The last time this was tried it was a complete success. The American Radio Relay League was delivering messages (about the length of a ping) coast to coast to places the wires didn't run, and they changed communications as we understand it.
The hitches are considerable this time. WiFi range and the line of site behavior of microwaves will be a significant impediment. Hands across America and the ARRL had methods of crossing large uninhabited distances.
I think if they are going to have any chance for bridging this, they'll have to bridge the tough spots with AX.25 using frequencies that carry. I would still consider it a success if 60% of the distance were to be covered with WiFi, and the rest more serious microwave hops, and even some longer waves (the 23cm band has space and decent speed). I can see the ocean from my porch and have a 30 foot high roof If they end up taking a NorthWestern route to the left pond, I'll certainly volunteer.
While those are very cool, and I want one just for that reason, there is no keyboard on that toy.
Since the poster specifically mentioned: All I really need is a linux command line to run SSH, links, and a few other things.
Then I'll wager no-keyboard is a deal breaker.
If you really want to run a command line comfortably, I'd suggest you bump up to the "small notebook, of previous generation processors" category. I just sold my Armada M700 series laptop, and I think it's lesser brothers might be a good match for your needs. The M700 was a true platform in that they had a large range of processors and ram that fit it. So compatible accessories abound on ebay.
Since they were targeted at the corporate types they have good docking station integration, and most importantly although there are an abundance of modern slip in peripherals (like a DVD/CDRW combo drive) the ones with the 400Mhz processors run XP like slugs so the corporate types are getting off them quick. This gives you a rare combination of "older laptop prices" but modern laptop battery and peripheral capability.
This one here.
Will probably sell for $270. It's PII 400Mhz processor will run a LowProfile Linux very well, and then you get multiple xterms per screen (which is always cool when your admin-ing). Cooler still you can slip out that nearly useless DVD drive and slip an additional battery in, and get excellent run times. Which you'll need for 1500.ogg files you'll still have space for.
Friends with whom I installed my first LCD and keypad-driven in-car MP3 player were really impressed at the time, but it was considerable work, and there was lots of software tweaking involved.
With Freevo's help, and some off the shelf components, this guy has a whole different level of cool going on without significantly more work.
When people point and look and ask questions, they're going ask what software it's running, and they're going to hear Linux. In the mindspace of youth, it's cool stuff like this that competes with all the fluff in WinXP (it really is pretty), and challenges the assumption as to which is cooler. Projects like this will win us more teenage users than Clippy could ever hope to.
Unlike spam, you solicit your downloads by choice. If they used a bug in a P2P network to fill people's hard drives with crap unsolicited, the anti-spam angle would seem workable. As it is you solicit their system to engage in obvious copyright infringement. Your claim for relief against fraud for an for an 'unpaid' service while attempting to break the law is going to be seriously weak.
I think you'd have a better chance asking the judge to prosecute someone for selling you a joint filled with oregano. At least in that case, you gave someone money and thus (in most states) there is an implied contract of fitness for the generally recognized use of the product.
Science put to good use? Wierd.
on
Sniffing Out Cancer
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Cheap tests are what HMOs love. If this test could be run for $5 a patient, they could add it to twice-yearly checkup for people over 55 and catch tumors when they are small and more cheaply removed. I kinda shrug when they invent new million dollar procedures for helping with a disease as they won't be in widespread use for many years, but cheap accurate tests like these could be saving thousands of lives a year, in just a few years. This seems very cool.
It seems likely it comes at a cost though. The accuracy of chemical detection they are talking about would make for some damnably accurate breath and air analysis tools. I certainly hope we resolve our most recent bout of prohibition in the states before Breathalyzers that can detect days old residue in the lungs are on the hip of every officer in the state.
I'm not sure that question can be put to completely to rest. I would argue that science, in total, is not at either extreme. But in the case of space exploration it's seems clearly incremental.
If some "space agency" invents a StarTrek like transporter and beams a chunk of Mars back to Earth, they can have the "First" title. But all the early space "Firsts" were a matter of strapping humans to the tips of bigger and badder rockets. I hate to simplify like that since a great deal of that silly incremental science went into them, but that is what they were.
Now the EAS people are going to gather more cool data with a probe that is a small fraction of the weight and cost of the one that went up twenty some years back. It doesn't have anti-matter drive, polaric shielding, or subspace communication. They're strapping a robot arm with cameras to a big bad rocket and pointing it at Mars. But the fact that I can show similarities in a chain of space missions back to the aerodynamics of the first hunting-spears shouldn't detract from the great work afoot. There are piles of little advancements and volumes of great data to be sent back, so I really can't see why they shouldn't get full credit for doing something better than it's ever been done before, even if, by commonly used abstractions, it isn't technically a first.
Neither Linux nor Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream are inarguable "Firsts" but I thank Ben, Jerry and Linus for doing them so well.
That is, the Brits and everyone else in the European Space Agency.
Do we always have to scream "FIRST!"?
on
Life on Mars? Why Not?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
First off, the article is worth the read. They are going to do a pile of cool things, and with the PAW robotic arm, they'll be very adaptive based on what they discover. Tres' cool.
But I must object to the following:
Clearly, if the British lander does find life on Mars, a scientific symposium will have to be convened to sort out who may have discovered it first: NASA or ESA.
Must we? Could we for once view science as the continuous stretch of micro-advances that it really is? Whether it's flight, or the TV, or beer the credit for doing it "first" seems to overwelm the real credit that I will lavish on the Brits at the end of the mission, and that is: the credit for doing it well.
Milberg: You would also think Linus would show more loyalty, to the folks that made him, but....
His parents?
It's a simple engineering axiom, if you don't know what you're talking about, don't.
Milberg@/. Karma: [fixed point exception: negative overflow on type long] (mostly due to being a troll's troll).
I can answer this...
on
GnomeDex 3.0
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Why do such people find it necessary to define themselves by their group?
Um. Because all humans do?
My answer comes in three points.
Though Geekdom isn't a religion for me, religion is one of the best examples of these things. My little town has a eight little churches, and not a day goes by that you can't go to some kind of church event at one of them.
I've talked to a large number of the folk that attend these gatherings. Their knowledge of the history surrounding the church and the flaws/merits of the different belief systems is rarely a match for mine. What it seems to come down to more often than not is that the congregation at their church has people whose company they enjoy and a preacher/minister/priest whose sermons speak to them at a personal level. Subsets of those same crowds gather based on enthusiasm for various sports, from the standard: football, baseball, soccer to the less so: curling, hopscotch, and rugby.
Geeks play or spectate on the Technology Sport. It truly is a game. It has big teams like HP, Apple, and IBM, and little ones like/., and MandrakeSoft. It has whole teams of ear-biters [we know who they are], and heated but friendly arguments over MVPs like Bruce, Eric, and Richard.
Every group of fans/players need an identifying group or logo to ease the job of finding like minded folks with which to congregate. If you want to talk sports with someone they can say they are a Chargers, Red Sox, and Brumbies fan. If you want to talk religion, they can say they are a formerly Jewish, briefly Catholic, Buddist. As in any other label these don't define all there is to a human, but like modem negotiation tones, they really do help you sync up in the beginning. This leaves those who fit the geek category with the task of picking a descriptive term. Technologist sounds too religious. HP fan, doesn't quite catch it. Hollywood has stomped on the more obvious terms with such generes as Revenge of the Nerds (I-MCLXII), and movies like "Hackers." So what is left to us?
In summary, people like fellowship, technology is a sport, people who seek fellowship with fans of the Technology sport need a name. In my RandomHouse unabridged, the second definition of Geek is simply, 2. person, fellow.
P.S. Iowa, in late July? How about we put the next one in scenic Barrow, AK in December?
Re:Brilliant solution.
on
Brain Privacy
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· Score: 1
But if you sell life insurance...
I specifically referred to the auto insurance issue because it was an indirect relationship. And yes, my examples were different, but what they all had in common, whether they were something you were born with and could change, or something you did as a kid and couldn't, or something that you still did today was that none of them prevent you from being a good driver. Even if every one of them moved you to a worsened statistical category, an African American smoker, who stole a candy bar as a child and tried pot while s/he was in college can should not be charged more for mandatory insurance that someone who did not fit these categories.
In this view, there is no difference between a characteristic that you were born with, and one that you chose because they are not directly related to the task at hand. Another obvious choice people make is their religion. If I had stats. to prove that Mormons drove better than Baptists, could I ask for that information on my insurance form and discriminate against this voluntary choice?
So how hard is it to provide training for slow-movers in faster ways to use the tool and then having contests for cash money or gift certificates or a paid day off or whatever?
Have you ever tried this?
Very few people's jobs are so quanitfiable that you can just look at some log file and figure out what their user-interface-operation speeds are. If you had something like a true data entry position, then it might be an option (and contests probably already exist at your office). For more typical office applications the time a person spends navigating on the computer is mixed in with other tasks, and though you and I might sit over their shoulder and think, "they'd be much faster if..." it will in general be hard to quantify productivity in a sufficiently objective way to deny someone a prize and have them feel it was even remotely fair.
Since the person who was asking/. was already looking for ...like an extensible version of Microsoft Access Forms for the green screen
I assumed he had other justifications for this project besides interface speed.
For the appropriate era, the Hero 2000 deserves a place of honor.
Robots have many useful purposes like manufacturing and deep sea exploration, but this non-trivial, non-toy robot was designed to inspire. It was an enormously complicated kit that our high school electronics class put together, that made all those stupid-seeming lessons on how to bias a transistor, and the million obscure uses of op-amps worthwhile. It illustrated for us, why you took the time to make good solder joints, and what these funny logic gates could actually be made to do. Go Heathkit!
I, too, use the all the keyboard shortcuts I can, and find them surprisingly available.
But the point he was making is cogent none the less. If you go into the office and tell your staff they have to start using the apps. they've been using for years "the way you think they should be using them," you'll probably note the conversation around the water cooler goes silent as you approach for several months. And not in a good way. People usually need a motivation to re-train that is a little more upbeat than "because you're inexcusably slow."
If you have the tools to make the development cheap, a new app interface is a great approach to the problem. You get to have meetings, everyone gets their input, several features they've always wanted are added. They "buy in" to the new interface, and they all start at the same point when learning the new system.
In the case where the Linux developer is not the only smart person in the organization (it happens:) ), the users may suggest features that genuinely enhance their productivity. I wouldn't be surprised if getting them to use the keyboard may be the least beneficial effect of the new interface.
When the technology is cheaply available to alter one's skin color will you dismiss any prejudice against African Americans with:
Then just stop being Black.
I was sincerely hoping that my examples were diverse enough to illustrate that the root cause they had in common wasn't a pro/con opinion on any particular subject but that: Accepting discriminatory practice when it seems like science, or saves us money, or only directly affects a class of people to which we don't belong, is always a bad choice. Always.
And more importantly, that if we can make it a habit that people in our society are alert for, recognize, and resoundingly reject such practice, we could live in a world without fear from new technology.
I'm glad there exist people in society that do the hardwork 39-41 hours a week, think the clean thoughts, use the "righteous" anti-stress meds (beer and cigs.), and go to church, but no body I know qualifies.
They may be in the majority, but I'd rather pick my nose than have a conversation with such people, and if you knew how long my fingernails are you'd know how painful I think it is.
We wouldn't just loose the creative sparks that make the world cool, we loose all the obsessed people who put up with the misery and pain of striving to be something great for the tiny chance they will become such.
Even if we had the genetic gifts, how many of us would have the dedication to shoot enough basketballs to develop the skills to play for the NBA? Only an insane person would take the kind of pain long distance runners tell me about to place 165th in a marathon with 4000 other runners. Variations of insanity drive all but the most mundane of tasks in our society. I'd put up with the Antarctic climate to avoid living in a place like that.
I'm afraid I simply pictured the bus load of nuns in quantity, (rather than in the bus itself), being dumped onto a similar volume of children, like from the scoop of a great bulldozer. Which brought to mind the image of the nuns afterward telling the children that all the pain and bruises were the kids own faults, because of their SINS.
The real drawback to the old Nickel-Titanium "muscle springs" was their lousy cyclic rate. Even with a fan on it, you couldn't get a spring with a 7 o.z., 1 inch throw to retract the distance it traveled in under 15 seconds. For most apps. this was just too slow. Now with less heat to bleed off and lower voltages, the cyclic rate could become useful. Motors with no brushes or bearings would be awefully useful in scads of gagets.
The application that springs to mind is in solar heating/cooling systems, where valves and pumps under computer control have piles of moving, rubbing parts could be replaced by parts that would work silently, and almost never wear out. Submersible pumps with no seals to erode would be nice too.
We all know that the copyright system needs a bit of an overhaul in the face of the technological changes of this and the previous century.
We all know that it is in the most profitable interests of large content holders/providers to fight these changes.
Whining will help, but not much.
If you want the Vic20 cartridges, buy the rights from the copyright holder and release them.
If you want to win the right to all the old cartridges and games and the technology that has blended into our cultural heritage in decades past, but is no longer profitable to package for consumers, support the EFF and change the law. This is not simply how honorable people fight these battles, it is how we win them in such a way that our children can fight new battles with these safely behind.
And as with genetics...
on
Brain Privacy
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· Score: 3, Interesting
This science will require us to grow socially, or regress into something ugly.
In both cases there will be untold millions for large corporations to save by abusing this technology. If we do not fight for our rights to be ourselves, companies will require periodic brain-scans as easily as periodic drug checks. They won't have to pay attention to individuality or the cause of one person's odd brain-patterns, they will justify it with statistics. "People with your brain-type are 80% more likely to become unhappy at this job, therefore we will not risk hiring you." They won't care that 5% of the people with your brain-type do especially well at that job, because they will work the percentages and it won't pay to take the risk.
The pay off of having faith in people doesn't show up on the bottom line, and the burden of having faith in people is one that the "gifted" or "blessed" often don't want to shoulder. If we want these scientific advances to be stairs for the ascension of mankind into the kind of species we can truly admire, then we must bridge this social gap. We must say as a society that we are willing to pay the price in dollars and cents, in mistakes and losses, to retain our diversity and that of our neighbors, even when we don't understand or approve of them.
Numerous studies have shown, the category of people who smoke has more accidents to it's credit than that of people who don't. As it stands, today it is legal to charge someone more for insurance if they smoke, than if they don't. Smokers have become the outsiders. This injustice remains. It is based on a statistic no more or less true than:
People who smoke pot have a greater chance of becoming addicted to pot.
Can't really argue that one.
"People who steal in their youth are more likely to steal as adults."
Also very true, and plainly so when you consider it's corollary.
The first black person on your board of directors will have a harder time "getting along."
This, in my limited exposure to such things is also likely to be true, and were the mechanism
to exist to quantify such things (one day it will) I'll wager that statistics would bear this out.
As technology advances more "truths" like these will exist, and the scientific evidence to back them up will become undeniable. The socially myopic corporations of the world will want to modify the way they treat the people who fall into the categories above in a profitable fashion and they will fight for their perceived right to do so.
The question of how to move forward is not one of fighting discoveries, or denying the obvious.
It is one of willfully choosing to make illegal and immoral by our societies standards, any use of indirectly related statistical phenomena to alter or inhibit any citizen's opportunities in any endeavor the public is permitted to regulate.
Most of us would raise hell if our auto insurance company demanded the right to to base our insurance rates on the following questions:
Have you ever stolen anything in your life?
Have you ever smoked canabis?
Are you of African American descent?
And we can be proud of that fact.
How many of us left the question box "Do you smoke?" unanswered and got on the insurance agent for being at the root of a Gattacan state?
Is it because of how incredibly annoying it is to step outside a crowded shopping area yearning to breath fresh air only to find our lungs filled by a cloud of noxious fumes? Is it the meal ruined by the elderly folk, who sat at the edge of the smoking section in a restaurant in our youths and managed to billow forth more atmospheric poisons than a '66 Chevelle?
What ever our reason for just checking the box handing over the form, does it really justify making them pay more for mandatory auto insurance? Is any reason you could give any less a prejudice than would be implied by seeing the three questions in my list above listed on a job application?
Gattaca ends or begins with us.
For highschool students I wouldn't worry...
on
FDL Math Textbooks?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I know when you're thinking in "math mode" the book is supposed to be correct, and that is supposed to be an inarguable given.
I think there is another perspective worth considering however.
There is the teenager (type K) that gets the right answer and can't make it match the one in the back of the book.
There is the teenager (type N) that sees a glimpse of "all that is math" (ok, a limited version) and is overwhelmed that they are having a hard time with Alg. 1 when they still have Geometry, Alg. 2, Trig, Pre-Calc, and Calculus just to get out of highschool and into a good college.
My observations were: That type N teenagers outnumbered type K's by at least 5 to 1.
That type K students had attention spans on the order of double the length of that of the average teenagers, but that this was still usually in the vicinity of 20 minutes of frustration before, "giving up and asking the teacher the next day."
I also noticed type N students were consistently relieved to see that the book could get things wrong, though later in life I attributed this to sloppy publishing, they seemed to take it as a sign that the math they were doing was "hard to get right, even for the experts who write these books." This seemed to validate their struggles.
Though this event only happened twice, in my 5 years of high-school math, it's impact to me and the other student was noteworthy. I was a type K and can remember the day I told the Calculus teacher that I had a particular answer for a problem that didn't agree with the book, and (as good teachers often do) she wrote the problem on the board and talked through the steps as she did them to help me spot the logic error. The other students, envious of the ease with which math seemed to come to me, were glad of the opportunity to see me screw up in an illustratedly public fashion. The teacher came to the same answer I had, and when I told her so, she stepped back for a count of 1, as if that was all the time it took her to completely rework the problem in her head, and shrugged and said "Well, the book is wrong." and went back to her desk. Some several days later my ego came back down to a livable size, but I had forever shed the last vestiges of the std. teenager's insecurity, "I may not be smart enough to understand this."
My conclusion is: Even if not for my, and another students, "special victories" over the oppressive self-righteousness of the HighSchoolPoliceState, my first three observations lead me to conclude that these errors, did at least as much good as harm. I also conclude that even the type K's benefited more than they lost, since having the type N's functioning at greater efficiency meant that they'd have to listen to fewer stupid questions during class, and noticeably less whining during the "quiet study" periods.
Even if this conclusion isn't valid for college math, a decent understanding of calculus is enough for all but the most formidable hacking. So I probably won't worry to much about the errors in HS math depriving the world of the "hacker class."
As to the issue of open text books. The university system and the people currently making large money on these things will fight an opensource version as tooth and claw as their O/S counterparts. The only advantage I can see is that their egos of university profs. will be to large too allow them to "play stupid." and foist it on others like, "...the people that made the PC fast and reliable." [Actual Microsoft Ad.]
Given how much code you could borrow from Project Gutenbergs supporters, a distributed document checking system for an FDL text book would be easy to set up and vastly improve the quality of the work. I certainly hope this comes about.
...I must say I don't have an opinion either way on the bill...
That's surprising. It's hard to imagine that you could be at all familiar with a non-technical perspective and not know how incendiary were the images you used.
I wouldn't have imagined that you would have gone into the history of War Games style auto-dialing to explain "war driving"'s hacker origins, but the "bacronym" Wireless Access Recon. or some other indication that War (in this case) wasn't (as your link points out) "a battle," a "military operation," an "active hostility" or an "open armed conflict." would have been much appreciated by those of us who use this technology and aren't looking for conflict.
When you repeat something that is simply farcical, and end it with, "...experts said." That's not the same as saying "opponents of the bill claimed." Without stating what makes these people expert, or who they are, many would take this to imply that you believe they were experts. And by extension, that their opinions have some merit to you.
I would be very interested to know your actual opinion. What would be a good analogy to the physical world as to the actual impact of War Driving? I like the dog drinking from the sprinklers, as it highlights the pettiness by which someone would begrudge a few thousand free packets of Internet surfing or a few thousand grams of water (which is worth more in some places) to a passerby. What do you think?
This is what (when I read it in my non-techy persona) I get from the article.
War Driving
Just like being... authorized to walk inside, sit on the couch or help yourself to the contents of the fridge
New Law Lets'm "off the hook"
They can get into banks
Committee still open for opinion ...opening up greater opportunity for criminal activity.
I'm delighted by the suggestion that this interpretation of your article may have not been your intent, but if you give your article to a decent sample of people who are intimidated by these new technologies, I think you'll find their opinions to closely match mine, that this is a soft battle cry to fight those stupid lawmakers that are endangering our computers and checking accounts.
That explaination would have been fine as well since Wireless Access Reconnaissance was added post-hoc. But the author offers neither explaination which leaves the newbie to think of is outside it's hacker-historical origins, as simply war. Which, as words go, seems to lean toward the agressive.
Brian McWilliams obviously thinks this is a bad law, and he has slanted his article accordingly. I'd have thought Wired's editors would have caught this sort of thing.
First off he refers to "war driving" and "war chalking" without ever once spelling out Wireless Access Reconnaissance even though he finds the space to define WEP. Makes it sound a bit aggressive, and not by accident.
New Hampshire's existing statute says it is a crime to knowingly access any computer network without authorization. By analogy, just because someone leaves his house unlocked doesn't mean you are authorized to walk inside, sit on the couch or help yourself to the contents of the fridge.
But HB 495 turns that thinking upside down, experts said.
No, it doesn't, and if you new the first damned thing about this technology you would never repeat what your (unverified) experts have told you. Walking into someone's open house and helping yourself to the contents of their fridge, is trespassing and stealing, and in showing such low regard for their personal space it becomes reasonable for them to wonder if your are a threat to safety and bodily harm. We're not talking a simple risk of data here.
What's more, if an alleged intruder can prove he gained access to an insecure wireless network believing it was intended to be open, the defendant may be able to get off the hook using an "affirmative defense" provision of the existing law.
That's not "getting off the hook." That's having committed no crime in the first place.
And here we are pandering to the fears of the masses again:
A 10-minute war drive down the main business district of Manchester earlier this month using a laptop with a standard wireless card revealed nearly two dozen open wireless access points, including some operated by banks and other businesses.
To the sadly un-geek of the world this suggests that NH is passing a law that makes it legal for hackers to hack your bank accounts. Clearly untrue, clearly flamebait.
And in closing he reminds everyone that the committee is, "...still open to arguments from anyone."
And closes with,
"We want to be sure that it wasn't the case that, through trying to protect people under certain circumstances, we were opening up greater opportunity for criminal activity," said Peterson.
If Brian had wanted a decent analogy to explain WAR driving he could have used the following:
It's like passing a law that claims it is legal for someone walking by on the sidewalk to let their dog drink from your sprinklers. Technically their dog is trespassing, and technically it's your water it's drinking, and technically it's allowing strangers to loiter near your house where they might become more aware of your houses security vulnerabilities. But as the lawmakers might have said themselves, "let's just get reasonable"
I like the pretty pictures in Wired, but I cannot renew my subscription in good conscience as the folks in NH are making a rare stand for reasonable behavior and a technology magazine is issuing flaimbait articles in response.
So Brian, if you're walking by my house with your wireless card in the sleeve of your IPAQ, feel free to check your e-mail and grab some headlines from/. If while you're doing this, your dog drinks from my sprinklers s/he is welcome to all s/he can drink. If you come into my house and steal my food I will offer you a 230 grain explanation of the difference between these activities at about 900 feet per second. Just so ya know
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Slashdot Mirror
The last time this was tried it was a complete success. The American Radio Relay League was delivering messages (about the length of a ping) coast to coast to places the wires didn't run, and they changed communications as we understand it.
The hitches are considerable this time. WiFi range and the line of site behavior of microwaves will be a significant impediment. Hands across America and the ARRL had methods of crossing large uninhabited distances.
I think if they are going to have any chance for bridging this, they'll have to bridge the tough spots with AX.25 using frequencies that carry. I would still consider it a success if 60% of the distance were to be covered with WiFi, and the rest more serious microwave hops, and even some longer waves (the 23cm band has space and decent speed). I can see the ocean from my porch and have a 30 foot high roof If they end up taking a NorthWestern route to the left pond, I'll certainly volunteer.
Best of luck to them.
While those are very cool, and I want one just for that reason, there is no keyboard on that toy.
.ogg files you'll still have space for.
Since the poster specifically mentioned:
All I really need is a linux command line to run SSH, links, and a few other things.
Then I'll wager no-keyboard is a deal breaker.
If you really want to run a command line comfortably, I'd suggest you bump up to the "small notebook, of previous generation processors" category. I just sold my Armada M700 series laptop, and I think it's lesser brothers might be a good match for your needs. The M700 was a true platform in that they had a large range of processors and ram that fit it. So compatible accessories abound on ebay.
Since they were targeted at the corporate types they have good docking station integration, and most importantly although there are an abundance of modern slip in peripherals (like a DVD/CDRW combo drive) the ones with the 400Mhz processors run XP like slugs so the corporate types are getting off them quick. This gives you a rare combination of "older laptop prices" but modern laptop battery and peripheral capability.
This one here. Will probably sell for $270. It's PII 400Mhz processor will run a LowProfile Linux very well, and then you get multiple xterms per screen (which is always cool when your admin-ing). Cooler still you can slip out that nearly useless DVD drive and slip an additional battery in, and get excellent run times. Which you'll need for 1500
Friends with whom I installed my first LCD and keypad-driven in-car MP3 player were really impressed at the time, but it was considerable work, and there was lots of software tweaking involved.
With Freevo's help, and some off the shelf components, this guy has a whole different level of cool going on without significantly more work.
When people point and look and ask questions, they're going ask what software it's running, and they're going to hear Linux. In the mindspace of youth, it's cool stuff like this that competes with all the fluff in WinXP (it really is pretty), and challenges the assumption as to which is cooler. Projects like this will win us more teenage users than Clippy could ever hope to.
Kudos John.
Unlike spam, you solicit your downloads by choice. If they used a bug in a P2P network to fill people's hard drives with crap unsolicited, the anti-spam angle would seem workable. As it is you solicit their system to engage in obvious copyright infringement. Your claim for relief against fraud for an for an 'unpaid' service while attempting to break the law is going to be seriously weak.
I think you'd have a better chance asking the judge to prosecute someone for selling you a joint filled with oregano. At least in that case, you gave someone money and thus (in most states) there is an implied contract of fitness for the generally recognized use of the product.
Cheap tests are what HMOs love. If this test could be run for $5 a patient, they could add it to twice-yearly checkup for people over 55 and catch tumors when they are small and more cheaply removed. I kinda shrug when they invent new million dollar procedures for helping with a disease as they won't be in widespread use for many years, but cheap accurate tests like these could be saving thousands of lives a year, in just a few years. This seems very cool.
It seems likely it comes at a cost though. The accuracy of chemical detection they are talking about would make for some damnably accurate breath and air analysis tools. I certainly hope we resolve our most recent bout of prohibition in the states before Breathalyzers that can detect days old residue in the lungs are on the hip of every officer in the state.
I'm not sure that question can be put to completely to rest. I would argue that science, in total, is not at either extreme. But in the case of space exploration it's seems clearly incremental.
If some "space agency" invents a StarTrek like transporter and beams a chunk of Mars back to Earth, they can have the "First" title. But all the early space "Firsts" were a matter of strapping humans to the tips of bigger and badder rockets. I hate to simplify like that since a great deal of that silly incremental science went into them, but that is what they were.
Now the EAS people are going to gather more cool data with a probe that is a small fraction of the weight and cost of the one that went up twenty some years back. It doesn't have anti-matter drive, polaric shielding, or subspace communication. They're strapping a robot arm with cameras to a big bad rocket and pointing it at Mars. But the fact that I can show similarities in a chain of space missions back to the aerodynamics of the first hunting-spears shouldn't detract from the great work afoot. There are piles of little advancements and volumes of great data to be sent back, so I really can't see why they shouldn't get full credit for doing something better than it's ever been done before, even if, by commonly used abstractions, it isn't technically a first.
Neither Linux nor Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream are inarguable "Firsts" but I thank Ben, Jerry and Linus for doing them so well.
That is, the Brits and everyone else in the European Space Agency.
First off, the article is worth the read. They are going to do a pile of cool things, and with the PAW robotic arm, they'll be very adaptive based on what they discover. Tres' cool.
But I must object to the following:
Clearly, if the British lander does find life on Mars, a scientific symposium will have to be convened to sort out who may have discovered it first: NASA or ESA.
Must we? Could we for once view science as the continuous stretch of micro-advances that it really is? Whether it's flight, or the TV, or beer the credit for doing it "first" seems to overwelm the real credit that I will lavish on the Brits at the end of the mission, and that is: the credit for doing it well.
Milberg: You would also think Linus would show more loyalty, to the folks that made him, but....
His parents?
It's a simple engineering axiom, if you don't know what you're talking about, don't.
Milberg@/. Karma: [fixed point exception: negative overflow on type long] (mostly due to being a troll's troll).
Um. Because all humans do?
My answer comes in three points.
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Though Geekdom isn't a religion for me, religion is one of the best examples of these things. My little town has a eight little churches, and not a day goes by that you can't go to some kind of church event at one of them.
I've talked to a large number of the folk that attend these gatherings. Their knowledge of the history surrounding the church and the flaws/merits of the different belief systems is rarely a match for mine. What it seems to come down to more often than not is that the congregation at their church has people whose company they enjoy and a preacher/minister/priest whose sermons speak to them at a personal level. Subsets of those same crowds gather based on enthusiasm for various sports, from the standard: football, baseball, soccer to the less so: curling, hopscotch, and rugby.
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Geeks play or spectate on the Technology Sport. It truly is a game. It has big teams like HP, Apple, and IBM, and little ones like
/., and MandrakeSoft. It has whole teams of ear-biters [we know who they are], and heated but friendly arguments over MVPs like Bruce, Eric, and Richard.
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Every group of fans/players need an identifying group or logo to ease the job of finding like minded folks with which to congregate. If you want to talk sports with someone they can say they are a Chargers, Red Sox, and Brumbies fan. If you want to talk religion, they can say they are a formerly Jewish, briefly Catholic, Buddist. As in any other label these don't define all there is to a human, but like modem negotiation tones, they really do help you sync up in the beginning. This leaves those who fit the geek category with the task of picking a descriptive term. Technologist sounds too religious. HP fan, doesn't quite catch it. Hollywood has stomped on the more obvious terms with such generes as Revenge of the Nerds (I-MCLXII), and movies like "Hackers." So what is left to us?
In summary, people like fellowship, technology is a sport, people who seek fellowship with fans of the Technology sport need a name. In my RandomHouse unabridged, the second definition of Geek is simply, 2. person, fellow.P.S. Iowa, in late July? How about we put the next one in scenic Barrow, AK in December?
But if you sell life insurance...
I specifically referred to the auto insurance issue because it was an indirect relationship. And yes, my examples were different, but what they all had in common, whether they were something you were born with and could change, or something you did as a kid and couldn't, or something that you still did today was that none of them prevent you from being a good driver. Even if every one of them moved you to a worsened statistical category, an African American smoker, who stole a candy bar as a child and tried pot while s/he was in college can should not be charged more for mandatory insurance that someone who did not fit these categories.
In this view, there is no difference between a characteristic that you were born with, and one that you chose because they are not directly related to the task at hand. Another obvious choice people make is their religion. If I had stats. to prove that Mormons drove better than Baptists, could I ask for that information on my insurance form and discriminate against this voluntary choice?
That was the point I was after.
So how hard is it to provide training for slow-movers in faster ways to use the tool and then having contests for cash money or gift certificates or a paid day off or whatever?
/. was already looking for
...like an extensible version of Microsoft Access Forms for the green screen
Have you ever tried this?
Very few people's jobs are so quanitfiable that you can just look at some log file and figure out what their user-interface-operation speeds are. If you had something like a true data entry position, then it might be an option (and contests probably already exist at your office). For more typical office applications the time a person spends navigating on the computer is mixed in with other tasks, and though you and I might sit over their shoulder and think, "they'd be much faster if..." it will in general be hard to quantify productivity in a sufficiently objective way to deny someone a prize and have them feel it was even remotely fair.
Since the person who was asking
I assumed he had other justifications for this project besides interface speed.
For the appropriate era, the Hero 2000 deserves a place of honor.
Robots have many useful purposes like manufacturing and deep sea exploration, but this non-trivial, non-toy robot was designed to inspire. It was an enormously complicated kit that our high school electronics class put together, that made all those stupid-seeming lessons on how to bias a transistor, and the million obscure uses of op-amps worthwhile. It illustrated for us, why you took the time to make good solder joints, and what these funny logic gates could actually be made to do. Go Heathkit!
I, too, use the all the keyboard shortcuts I can, and find them surprisingly available.
:) ), the users may suggest features that genuinely enhance their productivity. I wouldn't be surprised if getting them to use the keyboard may be the least beneficial effect of the new interface.
But the point he was making is cogent none the less. If you go into the office and tell your staff they have to start using the apps. they've been using for years "the way you think they should be using them," you'll probably note the conversation around the water cooler goes silent as you approach for several months. And not in a good way. People usually need a motivation to re-train that is a little more upbeat than "because you're inexcusably slow."
If you have the tools to make the development cheap, a new app interface is a great approach to the problem. You get to have meetings, everyone gets their input, several features they've always wanted are added. They "buy in" to the new interface, and they all start at the same point when learning the new system.
In the case where the Linux developer is not the only smart person in the organization (it happens
When the technology is cheaply available to alter one's skin color will you dismiss any prejudice against African Americans with:
Then just stop being Black.
I was sincerely hoping that my examples were diverse enough to illustrate that the root cause they had in common wasn't a pro/con opinion on any particular subject but that:
Accepting discriminatory practice when it seems like science, or saves us money, or only directly affects a class of people to which we don't belong, is always a bad choice. Always.
And more importantly, that if we can make it a habit that people in our society are alert for, recognize, and resoundingly reject such practice, we could live in a world without fear from new technology.
P.S. I've never smoked anything but salmon.
I'm glad there exist people in society that do the hardwork 39-41 hours a week, think the clean thoughts, use the "righteous" anti-stress meds (beer and cigs.), and go to church, but no body I know qualifies.
They may be in the majority, but I'd rather pick my nose than have a conversation with such people, and if you knew how long my fingernails are you'd know how painful I think it is.
We wouldn't just loose the creative sparks that make the world cool, we loose all the obsessed people who put up with the misery and pain of striving to be something great for the tiny chance they will become such.
Even if we had the genetic gifts, how many of us would have the dedication to shoot enough basketballs to develop the skills to play for the NBA? Only an insane person would take the kind of pain long distance runners tell me about to place 165th in a marathon with 4000 other runners. Variations of insanity drive all but the most mundane of tasks in our society. I'd put up with the Antarctic climate to avoid living in a place like that.
I'm afraid I simply pictured the bus load of nuns in quantity, (rather than in the bus itself), being dumped onto a similar volume of children, like from the scoop of a great bulldozer. Which brought to mind the image of the nuns afterward telling the children that all the pain and bruises were the kids own faults, because of their SINS.
That was the previous Nitinol technology.
The real drawback to the old Nickel-Titanium "muscle springs" was their lousy cyclic rate. Even with a fan on it, you couldn't get a spring with a 7 o.z., 1 inch throw to retract the distance it traveled in under 15 seconds. For most apps. this was just too slow. Now with less heat to bleed off and lower voltages, the cyclic rate could become useful. Motors with no brushes or bearings would be awefully useful in scads of gagets.
The application that springs to mind is in solar heating/cooling systems, where valves and pumps under computer control have piles of moving, rubbing parts could be replaced by parts that would work silently, and almost never wear out. Submersible pumps with no seals to erode would be nice too.
Or did it look to anyone else that Dr. Jörg Weissmüller from the Institut für Nanotechnologie in Duisburg bore a remarkable resemblence to Tarzan?
We all know that the copyright system needs a bit of an overhaul in the face of the technological changes of this and the previous century.
We all know that it is in the most profitable interests of large content holders/providers to fight these changes.
Whining will help, but not much.
If you want the Vic20 cartridges, buy the rights from the copyright holder and release them.
If you want to win the right to all the old cartridges and games and the technology that has blended into our cultural heritage in decades past, but is no longer profitable to package for consumers, support the EFF and change the law. This is not simply how honorable people fight these battles, it is how we win them in such a way that our children can fight new battles with these safely behind.
In both cases there will be untold millions for large corporations to save by abusing this technology. If we do not fight for our rights to be ourselves, companies will require periodic brain-scans as easily as periodic drug checks. They won't have to pay attention to individuality or the cause of one person's odd brain-patterns, they will justify it with statistics. "People with your brain-type are 80% more likely to become unhappy at this job, therefore we will not risk hiring you." They won't care that 5% of the people with your brain-type do especially well at that job, because they will work the percentages and it won't pay to take the risk.
The pay off of having faith in people doesn't show up on the bottom line, and the burden of having faith in people is one that the "gifted" or "blessed" often don't want to shoulder. If we want these scientific advances to be stairs for the ascension of mankind into the kind of species we can truly admire, then we must bridge this social gap. We must say as a society that we are willing to pay the price in dollars and cents, in mistakes and losses, to retain our diversity and that of our neighbors, even when we don't understand or approve of them.
Numerous studies have shown, the category of people who smoke has more accidents to it's credit than that of people who don't. As it stands, today it is legal to charge someone more for insurance if they smoke, than if they don't. Smokers have become the outsiders. This injustice remains. It is based on a statistic no more or less true than:
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People who smoke pot have a greater chance of becoming addicted to pot.
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"People who steal in their youth are more likely to steal as adults."
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The first black person on your board of directors will have a harder time "getting along."
As technology advances more "truths" like these will exist, and the scientific evidence to back them up will become undeniable. The socially myopic corporations of the world will want to modify the way they treat the people who fall into the categories above in a profitable fashion and they will fight for their perceived right to do so.Can't really argue that one.
Also very true, and plainly so when you consider it's corollary.
This, in my limited exposure to such things is also likely to be true, and were the mechanism to exist to quantify such things (one day it will) I'll wager that statistics would bear this out.
The question of how to move forward is not one of fighting discoveries, or denying the obvious.
It is one of willfully choosing to make illegal and immoral by our societies standards, any use of indirectly related statistical phenomena to alter or inhibit any citizen's opportunities in any endeavor the public is permitted to regulate.
Most of us would raise hell if our auto insurance company demanded the right to to base our insurance rates on the following questions:
Have you ever stolen anything in your life?
Have you ever smoked canabis?
Are you of African American descent?
And we can be proud of that fact.
How many of us left the question box "Do you smoke?" unanswered and got on the insurance agent for being at the root of a Gattacan state?
Is it because of how incredibly annoying it is to step outside a crowded shopping area yearning to breath fresh air only to find our lungs filled by a cloud of noxious fumes? Is it the meal ruined by the elderly folk, who sat at the edge of the smoking section in a restaurant in our youths and managed to billow forth more atmospheric poisons than a '66 Chevelle? What ever our reason for just checking the box handing over the form, does it really justify making them pay more for mandatory auto insurance? Is any reason you could give any less a prejudice than would be implied by seeing the three questions in my list above listed on a job application?
Gattaca ends or begins with us.
I know when you're thinking in "math mode" the book is supposed to be correct, and that is supposed to be an inarguable given.
I think there is another perspective worth considering however.
There is the teenager (type K) that gets the right answer and can't make it match the one in the back of the book.
There is the teenager (type N) that sees a glimpse of "all that is math" (ok, a limited version) and is overwhelmed that they are having a hard time with Alg. 1 when they still have Geometry, Alg. 2, Trig, Pre-Calc, and Calculus just to get out of highschool and into a good college.
My observations were:
That type N teenagers outnumbered type K's by at least 5 to 1.
That type K students had attention spans on the order of double the length of that of the average teenagers, but that this was still usually in the vicinity of 20 minutes of frustration before, "giving up and asking the teacher the next day."
I also noticed type N students were consistently relieved to see that the book could get things wrong, though later in life I attributed this to sloppy publishing, they seemed to take it as a sign that the math they were doing was "hard to get right, even for the experts who write these books." This seemed to validate their struggles.
Though this event only happened twice, in my 5 years of high-school math, it's impact to me and the other student was noteworthy. I was a type K and can remember the day I told the Calculus teacher that I had a particular answer for a problem that didn't agree with the book, and (as good teachers often do) she wrote the problem on the board and talked through the steps as she did them to help me spot the logic error. The other students, envious of the ease with which math seemed to come to me, were glad of the opportunity to see me screw up in an illustratedly public fashion. The teacher came to the same answer I had, and when I told her so, she stepped back for a count of 1, as if that was all the time it took her to completely rework the problem in her head, and shrugged and said "Well, the book is wrong." and went back to her desk. Some several days later my ego came back down to a livable size, but I had forever shed the last vestiges of the std. teenager's insecurity, "I may not be smart enough to understand this."
My conclusion is:
Even if not for my, and another students, "special victories" over the oppressive self-righteousness of the HighSchoolPoliceState, my first three observations lead me to conclude that these errors, did at least as much good as harm. I also conclude that even the type K's benefited more than they lost, since having the type N's functioning at greater efficiency meant that they'd have to listen to fewer stupid questions during class, and noticeably less whining during the "quiet study" periods.
Even if this conclusion isn't valid for college math, a decent understanding of calculus is enough for all but the most formidable hacking. So I probably won't worry to much about the errors in HS math depriving the world of the "hacker class."
As to the issue of open text books. The university system and the people currently making large money on these things will fight an opensource version as tooth and claw as their O/S counterparts. The only advantage I can see is that their egos of university profs. will be to large too allow them to "play stupid." and foist it on others like, "...the people that made the PC fast and reliable." [Actual Microsoft Ad.]
Given how much code you could borrow from Project Gutenbergs supporters, a distributed document checking system for an FDL text book would be easy to set up and vastly improve the quality of the work. I certainly hope this comes about.
At the risk of being a troll....
...I must say I don't have an opinion either way on the bill...
...opening up greater opportunity for criminal activity.
That's surprising. It's hard to imagine that you could be at all familiar with a non-technical perspective and not know how incendiary were the images you used.
I wouldn't have imagined that you would have gone into the history of War Games style auto-dialing to explain "war driving"'s hacker origins, but the "bacronym" Wireless Access Recon. or some other indication that War (in this case) wasn't (as your link points out) "a battle," a "military operation," an "active hostility" or an "open armed conflict." would have been much appreciated by those of us who use this technology and aren't looking for conflict.
When you repeat something that is simply farcical, and end it with, "...experts said." That's not the same as saying "opponents of the bill claimed." Without stating what makes these people expert, or who they are, many would take this to imply that you believe they were experts. And by extension, that their opinions have some merit to you.
I would be very interested to know your actual opinion. What would be a good analogy to the physical world as to the actual impact of War Driving? I like the dog drinking from the sprinklers, as it highlights the pettiness by which someone would begrudge a few thousand free packets of Internet surfing or a few thousand grams of water (which is worth more in some places) to a passerby. What do you think?
This is what (when I read it in my non-techy persona) I get from the article.
War Driving
Just like being... authorized to walk inside, sit on the couch or help yourself to the contents of the fridge
New Law Lets'm "off the hook"
They can get into banks
Committee still open for opinion
I'm delighted by the suggestion that this interpretation of your article may have not been your intent, but if you give your article to a decent sample of people who are intimidated by these new technologies, I think you'll find their opinions to closely match mine, that this is a soft battle cry to fight those stupid lawmakers that are endangering our computers and checking accounts.
I'd guess that the chance that even one person will be hit. There's just bunches of ocean around that equator thing.
That explaination would have been fine as well since Wireless Access Reconnaissance was added post-hoc. But the author offers neither explaination which leaves the newbie to think of is outside it's hacker-historical origins, as simply war. Which, as words go, seems to lean toward the agressive.
Brian McWilliams obviously thinks this is a bad law, and he has slanted his article accordingly. I'd have thought Wired's editors would have caught this sort of thing.
First off he refers to "war driving" and "war chalking" without ever once spelling out Wireless Access Reconnaissance even though he finds the space to define WEP. Makes it sound a bit aggressive, and not by accident.
New Hampshire's existing statute says it is a crime to knowingly access any computer network without authorization. By analogy, just because someone leaves his house unlocked doesn't mean you are authorized to walk inside, sit on the couch or help yourself to the contents of the fridge. But HB 495 turns that thinking upside down, experts said.
No, it doesn't, and if you new the first damned thing about this technology you would never repeat what your (unverified) experts have told you. Walking into someone's open house and helping yourself to the contents of their fridge, is trespassing and stealing, and in showing such low regard for their personal space it becomes reasonable for them to wonder if your are a threat to safety and bodily harm. We're not talking a simple risk of data here.
What's more, if an alleged intruder can prove he gained access to an insecure wireless network believing it was intended to be open, the defendant may be able to get off the hook using an "affirmative defense" provision of the existing law.
That's not "getting off the hook." That's having committed no crime in the first place.
And here we are pandering to the fears of the masses again:
A 10-minute war drive down the main business district of Manchester earlier this month using a laptop with a standard wireless card revealed nearly two dozen open wireless access points, including some operated by banks and other businesses.
To the sadly un-geek of the world this suggests that NH is passing a law that makes it legal for hackers to hack your bank accounts. Clearly untrue, clearly flamebait.
And in closing he reminds everyone that the committee is, "...still open to arguments from anyone."
And closes with, "We want to be sure that it wasn't the case that, through trying to protect people under certain circumstances, we were opening up greater opportunity for criminal activity," said Peterson.
If Brian had wanted a decent analogy to explain WAR driving he could have used the following: It's like passing a law that claims it is legal for someone walking by on the sidewalk to let their dog drink from your sprinklers. Technically their dog is trespassing, and technically it's your water it's drinking, and technically it's allowing strangers to loiter near your house where they might become more aware of your houses security vulnerabilities. But as the lawmakers might have said themselves, "let's just get reasonable"
I like the pretty pictures in Wired, but I cannot renew my subscription in good conscience as the folks in NH are making a rare stand for reasonable behavior and a technology magazine is issuing flaimbait articles in response.
So Brian, if you're walking by my house with your wireless card in the sleeve of your IPAQ, feel free to check your e-mail and grab some headlines from