Actually my wife fits that profile. She has had knee and back surgery and has been told not to walk on hills and, for now at least, she cannot ride her bike. She can walk on level surfaces just fine, but a Segway would be perfect for getting around in our hilly neighborhood.
I miss the ability to change a moderation - either to change the value or to moderate a different comment instead.
With the new system you make a menu selection and that's it. In my opinion, it makes it too easy to accidentally select a value you did not intend to choose.
I would like to see a search capability like that in the defunct Bloomba e-mail client (now the basis of WordPerfect Mail). The entire text of every piece of mail was indexed which made searches very fast. It was also easy to set up virtual folders (based on search criteria) to associate your e-mail according to several criteria. A given mail could appear in several folders, not just one. The company called it a Personal Content Database. The Bloomba client also incorporated a calendar and an anti-spam proxy.
The company producing the software, Stata Labs, sold the technology to Yahoo in 2004. It has since been resold to Corel for use in their WordPerfect Mail.
Actually I did - at least to the one that I thought might vote against giving the telecomms immunity (Salazar-D) - my other senator (Allard-R) is a lost cause. Now I get to write to Salazar again to express my extreme displeasure with his vote. I recommend that anyone else upset with their senator's vote do the same.
I agree, I still have both my HP-11C and HP-16C (the programmer's model with hex and binary) and they both work fine.
However, I think the toughest HP calculator has to be the original HP-35. I remember seeing my college roommate throw his against a wall (I can't recall exactly why - I think he was demonstrating how tough it was) but it wasn't scratched and worked like a charm. They were built like bricks (the LEDs were hard to read though).
Why was this modded Flamebait rather than Insightful? The points are valid.
TFA does not mention what environment is being used for these experiments. Some things should be done in high level containment environments until their effects are known.
When experiments in recombinant DNA were first starting in the mid-70s, the main result of the conference at Asilomar was to take serious precautions until the impact of the technology was known. The conference went so far as to prohibit some experiments because the potential biohazards could not be contained by the technology of the time.
The results of this research could be very useful, but it is common sense to take precautions until you know what you are dealing with.
It is a stretch to say that the scenarios of abuse of power are "fantastic". The administration repeatedly stated publicly that no one's rights were in danger, that the surveillance they were undertaking required a warrant. This was the whole point of the FISA law, to allow the government to perform surveillance on those who might want to harm us while preventing any potential abuses of the ability to monitor communications.
Then the administration was caught doing an end-run around the FISA law by doing "wiretaps" without bothering to obtain a FISA order (similar to a warrant) even though FISA allows the order to be obtained after the fact and the FISC (FISA court) created by the law virtually never denied a request for an order.
A major issue many people have with the law currently before the Senate is the retroactive immunity for the telecom companies, especially in light of allegations that the NSA was monitoring communications without obtaining the required FISA orders seven months *before* the 9/11 attack. If the telecom companies were not doing anything illegal, why is the immunity necessary?
I used to work for a company that did e-mail software for ISPs (although not for Charter) and they all relied on the redundancy in the file servers (RAID-5 or mirroring) to protect against hardware failures. They had a quota of 2 GB per user and they were not going to do backups of up to 2GB each for 5 million users. Charter would need up to ~27 TB to backup 2GB just for the 14000 users whose data was lost. How would they backup the e-mail for 2.6 million customers? Yes, most users do not use their entire quota, but they *could*.
The difference for the companies I dealt with was that they had procedures in place to maintain a customer's data for 20-30 days when an account was deleted to prevent the type of loss that Charter apparently suffered.
TIOBE bases their ratings on the number of search engine queries for "<language> programming'. Maybe it's just me but I don't equate an increase in search engine queries regarding programming in python as indicating an increase in the popularity of python.
Put another way, the number of people looking up information on a language X != the number of people programming in language X.
Even if the technical issues were all resolved (which is not guaranteed by any stretch of the imagination), what about the legal and insurance issues? Until the insurance companies jump on the bandwagon, this will go nowhere.
It's not like ALL the cars on the road will be driverless. Who is responsible for a crash that occurs while you aren't driving and are reading or asleep (why else would you want a driverless car)?
They might have better luck putting driverless "taxis" in crowded downtown areas where traffic moves slowly - that would reduce the damage and injuries associated with accidents at higher speeds.
Software like Canoma from the now-defunct Metacreations would let you create 3D models from 2D images in the mid-to-late 90s. I also remember reading about people using Viz ImageModeler to convert images from video to models even though the software is also designed for still images - the users would just capture those frames they needed to create the 3D model.
The only thing "new" about this is using video as the input without having to grab the individual frames yourself.
From TFA "The complaint takes issue with Apple's refusal to support the Windows Media Audio format. "Apple's iPod is alone among mass-market Digital Music Players in not supporting the WMA format," it states, noting that America Online, Wal-Mart, Napster, MusicMatch, Best Buy (NYSE: BBY), Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Music, FYE Download Zone, and Virgin Digital all support protected WMA files."
No one is forcing anyone to buy an iPod. There are several other music/video players that play WMA files (if that's what you want). This is equivalent to my suing a car manufacturer because they don't make a car the way *I* want it.
If you don't like how the company's products work, buy something else. If you don't like their music store, buy your music somewhere else. Their market share isn't the factor - they are not the only player in the market.
TFA has been updated with a note saying "Editor's Note: This article has been updated to clear up some references to a full-site redesign of Microsoft.com. We do not have any evidence that all of Microsoft.com is being redesigned to take advantage of Silverlight, just large portions of it. Sorry for any confusion."
It doesn't matter if they are only re-doing the download portion of the site. Unless they also provide the pages in some version of HTML they will be unavailable to everyone at my job as we cannot install Silverlight on our machines (corporate policy - we cannot access all Flash pages either).
On another note: why diss on kdawson - does anyone expect the Slashdot editors to thoroughly research the background of every story that is submitted? The referenced article said what the poster said it did.
From the press release referenced in the article "The agreement with JPL and Caltech includes an exclusive and perpetual license for photogrammetric technology that allows for the creation of very dense and accurate 3D data from stereo panoramic imagery. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but Caltech has taken an equity position in earthmine." [emphasis added]
OK, CalTech owns part of earthmine and JPL is at CalTech. That's fine, but didn't tax dollars pay for the technology developed at JPL? IANAL, but it *used* to be that federally-funded research needed to be made available to everyone - not licensed in perpetuity to a private company. When did this change?
What the users did on the Facebook site is not the issue. From the article "... when movie choices that Facebook members made on the latter's [Blockbuster] Web site were made available to other members of the social network".
Unless the Facebook members gave Blockbuster permission in writing to share their movie choices, then Blockbuster violated the law. As discussed in an earlier thread on the Beacon program, it was originally set up as an opt-out program, so many (most?) users had not even given Facebook permission to share this type of information.
Having a standard is all well and good, but it only matters if someone puts it into a phone.
Also, how many development platforms can survive in the cell phone market anyway? Besides Android and LiPS (we'll ignore Microsoft for now), there are Symbian, the LiMo Foundation and a la Mobile - all Linux-based. The first two or three to get accepted will attract the developers and dominate the market (unless they *really* bring something new to the game).
Does it matter? Any competent IT department will test it in a lab before deploying throughout the company. If SP3 makes Windows XP worse, they just won't install it.
If you are a home user, wait for the reviews to come out before installing it (and even then make a full backup, if you can, so you can remove it if you need to).
The article makes two points that, put together, concern me - "If an InnoCentive participant's idea is selected, he can be rewarded up to $100,000 for it."
and
"Who's to say that a company that doesn't pick your solution as the 'winner' won't nevertheless take your idea and run with it anyway? InnoCentive handles this by requiring all participants to sign an agreement protecting confidential information, and it prevents third parties from seeing and stealing others' ideas by allowing only the organization that posted the problem to see proposed solutions."
This may prevent a third-party from stealing your idea, but it does not address the issue of the company posting the problem from stealing your work. If a company wants to, what's to keep them from saying that no one's code was good enough to win the $100K, then using some, or even all, of the ideas submitted anyway. It's not like you get to look at the code for the final product to make sure your (unpaid) work has not been used.
From the article "Facebook came under withering criticism from its users and privacy advocates alike when a security researcher revealed that the ad system tracks user activities on third-party partner sites -- including the activities of people who never signed up with Facebook, who deactivated their accounts or who were not signed on to the site." [emphasis added]
What are they doing with the data of people who never signed up for Facebook in the first place? Is there a list of the 3rd-party sites that provide data to Facebook so that they can be avoided? I know that Facebook is not the only site to track user activity, but this underscores the need for a "Do Not track" list. Like that will happen anytime soon:D.
On reading the article the main thing that jumped out at me was the assumption that Sun, or at least Simon Phipps, believes that most open source programming will be done in India.
Why would we outsource open source software? Is there really that little interest in FOSS in the US, EU, etc.?
The full NIMF report is located at http://www.gamepolitics.com/images/legal/NIMF-2007.pdf. Some of the report makes sense (like having parents learn more about game ratings) and some of it does not (e.g., recommending that the ratings board review all the code in a game before assigning a rating, not just the "official" game code - how many games would get rated each year if they had to do that?).
Their main gripes about the ESRB seem to focus on children somehow getting to Adults Only (AO) content in Mature (M) rated games like Manhunt 2. Is it just me or is it not common sense that an "M" rating means that a 12 year old should not be playing the game in the first place?
You are correct. GPS only makes it easier and more accurate to locate a phone. The location services provided by phones and carriers are *intended* for consumer applications (e.g., all those GPS applications your wireless company is willing to sell you) and emergency/911 calls.
At least for the commercial applications, the software is designed to require a response from the phone saying in effect "Yes, you can determine my location at this time". The software will then use the GPS in the phone (if it is installed and turned on) or triangulation using the cell towers nearest the phone to determine your location.
The software is not in and of itself bad - recently it was used to locate a mother and child attending a concert to let them know that a transplant donor had been located for the child and to get to the hospital. The issue is more that courts are approving the government's requests without requiring the government to demonstrate probable cause that a crime is taking place. This increases the potential for abusing the process.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually my wife fits that profile. She has had knee and back surgery and has been told not to walk on hills and, for now at least, she cannot ride her bike. She can walk on level surfaces just fine, but a Segway would be perfect for getting around in our hilly neighborhood.
I miss the ability to change a moderation - either to change the value or to moderate a different comment instead.
With the new system you make a menu selection and that's it. In my opinion, it makes it too easy to accidentally select a value you did not intend to choose.
Why can't a Catholic priest be an astronomer? A Catholic priest, Father Georges Lemaitre, came up with the Big Bang theory
I would like to see a search capability like that in the defunct Bloomba e-mail client (now the basis of WordPerfect Mail). The entire text of every piece of mail was indexed which made searches very fast. It was also easy to set up virtual folders (based on search criteria) to associate your e-mail according to several criteria. A given mail could appear in several folders, not just one. The company called it a Personal Content Database. The Bloomba client also incorporated a calendar and an anti-spam proxy.
The company producing the software, Stata Labs, sold the technology to Yahoo in 2004. It has since been resold to Corel for use in their WordPerfect Mail.
Never let reality temper imagination
Actually I did - at least to the one that I thought might vote against giving the telecomms immunity (Salazar-D) - my other senator (Allard-R) is a lost cause. Now I get to write to Salazar again to express my extreme displeasure with his vote. I recommend that anyone else upset with their senator's vote do the same.
Never let reality temper imagination
It's simple, the Times reporter would not have been able to read the e-mail in question.
Never let reality temper imagination
I agree, I still have both my HP-11C and HP-16C (the programmer's model with hex and binary) and they both work fine.
However, I think the toughest HP calculator has to be the original HP-35. I remember seeing my college roommate throw his against a wall (I can't recall exactly why - I think he was demonstrating how tough it was) but it wasn't scratched and worked like a charm. They were built like bricks (the LEDs were hard to read though).
Never let reality temper imagination
Why was this modded Flamebait rather than Insightful? The points are valid.
TFA does not mention what environment is being used for these experiments. Some things should be done in high level containment environments until their effects are known.
When experiments in recombinant DNA were first starting in the mid-70s, the main result of the conference at Asilomar was to take serious precautions until the impact of the technology was known. The conference went so far as to prohibit some experiments because the potential biohazards could not be contained by the technology of the time.
The results of this research could be very useful, but it is common sense to take precautions until you know what you are dealing with.
Never let reality temper imagination
It is a stretch to say that the scenarios of abuse of power are "fantastic". The administration repeatedly stated publicly that no one's rights were in danger, that the surveillance they were undertaking required a warrant. This was the whole point of the FISA law, to allow the government to perform surveillance on those who might want to harm us while preventing any potential abuses of the ability to monitor communications.
Then the administration was caught doing an end-run around the FISA law by doing "wiretaps" without bothering to obtain a FISA order (similar to a warrant) even though FISA allows the order to be obtained after the fact and the FISC (FISA court) created by the law virtually never denied a request for an order.
A major issue many people have with the law currently before the Senate is the retroactive immunity for the telecom companies, especially in light of allegations that the NSA was monitoring communications without obtaining the required FISA orders seven months *before* the 9/11 attack. If the telecom companies were not doing anything illegal, why is the immunity necessary?
Never let reality temper imagination
I used to work for a company that did e-mail software for ISPs (although not for Charter) and they all relied on the redundancy in the file servers (RAID-5 or mirroring) to protect against hardware failures. They had a quota of 2 GB per user and they were not going to do backups of up to 2GB each for 5 million users. Charter would need up to ~27 TB to backup 2GB just for the 14000 users whose data was lost. How would they backup the e-mail for 2.6 million customers? Yes, most users do not use their entire quota, but they *could*.
The difference for the companies I dealt with was that they had procedures in place to maintain a customer's data for 20-30 days when an account was deleted to prevent the type of loss that Charter apparently suffered.
Never let reality temper imagination
TIOBE bases their ratings on the number of search engine queries for "<language> programming'. Maybe it's just me but I don't equate an increase in search engine queries regarding programming in python as indicating an increase in the popularity of python.
Put another way, the number of people looking up information on a language X != the number of people programming in language X.
Never let reality temper imagination
Even if the technical issues were all resolved (which is not guaranteed by any stretch of the imagination), what about the legal and insurance issues? Until the insurance companies jump on the bandwagon, this will go nowhere.
It's not like ALL the cars on the road will be driverless. Who is responsible for a crash that occurs while you aren't driving and are reading or asleep (why else would you want a driverless car)?
They might have better luck putting driverless "taxis" in crowded downtown areas where traffic moves slowly - that would reduce the damage and injuries associated with accidents at higher speeds.
Never let reality temper imagination
Software like Canoma from the now-defunct Metacreations would let you create 3D models from 2D images in the mid-to-late 90s. I also remember reading about people using Viz ImageModeler to convert images from video to models even though the software is also designed for still images - the users would just capture those frames they needed to create the 3D model.
The only thing "new" about this is using video as the input without having to grab the individual frames yourself.
Never let reality temper imagination
Does anyone seriously think that any candidate's stand on videogames was a factor in the Iowa caucuses?
Never let reality temper imagination
From TFA "The complaint takes issue with Apple's refusal to support the Windows Media Audio format. "Apple's iPod is alone among mass-market Digital Music Players in not supporting the WMA format," it states, noting that America Online, Wal-Mart, Napster, MusicMatch, Best Buy (NYSE: BBY), Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Music, FYE Download Zone, and Virgin Digital all support protected WMA files."
No one is forcing anyone to buy an iPod. There are several other music/video players that play WMA files (if that's what you want). This is equivalent to my suing a car manufacturer because they don't make a car the way *I* want it.
If you don't like how the company's products work, buy something else. If you don't like their music store, buy your music somewhere else. Their market share isn't the factor - they are not the only player in the market.
Never let reality temper imagination
TFA has been updated with a note saying "Editor's Note: This article has been updated to clear up some references to a full-site redesign of Microsoft.com. We do not have any evidence that all of Microsoft.com is being redesigned to take advantage of Silverlight, just large portions of it. Sorry for any confusion."
It doesn't matter if they are only re-doing the download portion of the site. Unless they also provide the pages in some version of HTML they will be unavailable to everyone at my job as we cannot install Silverlight on our machines (corporate policy - we cannot access all Flash pages either).
On another note: why diss on kdawson - does anyone expect the Slashdot editors to thoroughly research the background of every story that is submitted? The referenced article said what the poster said it did.
Never let reality temper imagination
From the press release referenced in the article "The agreement with JPL and Caltech includes an exclusive and perpetual license for photogrammetric technology that allows for the creation of very dense and accurate 3D data from stereo panoramic imagery. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but Caltech has taken an equity position in earthmine." [emphasis added]
OK, CalTech owns part of earthmine and JPL is at CalTech. That's fine, but didn't tax dollars pay for the technology developed at JPL? IANAL, but it *used* to be that federally-funded research needed to be made available to everyone - not licensed in perpetuity to a private company. When did this change?
Never let reality temper imagination
What the users did on the Facebook site is not the issue. From the article "... when movie choices that Facebook members made on the latter's [Blockbuster] Web site were made available to other members of the social network".
Unless the Facebook members gave Blockbuster permission in writing to share their movie choices, then Blockbuster violated the law. As discussed in an earlier thread on the Beacon program, it was originally set up as an opt-out program, so many (most?) users had not even given Facebook permission to share this type of information.
Never let reality temper imagination
Reviewing the member list at the Linux Phone Standards Forum (LiPS) web site I noticed that none of the major handset companies joined this organization. The Open Handset Alliance on the other hand has HTC, LG, Motorola and Samsung as members.
Having a standard is all well and good, but it only matters if someone puts it into a phone.
Also, how many development platforms can survive in the cell phone market anyway? Besides Android and LiPS (we'll ignore Microsoft for now), there are Symbian, the LiMo Foundation and a la Mobile - all Linux-based. The first two or three to get accepted will attract the developers and dominate the market (unless they *really* bring something new to the game).
Never let reality temper imagination
Does it matter? Any competent IT department will test it in a lab before deploying throughout the company. If SP3 makes Windows XP worse, they just won't install it.
If you are a home user, wait for the reviews to come out before installing it (and even then make a full backup, if you can, so you can remove it if you need to).
Never let reality temper imagination
The article makes two points that, put together, concern me - "If an InnoCentive participant's idea is selected, he can be rewarded up to $100,000 for it."
and
"Who's to say that a company that doesn't pick your solution as the 'winner' won't nevertheless take your idea and run with it anyway? InnoCentive handles this by requiring all participants to sign an agreement protecting confidential information, and it prevents third parties from seeing and stealing others' ideas by allowing only the organization that posted the problem to see proposed solutions."
This may prevent a third-party from stealing your idea, but it does not address the issue of the company posting the problem from stealing your work. If a company wants to, what's to keep them from saying that no one's code was good enough to win the $100K, then using some, or even all, of the ideas submitted anyway. It's not like you get to look at the code for the final product to make sure your (unpaid) work has not been used.
Never let reality temper imagination
From the article "Facebook came under withering criticism from its users and privacy advocates alike when a security researcher revealed that the ad system tracks user activities on third-party partner sites -- including the activities of people who never signed up with Facebook, who deactivated their accounts or who were not signed on to the site." [emphasis added]
:D.
What are they doing with the data of people who never signed up for Facebook in the first place? Is there a list of the 3rd-party sites that provide data to Facebook so that they can be avoided? I know that Facebook is not the only site to track user activity, but this underscores the need for a "Do Not track" list. Like that will happen anytime soon
Never let reality temper imagination.
On reading the article the main thing that jumped out at me was the assumption that Sun, or at least Simon Phipps, believes that most open source programming will be done in India.
Why would we outsource open source software? Is there really that little interest in FOSS in the US, EU, etc.?
Never let reality temper imagination
The full NIMF report is located at http://www.gamepolitics.com/images/legal/NIMF-2007.pdf. Some of the report makes sense (like having parents learn more about game ratings) and some of it does not (e.g., recommending that the ratings board review all the code in a game before assigning a rating, not just the "official" game code - how many games would get rated each year if they had to do that?).
Their main gripes about the ESRB seem to focus on children somehow getting to Adults Only (AO) content in Mature (M) rated games like Manhunt 2. Is it just me or is it not common sense that an "M" rating means that a 12 year old should not be playing the game in the first place?
Never let reality temper imagination
You are correct. GPS only makes it easier and more accurate to locate a phone. The location services provided by phones and carriers are *intended* for consumer applications (e.g., all those GPS applications your wireless company is willing to sell you) and emergency/911 calls.
At least for the commercial applications, the software is designed to require a response from the phone saying in effect "Yes, you can determine my location at this time". The software will then use the GPS in the phone (if it is installed and turned on) or triangulation using the cell towers nearest the phone to determine your location.
The software is not in and of itself bad - recently it was used to locate a mother and child attending a concert to let them know that a transplant donor had been located for the child and to get to the hospital. The issue is more that courts are approving the government's requests without requiring the government to demonstrate probable cause that a crime is taking place. This increases the potential for abusing the process.
Never let reality temper imagination