to do it, and hopefully put a system in place to make it workable. And something tells me that the government can already easily datamine my Citibank Card if they wanted to.
What was the slashdot response? To continue the same DOS attack. And I think it's incredibly appropriate. Hopefully no script kiddies are automating it. That defeats the purpose. Show the will of the people by showing that this is a valid way to show defiance. We need this sort of free speech, so long as it is not automated, available online as an act of public defiance.
Saying that it's statistically unlikely that the polling would change after 4PM seems a little bit extreme, especially with such a huge turnout.
Let's be really, painfully, stereotypical here (it's statistics, after all)...
Who can vote before 4PM:
1. Stay at home Mom's 2. College kids between classes 3. Old retired people 4. Unemployed
And political leanings:
1. Women, especially mom's, tend to vote heavily democratic. 2. College kids, and the exuberance of youth often leans democratic. 3. Retired peeps often vote for the dems, due to health care topics. 4. Unemployed are unlikely to be happy with the loss of jobs with Bush.
Of course there are others that would vote before 4PM, like those who's offices let them take off, or those on their lunch breaks, or those who vote in the morning, but really it seems like the 1-4 noted above would likely be enough to throw off any sort of polling. Without any basic demographic info in the polls, I think it's hard to judge this polling information as anything special.
I think there is certainly a chance for some sort of descrepincy, and they should certainly be scrutinized, but this 4 PM poll just seems a likely case of cherry picking. Perhaps not, but there needs to be much more data before any idea about what it means.
And, by the way, I am SOOOO not a bush fan. I just think that there is enough funny business that it should be discussed in truth, not in cherry picked hyperbole. That only distracts from the search for truth. Search out all truth, that which supports both sides of the story. That should be everyone's goal in an open democracy.
Actually that's because the role of the theatre showings of movies is no longer to make money. By far, and growing, the most money a film makes is made from DVD sales. The theatre showing role has become that of promotion, and building word of mouth. There is certainly some money still made during that time, but essentially even a moderate "blockbuster" will only make a bit more than cost over it's run, but the word of mouth and buzz built up will pay off imeasurably in the DVD sales market. People will go to movies, but that isn't the sales source that the MPAA is worried about stifling with piracy. It's purely the DVD sales. Anyway, I must admit that I am much happier with the way the MPAA has run business than that of the RIAA. They embraced the DVD format, sell them at, what I would consider, fair prices, and try to give consumers what they want. Are there still crappy movies? Of course, but they aren't just pushing out crap 24/7 and stifling independent movies. Rather they embrace any indie movies that are deemed worthy by the public. And again, selling at a fair price in a format that consumers overwhelmingly approve of. The RIAA is struggling for their lives, and pissing off customers in the process. The MPAA, on the other hand, is testing the waters to see what sort of threat there is to movie downloading. Admittedly, this could all change as the MPAA deems the threat, perceived or real, as large enough, but until that time, I think it's a bit too soon to deem them as pure evil... Though the broadcast flag is a whole other story...
Ha ha, well I made ONE of the costumes linked to, but not the one that required a plaster cast of my face. So no vaseline fun with mom for me!
Well, my version had no drinking straws up the nose. That guy did that to make a plaster cast of his head, around which he could form his own helmet. I went the cheap/easy way and got a damn used hockey helmet from play it again sports. Mine is all set up to be "good enough". So if I could make it look 80% as good in 10% the time and energy, then that's all good.
Woops. But, yeah, I did make a Tron suit for Halloween a couple of years ago. Have worn it for each Halloween since. It turned out great, and I'm sorry to the guy at Tron-Sector that got slashdotted. It's a great site and I recommend it to all once it gets back up and running. Anyway, the full text of my description on how I made it is posted in here somewhere. My name in that is BaumSquad as well. I'm just sorry that you guys can't see the final products!! It's pretty damn cool, if you like TRON. If you guys are nuts to see it, someone with webspace can post an e-mail address or e-mail me at paul(at)thebaumsquad.com and I'll send you the pics from my version. Pretty rad.
Anyway, thanks for enjoying the work! And honestly, if any of you are interested in doing something like this, it's not THAT hard. Just take a weekend or so and about $50 in materials, and have a pretty damn kick ass costume, if I do say so myself.
The light cycle, however, will take a little more time and energy. (And no I haven't made one... YET!)
(alternate ending quote in Tora! Tora! Tora!)
"I fear all we've done is to awaken a sleeping Minmae attack"
Yeah, that'll be the day. :)
I've been watching American Chopper and just dreaming of the day I could have enough cash to order a custom light cycle.
It would be the PERFECT thing to go with my TRON costume: TRON Costume by BaumSquad
Until I can make that happen, I'll just have to save up for this thing! Kaaannaaaaeeeedddaaaaa!!!!
I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords.
And a little googling, here's a little write up. It looks like some states allow free for alls, where you can vote for any primary on one ballot, others have you choose a single party ballot at the time of polling, and still others require you to be a registered voter under the party that you choose. http://www.vote-smart.org/resource_govt101_06.php
Well, this was for a primary. So basically you could only choose one political party to vote for the party's candidate. I believe that there is nothing checking what your REAL political party is. So I believe that you can still grab a different party than your own to vote for a different candidate. So, say, if you were a republican and didn't want to waste your primary vote for George Bush since he'll clearly win, you could cross parties at the polling place, and put in a vote for whichever democrat you think Bush has the best chance to beat. There's a word for it, but I don't recall, as I think I learned about it 7 or 8 years ago in high school...
They need to complete the package. These things were intended to be sort of like removable monitors. At least that was the initial intention. Picture this: Instead of buying a plain Jane 15" LCD panel, you pay $100 more and get the new version airpanel XP yada yada model. Now here's the key. You setup the monitor like any other LCD panel. DVI connected to your computer and all that jazz. You use it as normal, and it sits in a little docking station at your desk, which makes the connection to the DVI connection and power for battery charging... Nature calls! You have to go drop a deuce, but you don't want to stop reading the most recent Slashback. What do you do! Well, since you upgraded to the newfangeled peripheral, you just pull your monitor out of it's docking station, and, ideally, it would automatigically connect over wi-fi just as the current model does to the account you were just logged into. So maybe it blanks out for a few seconds as it transitions to the XP remote desktop mode and the Windows CE control. Or maybe it just switches to the login screen as soon as you unhook it. How cool would that be? You have the best of both worlds, and it doesn't cost all THAT much as you are getting a full monitor that works at full speed as well. Now how HARD could it be to make a hardware bypass for this thing? I swear, make this work, and quickly and easily, and these will actually sell! NOone will pay that kind of cash for a glorified gigantic PDA. The really missed the boat on this one. The original concept was "a monitor you can take with you" but instead they just made a weak-ass remote desktop unit. Get me in that think tank and I'd have set them straight... -BaumSquad
Yeah, you can do it too. I'd post the proof, but I don't really have any web space, and it's more fun to do yourself, and, hey, it only takes 20 seconds. Well, you need photoshop first. Basically just load up the supposed screen shot, go to Image-Ajust-Levels. In the levels drag the middle slider underneath the little graphic representation all the way to the left. What do you see? Just as I expected, a clear differentiation between the copy/pasted text from a real game and the pure black background. It looks like little rectangles of colored blocks around the text that fills the rectangle, and outside of that it is pure black. Basically the pure black background can't get any blacker, and no matter how much brightness/contrast/saturation you add to pure black, it stays pure black. Well, the real background from the screen grabs this faker got to copy-paste the letters together to make the words, or really whatever method he used, have a speckled background. There is a clear rectangular border around all three parts. It's oddly shaped, too. Not evenly surrounding each part of text, which could conceivably be jpg encoding artifacts, but it's a clear border that extends about 2 times the size of the bottom text below the bottom chuck. About 1 times the size of the middle text above that text, and the size of the middle text extended above the top title text. It's a clean line, and very obvious when viewed under these circumstances. An obvious hoax. Of course this doesn't disprove the whole thing, but it totally debunks by far the best "evidence" that is available. Try it! It's kinda fun in a nerdy CSI kinda way... -BaumSquad
Yeah, but it's not 4:3, like the GBA. It's 16:9 widescreen, so that 4.5 doesn't cover as much area. I think this point alone shows the greater promise of this unit being used for a portable DVD format. Like minidisc tried to do for the CD, this UMD will likely try to do to the DVD... With a good compression standard, this thing ought to have no problem with a full length movie. That makes it a real successor to the "walkman" as is stated in the article. ANd it gives it a real future. THey just need to fight the problems that the original read only MD players had... Lack of content...
Especially when this was intended to be a casual e-mail to a few friends. Who actually writes e-mail to friends at the same level as what they write in a real report? I know I don't. E-mail is much more casual, and thus, I would expect such typos. Though I do agree, it is important to question the authenticity of this thing. But not for the reasons you mention.