Nested Goatse.cx pop-ups. Really nice. It's jerks like this that ruin it for others who post as Anonymous Coward and are now going to get filtered by people like me trying to avoid the trolls and other jerks.
Well, I doubt that you can call our (yes, I'm Canadian as well) elections 'serious, worthwhile political discourse', since they're just as full of unfulfillable promises, bullshit and mudslinging as most other places.
I am however, glad that I remain blissfully unaware of any circumstance in Canadian politics that is in any way similar to the last national American election.
Well, for one thing there is a lot less need for a post-election media circus that employs all sorts of anchors, pundits, makeup artists, cameramen, reporters, lawyers, judges, etc, etc, etc.
It seems to me that somebody could make a heck of a lot of coin by setting up a business specifically for the purposes of suing telemarketers.
You'd charge, say $20/offence, and require a form granting access to the customer's phone records and listing as much information about the call as possible (though time & date should be enough)... then go ahead and sue (maybe on behalf of hundreds of other people complaining about the same firm as well). Keep 90% of the judgement and send the remaining 10% to your client(s).
We absolutely should not try to block the flow of jobs to other countries as a general rule. I LIKE a global economy - the more we're all tied together, the better, I think.
However, I believe in equal pay for equal work, and outsourcing to India and China doesn't do that. We're taking advantage of lower standards of living. We can't just pay more without disrupting the hell out of their economies (which would be fairly evil of us, I think). We need a tarriff placed on foriegn labour designed to compensate for differences in standards of living - an American company manufacturing goods for sale to Americans should have to support the American standard of living.
By sending labour of ANY sort overseas, but expecting to sell back home, companies are behaving like citizens who don't pay their taxes - they are expecting to reap the benefits of the home economy without paying their fair share to support it.
You know, I thought that was kind of a stupid, not as funny as intended kind of post until you got to the bit about the radio.
I can just imagine MS putting code in that only permitted a DRM-compliant radio to work in a car - which would mean no home-burned compliations, legal or not, knowing the way DRM usually ends up 'functioning'.
Anyway, I think that level of problem is far enough off that one need not be paranoid quite yet.
I'll burn some karma myself; This post is being done from my brand spankin' new RH9 box. A real bitch for a Wintechie to install a DLINK WLAN driver, considering there are a few projects out there, but none worked as documented. Of course, I learned a few things, so it isn't all bad.
Try telling people that they're not allowed to make copies, or allow copies to be made.
If anyone lets loose with the secret that hearing a request doesn't force one to obey it, sue 'em under the DMCA. After that, anyone who doesn't obey you is obviously using a circumvention device (their brain), which you can have confiscated by the authorities.
As someone who is currently wrestling with Redhat 9.0 in an effort to wean himself off of Windows... I'd say MS will have an effective monopoly for some time to come.
Actually, I wonder what the theoretical limit is on converting waste heat back into electricity in a laptop... would it be worth the extra weight? Even if it's NOT worth the extra weight, it might be fun to do it just because it can be done.
Off the top of my head, though, I'm not aware of any laptop-scale device for generating power from a heat source.
You know, I always got the feeling that "Mostly Harmless" was deliberately written by a bitter man to piss his fanbase off so that they'd stop bugging him to write sequels to the first four books.
This is the same author, after all, who wrote the whole middle of "So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish" in response to the publisher's demands, but then prefaced the section with a note that the middle of the book was crap, please skip to the end which has a nice bit about Marvin in it.
I shudder to think how he was planning to sabatoge the movie, which he must have regarded as a worse sellout than books four and five.
That's it... it was ShadowRun. Thanks for the memory jog. I've still got a bunch of sourcebooks I never used because my RPG friends were unable to get over D&D.
Actually, I've been wanting a 'SmartLink' for some time. IIRC, I picked that term up from a cyberpunk RPG.
Think about it, a position sensor on your weapon and a stereo HMD connected through a small processor. Wherever you point at a target, a dot is superimposed over reality via the HMD and you can tell where the slug will hit.
You could even have the computer calculate drop, drift, and estimated inaccuracy due to an unsteady grip. Of course, those last three don't apply if you're using a TBW which is so much cooler than a conventional gun, what with it's phaser-like effects and all.
Sadly, that means a much more than 5x factor of difficulty to get to LEO.
If you've achieved a 5x greater delta-v, that means a lot more friction (for longer, too) on the way back down... so, more thermal shielding which is more weight to carry up with you. Also, getting to LEO is a nice trick, but once you're there, you're going to want a little extra life support as well - because who wants to kick themselves out of LEO right after reaching it? So, far more weight, which means more fuel.
I'm going to pull a number out of my ass and say that reaching LEO is 100x harder than a quick sub-orbital flight to the 'edge of space' despite only needing 5x more delta-v.
What's the point of knowing there's damage on the underside of the shuttle, when it's already up there with no ability to perform a repair or be rescued?
I'm pretty sure a lot of people will find fault with that reasoning, but the only argument that could convince me to change my mind is one that involves a plausible repair senario.
I'm not sure I buy that; knowing that elevated passenger levels on a given day and route are a random event doesn't help predict a future random event.
Knowing daily averages by day of the week and season for travel between any two stops should be completely sufficient for route planning.
Hell, maybe I'm missing something here, but I'd like to know why you'd care if it's the same people travelling the same route... all a subway car cares about is whether or not it's underutilized or filled to capacity.
After a long day of logging and then processing the results... you need to know how many people travelled between any particular two stations on any given train.
I strongly suspect that once you've distilled the raw data down to "From Stop A, 10 passengers travelled to Stop C, 5 passengers to Stop E" you don't need to know who those individual passengers are. There isn't any statistically valid reason of which I am aware for keeping that information.
IP addresses aren't exclusively represented by 4 sets of three decimal digits, you know.
Most times I see an IP address containing a number less than 100, there is no leading zero to pad that portion back to three digits. Therefore, an IP with three sets of numbers under 100 would have a mere 9 digits. Mr. Cox was quite accurate.
The other responses to my post were very interesting... yours was just sad. I'm sure you read, but do you comprehend what those groups of letters and words mean?
The parent of my post suggested a 2-part receipt, of which only HALF would be put in the box, and the other HALF you would keep.
You can't have voting receipts... because that would make it too easy to corrupt the voting process.
Imagine a candidate with 'connections', who insists that you provide him with the opportunity to view your receipt the day after the vote - and if you don't show him a receipt with his name on it, his 'connections' hurt you, your family, or your property.
Re:Obligatory "they started with..." quote
on
RFID Hell
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· Score: 1
Actually, the only problem I have with GPS tracking of the types of offenders you have mentioned is that it would indicate they'd been released from prison.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to know if the design can be scaled down to the point where it would power a single house.
Nested Goatse.cx pop-ups. Really nice. It's jerks like this that ruin it for others who post as Anonymous Coward and are now going to get filtered by people like me trying to avoid the trolls and other jerks.
Well, I doubt that you can call our (yes, I'm Canadian as well) elections 'serious, worthwhile political discourse', since they're just as full of unfulfillable promises, bullshit and mudslinging as most other places.
I am however, glad that I remain blissfully unaware of any circumstance in Canadian politics that is in any way similar to the last national American election.
Well, for one thing there is a lot less need for a post-election media circus that employs all sorts of anchors, pundits, makeup artists, cameramen, reporters, lawyers, judges, etc, etc, etc.
Canadian elections are generally pretty dull.
It seems to me that somebody could make a heck of a lot of coin by setting up a business specifically for the purposes of suing telemarketers.
You'd charge, say $20/offence, and require a form granting access to the customer's phone records and listing as much information about the call as possible (though time & date should be enough)... then go ahead and sue (maybe on behalf of hundreds of other people complaining about the same firm as well). Keep 90% of the judgement and send the remaining 10% to your client(s).
However, I believe in equal pay for equal work, and outsourcing to India and China doesn't do that. We're taking advantage of lower standards of living. We can't just pay more without disrupting the hell out of their economies (which would be fairly evil of us, I think). We need a tarriff placed on foriegn labour designed to compensate for differences in standards of living - an American company manufacturing goods for sale to Americans should have to support the American standard of living.
By sending labour of ANY sort overseas, but expecting to sell back home, companies are behaving like citizens who don't pay their taxes - they are expecting to reap the benefits of the home economy without paying their fair share to support it.
You know, I thought that was kind of a stupid, not as funny as intended kind of post until you got to the bit about the radio.
I can just imagine MS putting code in that only permitted a DRM-compliant radio to work in a car - which would mean no home-burned compliations, legal or not, knowing the way DRM usually ends up 'functioning'.
Anyway, I think that level of problem is far enough off that one need not be paranoid quite yet.
I'll burn some karma myself; This post is being done from my brand spankin' new RH9 box. A real bitch for a Wintechie to install a DLINK WLAN driver, considering there are a few projects out there, but none worked as documented. Of course, I learned a few things, so it isn't all bad.
Try telling people that they're not allowed to make copies, or allow copies to be made.
If anyone lets loose with the secret that hearing a request doesn't force one to obey it, sue 'em under the DMCA. After that, anyone who doesn't obey you is obviously using a circumvention device (their brain), which you can have confiscated by the authorities.
As someone who is currently wrestling with Redhat 9.0 in an effort to wean himself off of Windows... I'd say MS will have an effective monopoly for some time to come.
Actually, I wonder what the theoretical limit is on converting waste heat back into electricity in a laptop... would it be worth the extra weight? Even if it's NOT worth the extra weight, it might be fun to do it just because it can be done.
Off the top of my head, though, I'm not aware of any laptop-scale device for generating power from a heat source.
You know, I always got the feeling that "Mostly Harmless" was deliberately written by a bitter man to piss his fanbase off so that they'd stop bugging him to write sequels to the first four books.
This is the same author, after all, who wrote the whole middle of "So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish" in response to the publisher's demands, but then prefaced the section with a note that the middle of the book was crap, please skip to the end which has a nice bit about Marvin in it.
I shudder to think how he was planning to sabatoge the movie, which he must have regarded as a worse sellout than books four and five.
That's it... it was ShadowRun. Thanks for the memory jog. I've still got a bunch of sourcebooks I never used because my RPG friends were unable to get over D&D.
Actually, I've been wanting a 'SmartLink' for some time. IIRC, I picked that term up from a cyberpunk RPG.
Think about it, a position sensor on your weapon and a stereo HMD connected through a small processor. Wherever you point at a target, a dot is superimposed over reality via the HMD and you can tell where the slug will hit.
You could even have the computer calculate drop, drift, and estimated inaccuracy due to an unsteady grip. Of course, those last three don't apply if you're using a TBW which is so much cooler than a conventional gun, what with it's phaser-like effects and all.
Sadly, that means a much more than 5x factor of difficulty to get to LEO.
If you've achieved a 5x greater delta-v, that means a lot more friction (for longer, too) on the way back down... so, more thermal shielding which is more weight to carry up with you. Also, getting to LEO is a nice trick, but once you're there, you're going to want a little extra life support as well - because who wants to kick themselves out of LEO right after reaching it? So, far more weight, which means more fuel.
I'm going to pull a number out of my ass and say that reaching LEO is 100x harder than a quick sub-orbital flight to the 'edge of space' despite only needing 5x more delta-v.
OK. Damn, you're good.
It appears most of the other replies were of the, "If they'd know they could have pulled a repair kit and EVA proceedure out of their ass" variety.
Actually, I kind of side with the managers.
What's the point of knowing there's damage on the underside of the shuttle, when it's already up there with no ability to perform a repair or be rescued?
I'm pretty sure a lot of people will find fault with that reasoning, but the only argument that could convince me to change my mind is one that involves a plausible repair senario.
Perhaps more useful information for those of us at high risk of mime-exposure: "In the dark, no one can see a mime."
I'm not sure I buy that; knowing that elevated passenger levels on a given day and route are a random event doesn't help predict a future random event.
Knowing daily averages by day of the week and season for travel between any two stops should be completely sufficient for route planning.
Hell, maybe I'm missing something here, but I'd like to know why you'd care if it's the same people travelling the same route... all a subway car cares about is whether or not it's underutilized or filled to capacity.
After a long day of logging and then processing the results... you need to know how many people travelled between any particular two stations on any given train.
I strongly suspect that once you've distilled the raw data down to "From Stop A, 10 passengers travelled to Stop C, 5 passengers to Stop E" you don't need to know who those individual passengers are. There isn't any statistically valid reason of which I am aware for keeping that information.
IP addresses aren't exclusively represented by 4 sets of three decimal digits, you know.
Most times I see an IP address containing a number less than 100, there is no leading zero to pad that portion back to three digits. Therefore, an IP with three sets of numbers under 100 would have a mere 9 digits. Mr. Cox was quite accurate.
The other responses to my post were very interesting... yours was just sad. I'm sure you read, but do you comprehend what those groups of letters and words mean?
The parent of my post suggested a 2-part receipt, of which only HALF would be put in the box, and the other HALF you would keep.
You can't have voting receipts... because that would make it too easy to corrupt the voting process.
Imagine a candidate with 'connections', who insists that you provide him with the opportunity to view your receipt the day after the vote - and if you don't show him a receipt with his name on it, his 'connections' hurt you, your family, or your property.
Actually, the only problem I have with GPS tracking of the types of offenders you have mentioned is that it would indicate they'd been released from prison.