Find those kids who love to do this. Science fairs attract them like football fans to a game.
Do them a big favor and snag them before some corporate bureaucracy burns them out with mindless office politics.
They will work their a** off for you, and love doing it.
But, like any other tool, they can be damaged by using them the wrong way. Stifle them, subject them to office politics, micromanage them, and they will most likely become bitter and sour, not of much use to anyone anymore.
Some people derive tremendous pleasure at creating things. Others derive tremendous pleasure at controlling others and getting paid humongous salaries. The executive level determines what type will staff the company.
Thanks for the link. I knew user ignorance is the primary vector for malware spreads, but I did not know what to call it.
Corporations/Governments seem to love to keep underlings ignorant so they can be controlled - Knowledge is Power.
Ignorance of digital hygiene on the internet is just as risky as ignorance of bacterial hygiene in the kitchen.
A big problem is a few people profit immensely from privileged information. They will lobby like hell to keep it that way.
There was once a time I knew exactly how my machine worked, but with the advent of all sorts of proprietary protocols and formats, I have no idea of what is and is not legitimate traffic on my machine.
I can't tell you how many times I have had rogue scripts pop up on my system, warning me I was infected and needed to "click here" to fix it - for free.
I absolutely hate this circus certain "businessmen" have foisted on us by "working with" other trusted businesses to use proprietary technologies which I cannot verify whether or not they have other motives. The simplest apps now require megabytes of code and use tunneling protocols. Its now illegal to even discuss who is using what and how to see into what it is doing. How do I know if they are honest?
As far as I am concerned, these botnets are the internet equivalent of typhoid Mary .
Imagine if I drove the way they wanted me to read!
Here is the bottom line for me:
If I have an INTEREST in something, learning is NO problem.
If I have no INTEREST in it, there is little to no way I, consciously or unconsciously, am going to learn it.
If you want your students to learn it, make it INTERESTING.
( sorry for shouting, but most formal schooling was so boring until I finally went to college and was able to take courses in what interested me, Then I did well. )
Trying to ram information into a human brain is like pushing on a string. But if that brain is pulling it in, the string works.
I seem best socially in areas I have no knowledge of. If someone is showing me caverns or a forest tour, I make a great team player and go wherever I am led.
But, you get me in an area I know well, and I will fight like the dickens when I think things are not right. If I am on a tour bus, and I know the bridge is out ahead, and know we don't have enough gas to get back, I will holler my concerns until they throw me off the bus.
Even though I know in the corporate world, its not about being right, its about being liked, I still insist - to the point of layoff - that things be done what I think is the right way. Maybe its early Bible training in me - about Joseph becoming second under Pharoah in Egypt because he was honest. Maybe its just hardwired in me. I can't change it no more than a musician can delete his need to make music.
Here I am in McDonalds using their internet, reading Slashdot, and downloading the specs on a WIZNET 5300 chip after discovering it at Saelig.. There is porn all over the net, but it holds no interest to me.
Even though I have no market for this, I want to design a big battery pack using the LLTC6802 battery monitor so I can have enough processing power to do charge balancing functions, make decent charts of each cell and make reasonable predictions of battery health, cell by cell, and make the results available via web server.
The little 8-bit microcontroller won't draw so much juice as to make the whole thing impractical, yet has enough processing capability as to do everything I need as for cell balancing, statistics gathering, and report generation. That little WIZNET chip looks great, I am looking forward to seeing what I can do with it. I have Wireshark, and can see exactly what it is doing on the 'net.
I feel free about talking about such things before a Slashdot audience, as I know a lot of you know exactly what I intend to do.
For me to take my interests and go before some corporate personnel resources type and try to sell it, I already feel judged as too useless for the modern executive-driven enterprise. I already sense they are not looking for someone like me, rather they want some young guy that looks great in suit and tie, and knows a lot of people. The type of people who will lay me off for being obstinate. Why would they value me as much as a $250K/yr guy who hires management types @150K/yr which fill out evaluation forms on how I take instructions - even if everything in me tells me they are barking up the wrong tree?
I do not even look for a job anymore.
I figured I could just learn to live very cheaply and do as much as I can without involving anyone else. Its been my experience once anyone sees me doing anything, they will run to their lawyers to have cease-and-desist letters sent, and I am not strong enough to defend myself.
I do not feel I can work for a big corporation, as I cannot deal with the office politics, nor can I start my own small business, as our Government coins law at the request of the bigger fish that keeps us small fry from spawning and competing in the market.
Legal torts kill just as surely as a bullet. I can die from either blood or economic hemorrhage. Tort guns are legal, but the bullets are way too expensive for me.
I have better sense than to make moonshine, grow pot, or start a business that might upset somebody else who knows how to play off of Congress. All of these activities attract lawsuits.
I have posted enough hopefully to indicate we are not all of the same mold. I feel quite cheated, as I spent so much time in schools, actually DOING the work single-handedly, successfully competing against fraternities who had databases of old tests. When I get in the workplace, I can't hold a job because I try my damndest to be honest and hold my ground. T
How much of this will we tolerate? Of course, the second photo was made to avoid licensing fees from the original!
Am I about to be sued by McDonalds because I went home and grilled my own burger? Or will Burger King get sued?
Wasn't competition and free markets the basis of free enterprise?
If I declaw a cat, do I assume the responsibility of feeding and protecting it?
If I can persuade Congress to pass law telling someone else he can't do something cause I did it first, do I incur responsibility to accept taxation so the other guy, at my insistence, foregoes doing this?
I pay for my right to force others not to camp on my yard - its called property tax. Its a bit over 1% of assessed value. Can one claim "rights" without paying for that right? Isn't that theft?
As Congress transforms this nation from a production-based society to an ownership-based society, our tax codes must be updated accordingly or I guarantee we will have significant social unrest.
Land of the free, home of the brave???
Land of the wimps if you ask me. ( yes, I am a wimp too ).
There will always be a way to force autonomous vehicles off the road.
Think "armor piercing bullets".
"Surprise" potholes.
Both the good guys and the bad guys have them.
If the autonomous vehicle could be "hijacked", the bad guy could use the autonomous vehicle to do his dirty work, protecting his anonymity, just as they use hijacked computers on the net.
Think deliberately ramming an armored bank transport with someone else's autonomous vehicle. The bad guy makes off with the cash leaving the bank and autonomous vehicle owner wagging pens and lawsuits at each other.
Just playing devil's advocate here. We do not live in a world where everyone is nice. Anything we make can be screwed up. Its gotta be that way. It guarantees the trodden-under class ways to straighten things out.
The better "duress" password will decrypt alternate, non-incriminating data.
Yes... like your banking information, passwords to other sites, and health records... stuff anybody could justify having an encrypted file for.
Or, like you say, embarassing photos or nude pictures of you and your significant other "in the act". Anybody would want those out of public view.
This whole "privacy" thing reminds me of an episode on Star Trek where some young Star Fleet bureaucrat took it on himself to make the whole starship's crew's lives miserable putting them all under the microscope in a futuristic witch hunt.
The most important thing is make yourself useful.
Society will keep you.
If you own too much, they will shoot you, as they need what you have and can't afford to pay you. But if they need your services, you are good to go.
I am heavily invested in my ability to fix things. Cars, industrial machinery, refrigeration, process controllers, you name it. They all follow the same laws of physics.
Making sure that everyone knows what is happening and what is at stake is probably the most useful thing anyone can do.
Absolutely!
I am not that much into politics, but this mess they are making is forcing me to watch them, as I would watch a car mechanic who slits radiator hoses while checking tires.
Who is maintaining a list as to what congresscritters vote what on these issues. For now, everyone is complaining the pool reeks of urine - what I want to know is just who is peeing in the pool and get them out of here. I know this Lamar Smith fellow stinks to all high heaven. Its time the "99%" take their concerns to the polling place instead of the park.
And I do not mean "repuglican" or "dimmercrat", I mean write-in! Someone not bought and paid for by Washington Whoring.
Re:Part of a money conflict within the King family
on
A Copyright Nightmare
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I have never been able to "keep at" anything continuously for that long. Maybe a couple of hours. Then something will inevitably block me. I end up making things far more complicated than they need be,
At this point, I realize I am just digging in deeper and deeper, and making a mess.
By this time, I have fleshed out what has to be done, but the implementation I have so far really stinks.
That's when I do something else for a while. "Socialization", aka "Bullschitt Session".
I never married because I was always so addicted to my horsing around with my toys. ( No, I never played much with them, I ended up taking them apart to find out how they worked, and if I learned enough to reassemble it into something else, well that was good.).
I could never get anything "done" at the office. It was almost like trying to do ALU operations at the I/O port.
The office is where I do I/O. I find it very hard to be creative at the office. Its difficult to keep a chain of thought intact. I figure out how to do it somewhere else.
Lately, its been the local pizza parlor. I know the owner, He makes me a special pizza, and I will often sit all afternoon there, enjoying pizza, refining my designs in spiral-bound notebooks ( 10 cents each from Wal-Mart during their back-to-school special ). There is usually no-one there in the middle of the afternoon.
At home, I have all my computers with everything I need to try out any DSP algorithms, and its easy for me to quickie-prototype some code on an arduino, netburner, or propeller ( Andre LaMothe's "Chameleon", )
I can't do that kind of stuff at the office. Especially in management-laden businesses. I do this at home, where I have peace and quiet, and no-one cares if I "make a clutter". If I were married, the wife would certainly make me trash it.
I've been psychologically tested for social skills. I am INTP. Asperger too. So, I am apparently incapable of knowing what I am missing ( wifery, sports, concerts, etc. ). I highly enjoy technical discussions, but it is hard for me to find others who would rather discuss thermodynamics than football.
You can see where I work best in a small company who is struggling to survive, rather than large companies sailing on inertia. I have little to offer companies who have hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire managers who evaluate me by how well I conform to office politics... as I perform quite poorly at the desk. I run like WIN95 on 4 Meg of ram in an office environment.
I would launch another diatribe here, but George Huppert said it better...
"Peasant rebellions were not exceptional events. They erupted so frequently in the course of these four centuries that they may be said to have been as common in this agrarian society as factory strikes would be in the industrial world. In southwestern France alone, some 450 rebellions occurred between 1590 and 1715. No region of Western Europe was exempted from this pattern of chronic violence. The fear of sedition was always present in the minds of those who ruled. It was a corrective, a salutary fear --- since only the threat of insurrection could act as a check against unlimited exactions."
My broker's website is so full of javascript and pop-ups I am terrified to use it. I pulled my retirement from that broker and went to a "brick-and-mortar" institution, only because I know how easy it would be to fool me with a clever javascript to redirect me to a bogus site.
I feel completely powerless when talking to a office guy whose instructions are to toe the company line and ignore the customer's pleas to not put this kind of code on a financial site. I am left stewing knowing the suit-guy keeps his job while I am liable to be in quite a mess trying to straighten things out if my account is taken for a roll-in-the-pigsty by some clever javascript coder who left a bug in my machine.
For me, seeing JavaScript is like seeing mice. If I am in most places, it does not alarm me. But in a restaurant, it does. If you wonder from where I get my fear, google virus and javascript together.
The clear message I get is bankers could care less how people like me think of the security of an account with them.
I think you have good insight into the situation today.
If I had mod points today, you would have got one. Instead, all the appreciation I can give you is a reply..
I can surely understand your situation. I'm in the same boat.
Its like being an artist when what employers want are house painters, evaluated by how many square feet per second they can paint.
Not on whether or not the paint was properly applied.
Let the sucker customer deal with the inevitable peeling that will happen next year. All that is important is the check cleared, and sufficient ambiguities are in place so a lawsuit won't hold.
I still have my old IMSAI 8080, but I had donated my C64 stuff to Goodwill during a move about 10 years ago.
I had ordered this thing from a firm in San Leandro, California, and when it arrived, it was a box full of bags of parts. When they said "kit", they meant "kit"! I soldered all the parts onto PCB's. I went whole hog and got the 21 slot version. S-100 bus. Memory at that time was 2102-1 1Kx1 Static ram. Each 4K of RAM required 1 S-100 card. There were dip switches on each memory card to address it. I also had 8K of 1702 EPROM. Took 100 volts to program these babies. They held 256 bytes each.
I still remember building the power supply to supply that voltage. I used a standard transformer isolator with rectifier, filter, and a gas regulator tube ( 0B2 I think ). It glowed purple when operating.
.
Later, I acquired some of the latest technology and bought 32K of 2716.
Blank S-100 prototyping boards were readily available. So were the 7400 series of TTL chips. Even Radio Shack carried an impressive array of them. And wirewrap sockets. A genuine Gardner-Denver wirewrap gun was the thing to have, and the serious guy bought his wirewrap wire in at least 100 foot spools. You could get a rainbow of colors in 24 thru 30 gauge kynar. You quickly learned to get the good stuff - that cheap wire would drive you nuts...you couldn't strip it cleanly!
I had two 1K VideoRam cards in mine. Each gave me 16 lines of 64 characters, each would feed one NTSC RS-170 analog video monitor.
That was really high-tech back then. Those monitors were normally used by shop clerks snooping the cigarette rack and likker shelf.
The first UARTs were just coming out. Western Digital. I had one. It took 3 voltages sequenced up and down properly to keep from blowing the chip ( +5, -5, -12 ). It had something to do with keeping the silicon NMOS substrate biased properly. Messy. But it beat the boardful of TTL it replaced.
TTL ( transistor-transistor logic ) was the cat's meow back then. It replaced DTL ( diode-transistor logic ) and RTL (resistor-transistor logic) with significantly better noise immunity and fanout drive. By today's standards, it was quite a power hungry little beast. I can run a 20 MHz microcontroller today on the power needed by just one of those old 7400 quad NAND gate.
The biggest thing in the IMSAI is its power transformer. The power supply was rated 8V at 30 Amps. There were 7805 regulators, usually four of em, on each card to drop the 8V raw power to 5V clean power.
Forget software and operating systems. You wrote your own.
There were very few pre-made accessories. But thats what made this fun. I cannibalized a tape recorder ( Astrocom-Marlux 406 sold by Lafayette Radio ) because it had electromagnets to control the transport, and it was cheap. I wrote to the head directly with TTL tri-state logic with manchester code, and used a National Semiconductor preamp chip and a Signetics comparator to read the data back. It was a lot of fun getting that thing to work. I never got much over 12 Kb/sec at 7 1/2 IPS tape speed, but at least it was reliable and worked for many years. It was primitive, but it could load a file by filename by looking it up in a special file at the beginning of the tape. But it was a lot faster if I gave my program the starting block. Forget defrag. Once written to tape, it was MY job to make sure any file overwriting an existing file was of less or equal length!
It was fun playing with motors with the thing.
It was also possible to hook the computer up to a control system ( think gas turbine controller ) and fake out the controller to think there was actually a gas turbine being controlled. This allowed me to introduce "turbine malfunctions" to see how the controller would handle it without risk to some very expensive and dangerous mechanical apparatus.
The most precious program I had was my assembler. It and my rudimentary monitor/tape transport controller occupied my precious EPROM.
Being its common to have vending machines on the internet anyway so they can report their status, it does indeed make a lot of sense to make the otherwise unutilized bandwidth available to nearby people.
It will encourage them to loiter near the machine.
Eventually, the urge to enjoy one of the vendor's products will likely be met by the same machine.
Nobody said it had to be super bandwidth... for a lot of stuff, enough to get email or browse Slashdot is fine.
This is the kind of stuff that I am glad to see on Slashdot.
I have been around since the 50's, and have observed management styles change like fashion.
It struck me hard in in Aerospace, when management went to "training seminars" and came back all holier than thou. I was more concerned with stability of phase-locked loops at the time, and I became very concerned over the lack of concern our managers seemed to express about our products. Everything became "the bottom line". Cost centers. Profit centers. Presentation. What is the minimum amount of effort that will result in getting paid. Suddenly, "Pride of Workmanship" became a bad thing as it was an inefficient use of manpower.
Well, we banged around for a few more years riding on the reputation the guys before us earned.
As we "redefined the organization", our clients re-evaluated what our name meant.
Things dried up.
Being one of the noisier ones bemoaning the micromanagement I had to take, I was one of the first dismissed..
Yes, I have studied "Obedience to Authority" by Stanley Milgram. I would urge everyone to read his book. Its tiny. Its a research paper by Stanley Milgram of Yale University, a psychology major, doing a thesis on what got into the German people to do the things they did to the Jews.
I found the book very shocking. What he did was set himself up as an "authority figure" by wearing a white lab coat, and he would see just how far people would go in obeying him. People would actually electrocute others they did not even know once they had shifted responsibility of their act to someone else. Stanley called this state of obedience as "agentic", as being an "agent" for someone else, who was - as you know - Stanley himself.
Some of us have a moral compass that will not let us do such things. Stanley noted that. There were a few that simply would not obey when they were ordered, no matter what he did. He did not label them "not a team player", but I am sure today's "leadership types" would.
This crap even got into my church.
I have pontificated on slashdot long ago on my spiritual beliefs, why I believe there is a creator, and my frustration with religion.
I sat through one "leadership" lesson, and was told things like "if you need them, you can't lead them".
That goes against everything in me. I have got to make those under me feel worthless and dependent so they will follow me? I call bullshit.
If they are going to follow me, they will do so if they believe I know how to do it and have all of our best interests at heart. More down the line of the of the leader of Terra-Nova. Not because I threaten them with bad performance reviews and layoffs. I've been there. No way I want to inflict this bullshit on anyone else. This kind of crap is for the kids who like to pull the legs off of bugs. The worst leaders I have worked under were the ones who placed great value on "being the leader", not "doing the work". I work best with those whose prime ambition is "doing the work".
This new stuff sounds like some greedy industrialist trying to staff a 1800's style sweatshop with the cheapest possible labor, Its the form of capitalism that gives the whole concept a bad name.
Thanks for the offer, Emil. I believe you have the Fortran source code (2G5 - University of California - Berkeley) that the guys in the aerospace company I worked for recoded into C for the PC. ( With your three digit Slashdot ID, I know you are no spring chicken in these woods;) ).
Boy, those were the days. We were all artists, really enjoying the challenge of creating. There is something so beautiful in an elegant algorithm or mechanical design. The closest thing I think of is the beauty of fine music.
With about 15 years of circuit snippets I have collected over the years, this particular SPICE analyzer has become a part of me, and losing it would be like losing a finger.
With your experience in piping the dot matrix output to a graphics package, you know exactly what I am doing. Its a heckuva lot of pixel by pixel manipulation on the bit level. The assembler has instructions that will do this. Especially the rotate-thru-carry.
Again, thanks for your generous offer, but I will pass for now. I figure once I code my little "bitmap capture" program, every time I "print" a plot from Spice, I will see another bitmap file appear in the directory. Finally I will be able to import my plots into modern presentation software.
That's the fun of this. Its the pleasure of seeing your creation come to life and do its thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Right on!
Find those kids who love to do this. Science fairs attract them like football fans to a game.
Do them a big favor and snag them before some corporate bureaucracy burns them out with mindless office politics.
They will work their a** off for you, and love doing it.
But, like any other tool, they can be damaged by using them the wrong way. Stifle them, subject them to office politics, micromanage them, and they will most likely become bitter and sour, not of much use to anyone anymore.
Some people derive tremendous pleasure at creating things. Others derive tremendous pleasure at controlling others and getting paid humongous salaries. The executive level determines what type will staff the company.
You hit the nail on the head there, Lotana.
Thanks for the link. I knew user ignorance is the primary vector for malware spreads, but I did not know what to call it.
Corporations/Governments seem to love to keep underlings ignorant so they can be controlled - Knowledge is Power.
Ignorance of digital hygiene on the internet is just as risky as ignorance of bacterial hygiene in the kitchen.
A big problem is a few people profit immensely from privileged information. They will lobby like hell to keep it that way.
There was once a time I knew exactly how my machine worked, but with the advent of all sorts of proprietary protocols and formats, I have no idea of what is and is not legitimate traffic on my machine.
Can I trust even an antivirus company?
The Kelihos botnet that sent up to 3.8 billion spam e-mails per day before being taken offline by Microsoft and Kaspersky Lab four months ago was created and controlled by a software developer who formerly worked for an antivirus firm, Microsoft said in a civil lawsuit updated yesterday.
I can't tell you how many times I have had rogue scripts pop up on my system, warning me I was infected and needed to "click here" to fix it - for free.
I absolutely hate this circus certain "businessmen" have foisted on us by "working with" other trusted businesses to use proprietary technologies which I cannot verify whether or not they have other motives. The simplest apps now require megabytes of code and use tunneling protocols. Its now illegal to even discuss who is using what and how to see into what it is doing. How do I know if they are honest?
As far as I am concerned, these botnets are the internet equivalent of typhoid Mary .
Yes, I remember those projectors.
Imagine if I drove the way they wanted me to read!
Here is the bottom line for me:
If I have an INTEREST in something, learning is NO problem.
If I have no INTEREST in it, there is little to no way I, consciously or unconsciously, am going to learn it.
If you want your students to learn it, make it INTERESTING.
( sorry for shouting, but most formal schooling was so boring until I finally went to college and was able to take courses in what interested me, Then I did well. )
Trying to ram information into a human brain is like pushing on a string. But if that brain is pulling it in, the string works.
Thanks for taking the time to post, Froobly.
Yes, I am bitter.
I guess I am a lot like a kicked cat who no longer trusts humans.
What you say is true, All of it.
Again, thanks. You spent a lot of time preparing your reply to me. I appreciate your help.
I have every one of these issues.
I seem best socially in areas I have no knowledge of. If someone is showing me caverns or a forest tour, I make a great team player and go wherever I am led.
But, you get me in an area I know well, and I will fight like the dickens when I think things are not right. If I am on a tour bus, and I know the bridge is out ahead, and know we don't have enough gas to get back, I will holler my concerns until they throw me off the bus.
Even though I know in the corporate world, its not about being right, its about being liked, I still insist - to the point of layoff - that things be done what I think is the right way. Maybe its early Bible training in me - about Joseph becoming second under Pharoah in Egypt because he was honest. Maybe its just hardwired in me. I can't change it no more than a musician can delete his need to make music.
Here I am in McDonalds using their internet, reading Slashdot, and downloading the specs on a WIZNET 5300 chip after discovering it at Saelig.. There is porn all over the net, but it holds no interest to me.
Even though I have no market for this, I want to design a big battery pack using the LLTC6802 battery monitor so I can have enough processing power to do charge balancing functions, make decent charts of each cell and make reasonable predictions of battery health, cell by cell, and make the results available via web server.
The little 8-bit microcontroller won't draw so much juice as to make the whole thing impractical, yet has enough processing capability as to do everything I need as for cell balancing, statistics gathering, and report generation. That little WIZNET chip looks great, I am looking forward to seeing what I can do with it. I have Wireshark, and can see exactly what it is doing on the 'net.
I feel free about talking about such things before a Slashdot audience, as I know a lot of you know exactly what I intend to do.
For me to take my interests and go before some corporate personnel resources type and try to sell it, I already feel judged as too useless for the modern executive-driven enterprise. I already sense they are not looking for someone like me, rather they want some young guy that looks great in suit and tie, and knows a lot of people. The type of people who will lay me off for being obstinate. Why would they value me as much as a $250K/yr guy who hires management types @150K/yr which fill out evaluation forms on how I take instructions - even if everything in me tells me they are barking up the wrong tree?
I do not even look for a job anymore.
I figured I could just learn to live very cheaply and do as much as I can without involving anyone else. Its been my experience once anyone sees me doing anything, they will run to their lawyers to have cease-and-desist letters sent, and I am not strong enough to defend myself.
I do not feel I can work for a big corporation, as I cannot deal with the office politics, nor can I start my own small business, as our Government coins law at the request of the bigger fish that keeps us small fry from spawning and competing in the market.
Legal torts kill just as surely as a bullet. I can die from either blood or economic hemorrhage. Tort guns are legal, but the bullets are way too expensive for me.
I have better sense than to make moonshine, grow pot, or start a business that might upset somebody else who knows how to play off of Congress. All of these activities attract lawsuits.
I have posted enough hopefully to indicate we are not all of the same mold. I feel quite cheated, as I spent so much time in schools, actually DOING the work single-handedly, successfully competing against fraternities who had databases of old tests. When I get in the workplace, I can't hold a job because I try my damndest to be honest and hold my ground. T
How much of this will we tolerate? Of course, the second photo was made to avoid licensing fees from the original!
Am I about to be sued by McDonalds because I went home and grilled my own burger? Or will Burger King get sued?
Wasn't competition and free markets the basis of free enterprise?
If I declaw a cat, do I assume the responsibility of feeding and protecting it?
If I can persuade Congress to pass law telling someone else he can't do something cause I did it first, do I incur responsibility to accept taxation so the other guy, at my insistence, foregoes doing this?
I pay for my right to force others not to camp on my yard - its called property tax. Its a bit over 1% of assessed value. Can one claim "rights" without paying for that right? Isn't that theft?
As Congress transforms this nation from a production-based society to an ownership-based society, our tax codes must be updated accordingly or I guarantee we will have significant social unrest.
Land of the free, home of the brave???
Land of the wimps if you ask me. ( yes, I am a wimp too ).
There will always be a way to force autonomous vehicles off the road.
Think "armor piercing bullets".
"Surprise" potholes.
Both the good guys and the bad guys have them.
If the autonomous vehicle could be "hijacked", the bad guy could use the autonomous vehicle to do his dirty work, protecting his anonymity, just as they use hijacked computers on the net.
Think deliberately ramming an armored bank transport with someone else's autonomous vehicle. The bad guy makes off with the cash leaving the bank and autonomous vehicle owner wagging pens and lawsuits at each other.
Just playing devil's advocate here. We do not live in a world where everyone is nice. Anything we make can be screwed up. Its gotta be that way. It guarantees the trodden-under class ways to straighten things out.
Yes... like your banking information, passwords to other sites, and health records... stuff anybody could justify having an encrypted file for.
Or, like you say, embarassing photos or nude pictures of you and your significant other "in the act". Anybody would want those out of public view.
This whole "privacy" thing reminds me of an episode on Star Trek where some young Star Fleet bureaucrat took it on himself to make the whole starship's crew's lives miserable putting them all under the microscope in a futuristic witch hunt.
The most important thing is make yourself useful. Society will keep you. If you own too much, they will shoot you, as they need what you have and can't afford to pay you. But if they need your services, you are good to go. I am heavily invested in my ability to fix things. Cars, industrial machinery, refrigeration, process controllers, you name it. They all follow the same laws of physics.
All this will do is trip off use of PGP that includes a "duress" password.
Using it will scramble the disk beyond ANY recoverability.
Into yourself.
Acquire knowledge and tools.
Absolutely!
I am not that much into politics, but this mess they are making is forcing me to watch them, as I would watch a car mechanic who slits radiator hoses while checking tires.
Who is maintaining a list as to what congresscritters vote what on these issues. For now, everyone is complaining the pool reeks of urine - what I want to know is just who is peeing in the pool and get them out of here. I know this Lamar Smith fellow stinks to all high heaven. Its time the "99%" take their concerns to the polling place instead of the park.
And I do not mean "repuglican" or "dimmercrat", I mean write-in! Someone not bought and paid for by Washington Whoring.
Thank you for a brilliant post.
I have never been able to "keep at" anything continuously for that long. Maybe a couple of hours. Then something will inevitably block me. I end up making things far more complicated than they need be,
At this point, I realize I am just digging in deeper and deeper, and making a mess.
By this time, I have fleshed out what has to be done, but the implementation I have so far really stinks.
That's when I do something else for a while. "Socialization", aka "Bullschitt Session".
I never married because I was always so addicted to my horsing around with my toys. ( No, I never played much with them, I ended up taking them apart to find out how they worked, and if I learned enough to reassemble it into something else, well that was good.).
I could never get anything "done" at the office. It was almost like trying to do ALU operations at the I/O port.
The office is where I do I/O. I find it very hard to be creative at the office. Its difficult to keep a chain of thought intact. I figure out how to do it somewhere else.
Lately, its been the local pizza parlor. I know the owner, He makes me a special pizza, and I will often sit all afternoon there, enjoying pizza, refining my designs in spiral-bound notebooks ( 10 cents each from Wal-Mart during their back-to-school special ). There is usually no-one there in the middle of the afternoon.
At home, I have all my computers with everything I need to try out any DSP algorithms, and its easy for me to quickie-prototype some code on an arduino, netburner, or propeller ( Andre LaMothe's "Chameleon", )
I can't do that kind of stuff at the office. Especially in management-laden businesses. I do this at home, where I have peace and quiet, and no-one cares if I "make a clutter". If I were married, the wife would certainly make me trash it.
I've been psychologically tested for social skills. I am INTP. Asperger too. So, I am apparently incapable of knowing what I am missing ( wifery, sports, concerts, etc. ). I highly enjoy technical discussions, but it is hard for me to find others who would rather discuss thermodynamics than football.
You can see where I work best in a small company who is struggling to survive, rather than large companies sailing on inertia. I have little to offer companies who have hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire managers who evaluate me by how well I conform to office politics... as I perform quite poorly at the desk. I run like WIN95 on 4 Meg of ram in an office environment.
( Found at http://www.dieoff.org/ )
That is what scares me.
My broker's website is so full of javascript and pop-ups I am terrified to use it. I pulled my retirement from that broker and went to a "brick-and-mortar" institution, only because I know how easy it would be to fool me with a clever javascript to redirect me to a bogus site.
I feel completely powerless when talking to a office guy whose instructions are to toe the company line and ignore the customer's pleas to not put this kind of code on a financial site. I am left stewing knowing the suit-guy keeps his job while I am liable to be in quite a mess trying to straighten things out if my account is taken for a roll-in-the-pigsty by some clever javascript coder who left a bug in my machine.
For me, seeing JavaScript is like seeing mice. If I am in most places, it does not alarm me. But in a restaurant, it does. If you wonder from where I get my fear, google virus and javascript together.
The clear message I get is bankers could care less how people like me think of the security of an account with them.
Coding IS easy!
... that takes a bit more know-how.
So is surgery!
But doing it right, well
A lot more.
Why did you post AC?
I think you have good insight into the situation today.
If I had mod points today, you would have got one. Instead, all the appreciation I can give you is a reply..
I can surely understand your situation. I'm in the same boat.
Its like being an artist when what employers want are house painters, evaluated by how many square feet per second they can paint.
Not on whether or not the paint was properly applied.
Let the sucker customer deal with the inevitable peeling that will happen next year. All that is important is the check cleared, and sufficient ambiguities are in place so a lawsuit won't hold.
Yes.
The code produced will the architectural equivalent of a "lean-to".
Its like practicing medicine after a first-aid course. Practicing law after watching Judge Judy.
These are the "handymen" of the IT industry.
Relax, guys.
These guys will get the moneymeisters to invest, as they will promise and deliver an inexpensive job.
Once the moneymeister has money invested, he will be easier to talk to as he will now have a vested interest in his investment actually being viable.
You know the story: Haircuts, $1.00. Across the street: We fix bad haircuts, $10.00.
But it gets better. The guy didn't need service at all until he got the buck job.
I was just looking at these a couple of days ago... they don't have the range I needed, but would work great for books.
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9875
A short video on Youtube about these....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ioDBOOAFvM
Have fun!
I still have my old IMSAI 8080, but I had donated my C64 stuff to Goodwill during a move about 10 years ago.
I had ordered this thing from a firm in San Leandro, California, and when it arrived, it was a box full of bags of parts. When they said "kit", they meant "kit"! I soldered all the parts onto PCB's. I went whole hog and got the 21 slot version. S-100 bus. Memory at that time was 2102-1 1Kx1 Static ram. Each 4K of RAM required 1 S-100 card. There were dip switches on each memory card to address it. I also had 8K of 1702 EPROM. Took 100 volts to program these babies. They held 256 bytes each.
I still remember building the power supply to supply that voltage. I used a standard transformer isolator with rectifier, filter, and a gas regulator tube ( 0B2 I think ). It glowed purple when operating.
. Later, I acquired some of the latest technology and bought 32K of 2716.
Blank S-100 prototyping boards were readily available. So were the 7400 series of TTL chips. Even Radio Shack carried an impressive array of them. And wirewrap sockets. A genuine Gardner-Denver wirewrap gun was the thing to have, and the serious guy bought his wirewrap wire in at least 100 foot spools. You could get a rainbow of colors in 24 thru 30 gauge kynar. You quickly learned to get the good stuff - that cheap wire would drive you nuts...you couldn't strip it cleanly!
I had two 1K VideoRam cards in mine. Each gave me 16 lines of 64 characters, each would feed one NTSC RS-170 analog video monitor.
That was really high-tech back then. Those monitors were normally used by shop clerks snooping the cigarette rack and likker shelf.
The first UARTs were just coming out. Western Digital. I had one. It took 3 voltages sequenced up and down properly to keep from blowing the chip ( +5, -5, -12 ). It had something to do with keeping the silicon NMOS substrate biased properly. Messy. But it beat the boardful of TTL it replaced.
TTL ( transistor-transistor logic ) was the cat's meow back then. It replaced DTL ( diode-transistor logic ) and RTL (resistor-transistor logic) with significantly better noise immunity and fanout drive. By today's standards, it was quite a power hungry little beast. I can run a 20 MHz microcontroller today on the power needed by just one of those old 7400 quad NAND gate.
The biggest thing in the IMSAI is its power transformer. The power supply was rated 8V at 30 Amps. There were 7805 regulators, usually four of em, on each card to drop the 8V raw power to 5V clean power.
Forget software and operating systems. You wrote your own.
There were very few pre-made accessories. But thats what made this fun. I cannibalized a tape recorder ( Astrocom-Marlux 406 sold by Lafayette Radio ) because it had electromagnets to control the transport, and it was cheap. I wrote to the head directly with TTL tri-state logic with manchester code, and used a National Semiconductor preamp chip and a Signetics comparator to read the data back. It was a lot of fun getting that thing to work. I never got much over 12 Kb/sec at 7 1/2 IPS tape speed, but at least it was reliable and worked for many years. It was primitive, but it could load a file by filename by looking it up in a special file at the beginning of the tape. But it was a lot faster if I gave my program the starting block. Forget defrag. Once written to tape, it was MY job to make sure any file overwriting an existing file was of less or equal length!
It was fun playing with motors with the thing.
It was also possible to hook the computer up to a control system ( think gas turbine controller ) and fake out the controller to think there was actually a gas turbine being controlled. This allowed me to introduce "turbine malfunctions" to see how the controller would handle it without risk to some very expensive and dangerous mechanical apparatus.
The most precious program I had was my assembler. It and my rudimentary monitor/tape transport controller occupied my precious EPROM.
Those were the days.
My favorite is uCOS/II
http://www.amazon.com/MicroC-OS-II-Kernel-CD-ROM/dp/1578201039/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1325141293&sr=8-1
It runs on the ColdFire processors in the NetBurners.
http://www.netburner.com/
I like these for embedded controllers.
I feel they have their ducks in a row and know whats important.
Being its common to have vending machines on the internet anyway so they can report their status, it does indeed make a lot of sense to make the otherwise unutilized bandwidth available to nearby people.
It will encourage them to loiter near the machine.
Eventually, the urge to enjoy one of the vendor's products will likely be met by the same machine.
Nobody said it had to be super bandwidth... for a lot of stuff, enough to get email or browse Slashdot is fine.
This is the kind of stuff that I am glad to see on Slashdot.
I have been around since the 50's, and have observed management styles change like fashion.
It struck me hard in in Aerospace, when management went to "training seminars" and came back all holier than thou. I was more concerned with stability of phase-locked loops at the time, and I became very concerned over the lack of concern our managers seemed to express about our products. Everything became "the bottom line". Cost centers. Profit centers. Presentation. What is the minimum amount of effort that will result in getting paid. Suddenly, "Pride of Workmanship" became a bad thing as it was an inefficient use of manpower.
Well, we banged around for a few more years riding on the reputation the guys before us earned.
As we "redefined the organization", our clients re-evaluated what our name meant.
Things dried up.
Being one of the noisier ones bemoaning the micromanagement I had to take, I was one of the first dismissed..
Yes, I have studied "Obedience to Authority" by Stanley Milgram. I would urge everyone to read his book. Its tiny. Its a research paper by Stanley Milgram of Yale University, a psychology major, doing a thesis on what got into the German people to do the things they did to the Jews.
I found the book very shocking. What he did was set himself up as an "authority figure" by wearing a white lab coat, and he would see just how far people would go in obeying him. People would actually electrocute others they did not even know once they had shifted responsibility of their act to someone else. Stanley called this state of obedience as "agentic", as being an "agent" for someone else, who was - as you know - Stanley himself.
Some of us have a moral compass that will not let us do such things. Stanley noted that. There were a few that simply would not obey when they were ordered, no matter what he did. He did not label them "not a team player", but I am sure today's "leadership types" would.
This crap even got into my church.
I have pontificated on slashdot long ago on my spiritual beliefs, why I believe there is a creator, and my frustration with religion.
I sat through one "leadership" lesson, and was told things like "if you need them, you can't lead them".
That goes against everything in me. I have got to make those under me feel worthless and dependent so they will follow me? I call bullshit.
If they are going to follow me, they will do so if they believe I know how to do it and have all of our best interests at heart. More down the line of the of the leader of Terra-Nova. Not because I threaten them with bad performance reviews and layoffs. I've been there. No way I want to inflict this bullshit on anyone else. This kind of crap is for the kids who like to pull the legs off of bugs. The worst leaders I have worked under were the ones who placed great value on "being the leader", not "doing the work". I work best with those whose prime ambition is "doing the work".
This new stuff sounds like some greedy industrialist trying to staff a 1800's style sweatshop with the cheapest possible labor, Its the form of capitalism that gives the whole concept a bad name.
Thanks for the offer, Emil. I believe you have the Fortran source code (2G5 - University of California - Berkeley) that the guys in the aerospace company I worked for recoded into C for the PC. ( With your three digit Slashdot ID, I know you are no spring chicken in these woods ;) ).
Boy, those were the days. We were all artists, really enjoying the challenge of creating. There is something so beautiful in an elegant algorithm or mechanical design. The closest thing I think of is the beauty of fine music.
With about 15 years of circuit snippets I have collected over the years, this particular SPICE analyzer has become a part of me, and losing it would be like losing a finger.
With your experience in piping the dot matrix output to a graphics package, you know exactly what I am doing. Its a heckuva lot of pixel by pixel manipulation on the bit level. The assembler has instructions that will do this. Especially the rotate-thru-carry.
Again, thanks for your generous offer, but I will pass for now. I figure once I code my little "bitmap capture" program, every time I "print" a plot from Spice, I will see another bitmap file appear in the directory. Finally I will be able to import my plots into modern presentation software.
That's the fun of this. Its the pleasure of seeing your creation come to life and do its thing.