"dumbing down to the least common denominator so that nobody feels bad."
What are you talking about?!? I've spent $16,000 and countless hours (~20 hrs a week, it's hurting my social life!) in the past year trying to teach my pet rock how to beg and shake hands. That's money well spent! Already it's learned how to roll-over with a little nudge.
"so that's $7.20 per 100km. Or £3.55 for 62 miles in english. Equivalent in petrol about 62 mpg. That's not bad at all."
$7.20 to travel 100km (62 miles) is bad in the US. If gas is $3/gallon that's the equivalent to 25.8 mpg. That'd be great for a large truck or SUV, but most V6 4-door sedans like the BMW 7-series easily average 25 mpg, and that'd be absolutely horrible compared to other technologies like hybrids getting 40+ mpg.
However, if gas was $5/gallon that'd be 43mpg so I could see some people buying hydrogen cars if the price of hydrogen remains the same or drops and gas skyrockets, but currently it's not cost efficient at all.
"The whole path that desktops are going down (except for the occasional exception such as a mac mini) is one of more power, more heat, more fans, more noise."
Really? Seems to me computers are quieter now than they were 5+ years ago, despite the much larger power supplies and faster processors.
Video card fans now adjust with gpu temp instead of just spinning at 100% constantly.
Hard drives have already become much quieter than they use to be in the late 90s.
Newer desktop CPUs can throttle down automatically
I have less fans in my case now than I did in 2000 and the computer's quieter and running cooler. I think the water-cooled hard drive market would have been great in 1999 but not anymore.
"You're not looking hard enough. I have a 1000 minute family plan with two phones, unlimited weekends and evenings, unlimited mobile to mobile, unlimited messaging, for $90."
Had to pay $5 more per phone to get 250 txt for each phone, and another $5.95 per phone for insurance on each phone, so total is a little over $100 + taxes so about $115 for everything.
""This seems like it'd be a great idea in Iraq - breach a door"
and get hit with a chair. Millions of taxpayers dollars lost to breach a door lost to a $5 dollar chair."
Screw you flamebait. How about you go breach a door and have someone shoot back and see if you'd rather have the robot breach the next door.
And if you bothered to read the wikipedia article you'd see these robots are only $230,000, and could drop to 150k if ordered in large quantities. Dirt cheap compared to a couple of dead soldiers.
Also they're 100 lbs so they're not being knocked over easily and I really doubt a chair would seriously damage it... or if it did you'd risk setting the gun off. Would you hit a armed robot with a gun? Honestly you'd probably have better luck surprising a armed soldier with a swift chair to the chest than hitting this robot.
Agreed! Gotta love this quote from the article: ""The average adult who can afford a cell phone is not going to want to listen to ads. So this is mainly for teenagers, twenty-somethings, high schoolers or people who can't afford a phone," "
Well then just add me to the list. By the time they add taxes, the cheapest text messaging plan and insurance I'm paying nearly $100 a month for a regular, "cheap" cellphone plan. Add me to the list of people who "can't afford a phone" because it's killing me. I would love to listen to a 30 second ad before making a call.
There was a 1-800 service I used many years ago called phonehog that provided a calling card for use at payphones if you listened to ads. For every 30 second ad I listened to I think I got a 3 minute call. Worked very well and I loved the service, but when payphones started disappearing and cellphone plans got cheaper I stopped using the service.
Google's free phone will kill the prepaid market. Who would pay $50 for 400 minutes when they can get the calls for free? I think I would like an option though, maybe if I press # and the number then deduct the minutes from prepaid minutes but if not then I'll listen to ads.
What about incoming calls? Some companies, like Sprint and US Cellular offer free incoming already with select plans. I suppose Google would have to implement something similar, they can't delay an incoming call so you can listen to some ads.
wtf? Every cellphone company offer free phones with a new plan. At&t / Cingular have 6 free phones that cost absolutely nothing with a 2 year agreement. And if you don't want a plan then why are you even getting a cellphone??
Dammit, if I would have known skin-tight spacesuits were really coming I would have studied Astro Physics and went for Airforce ROTC instead of comp sci:(
"work on your MBA so you can make good money while all the CS/IT majors and High School grads (a.k.a. sales) do all the work."
MBA's make money? On what planet? If I had a dollar for every person i knew with a MBA that wasn't using it (aka got MBA = now sells insurance) I'd have... 11 dollars.
"in particular when used for "nonprofit educational purposes"."
and before someone says "but there's a link to his website so he's technically profiting!"... no, he isn't. Anyone can watch those lessons online for free, he didn't sell it to you. Now if you decide you like his work and want more lessons and want to pay him for lessons that's fine, but you didn't pay him for the original lesson. Think of it as a teacher showing you something in a class, but then you decide to hire the teacher for private tutoring.
"Mayby someone should start a class-action lawsuit or something, just to get the message across."
Soon as I read the article I searched here for someone posting a link to a class-action lawsuit. You're the only one that mentioned the word "lawsuit".
Come on lawyers this is a easy one with deep pockets, just let us know where to sign up.
"Am I the only one who detects a distinct odor of hype around this story?"
yep... how come no one else realized this though? There's tons of Youtube videos on there that get hundreds of thousands of views, why aren't they getting a percentage too?
I don't see this going well. If youtube gives this guy a few bucks for his stupid "show" then 99% of all future videos will be people trying to make a quick buck. Every video will be either something shocking or barely dressed teen girls shaking their ass.
"All you need to run Vista happily is an Intel quad-core overclocked to 4GHz, 4Gb RAM and twin nVidia 8800 GTX video cards."
Great!! So we should all upgrade to Vista next summer?
Huh, this seems familiar, seems like with every Windows OS there's a bunch of groaning about the system requirements when it's first released, then a year later everyone eventually upgrades and everyone's happy.
"how many without a cell phone will be tagged because they have On Star."
More importantly, what's GM going to do about this? There's big money in OnStar, costs $200-$300/yr if you pay yearly. GM's just going to roll-over and take this?
What about all the bluetooth headset providers? Most people bought the headsets specifically for driving.
What about the National Association of Realtors? I can't imagine they're taking this sitting down and believe it or not they do have a pretty powerful lobbying group. Realtors live off their cellphone, business would be nearly impossible without being able to answer their phones 24/7.
"I see some great small MP3 players for really cheap and a real digital camera takes way better pictures and both of them last a lot longer."
I don't see why people need mp3 players in their phones but I've been actively searching for a cellphone that takes good photos, especially macro photos for clear full-page photos of documents. Why? Because I'm in real estate and it'd be nice to whip out a cameraphone and snap pictures of a contract or lease and have a copy on me and on the PC at all times. Never know when I'll have to take a second look at it or show it to an attorney or the original disappears 6 months down the road when the renter decides not to pay.
2mp would print a nice 8x10 document, and after playing with another agent's LG enV it's high on my list of future cellphones. It's also huge by today's standards but all that size includes a giant battery that lasts for days (4:30 talk time, 19 day standby) which is fine by me.
"There are still many notebooks being shipped with 32-bit Core Duo and Celeron M processors even today, and not just in low-end machines."
So? Honestly would you want to use the computer you're using now to run whatever bloatware M$ thinks up 3-5 years from now?
Who out there buys their computer and thinks "gee I sure hope I can run the new OS coming out in a few years!"
Besides, who cares if it'll run the next OS? I don't run Vista now after all the horrible crap I've heard about it on/. and my system is more than capable with a 1.8ghz clocked at 3ghz core 2 duo with 2gb ram and 1 tera hd. I won't need vista for awhile (if ever) and might not even run the next OS, just depends on what the market's like by then.
the very first page that pops up: Basic information about junk faxes:
Do you...Want to have them pay you at least $500 and as much as $1,500 per fax?
"Many people get $2,500 per fax in small claims court. I recently got a judgment for over $40,000 for 16 junk faxes sent to me by an advertiser. The trial lasted about 15 minutes. Here's the proof it can be done: FirstChartered.pdf
Federal law applies in all 50 states and cannot be superceded by state law. You can sue in your local small claims court in many cases."
I only wish I had your problem of tons of junk faxes because I'd be a very rich man!
" if they are open minded with this thing, $10 *might* be acheivable.... Believe me, once upon a time I surfed the web, checked email, wrote papers, and generated spreadsheets just fine on a 486 25mhz and 4MB of ram - using a full GUI. "
This is more than a CPU issue. CPU, Ram, storage, motherboard, some kind of screen, keyboard and input device all cost $$$$. I don't believe for a second they can build a "laptop" for $10. Can you even buy a keyboard for $10? I'm talking new here, they can't build a million "used" 486 laptops. Even if you could get a brand new keyboard for $10 would you want it? How well would that work? Only half the keys would work and the other half would stick.
You can just barely purchase a brand new calculator for $10, and all that has is a few buttons, a watch battery, a one-line LCD screen, a cpu running at a few mhz and a few kilobytes of ram. Is that what they're calling a "laptop"? OH and prices aren't going to get cheaper, in 10 years it'll be even harder to get a $10 laptop because of inflation and labor costs, so this is impossible now and impossible in the future.
This is either a PR stunt or a scam.
From the article: "The laptop would be made on a single board which would make it easy to find fault and rectify it, say sources."
Aren't calculators on a single board? They're building a large calculator, and even now the prices are at $47, 5x more than their goal of $10. A $47 oversized calculator-type "laptop" I could kinda see, but $10 isn't going to happen.
"Can somebody tell me how long will it take to hack into this box and reuse the code in some PC apps?
I don't think film studios are going to be particularly happy and enthusiastic about it."
Who cares? I'm still wondering why I can find a Redbox anywhere (nine less than 5 miles from me) and rent a new DVD for $1, a DVD with DRM that has been broken a million times over and I can duplicate easily, but I still can't frickin download one to watch on my PC or TV?? Hello? Consumer to movie studios, what are you doing? I should be able to go to walmart tonight and buy a set-top box for under $50 that allows me to download movies for $1 and watch them up to 24 hours.
Slashdot Mirror
"dumbing down to the least common denominator so that nobody feels bad."
What are you talking about?!? I've spent $16,000 and countless hours (~20 hrs a week, it's hurting my social life!) in the past year trying to teach my pet rock how to beg and shake hands. That's money well spent! Already it's learned how to roll-over with a little nudge.
"so that's $7.20 per 100km. Or £3.55 for 62 miles in english. Equivalent in petrol about 62 mpg. That's not bad at all."
$7.20 to travel 100km (62 miles) is bad in the US. If gas is $3/gallon that's the equivalent to 25.8 mpg. That'd be great for a large truck or SUV, but most V6 4-door sedans like the BMW 7-series easily average 25 mpg, and that'd be absolutely horrible compared to other technologies like hybrids getting 40+ mpg.
However, if gas was $5/gallon that'd be 43mpg so I could see some people buying hydrogen cars if the price of hydrogen remains the same or drops and gas skyrockets, but currently it's not cost efficient at all.
"The whole path that desktops are going down (except for the occasional exception such as a mac mini) is one of more power, more heat, more fans, more noise."
Really? Seems to me computers are quieter now than they were 5+ years ago, despite the much larger power supplies and faster processors.
Video card fans now adjust with gpu temp instead of just spinning at 100% constantly.
Hard drives have already become much quieter than they use to be in the late 90s.
Newer desktop CPUs can throttle down automatically
I have less fans in my case now than I did in 2000 and the computer's quieter and running cooler. I think the water-cooled hard drive market would have been great in 1999 but not anymore.
here's real photos of the mole
photo 1
photo 2
Note to NBC: if you're gonna send a mole to a hacker's convention, try to pick someone other than the fairly attractive 20-something slim blonde.
Maybe you should have sent in one of those predators from To Catch A Predator? They all could pass for hackers.
"You're not looking hard enough. I have a 1000 minute family plan with two phones, unlimited weekends and evenings, unlimited mobile to mobile, unlimited messaging, for $90."
Actually I just got a better deal through US Cellular. 1000 peak minutes family plan for 2 phones, unlimited incoming, unlimited nites/weekends @ 7pm, unlimited mobile 2 mobile, for $79.99.
Had to pay $5 more per phone to get 250 txt for each phone, and another $5.95 per phone for insurance on each phone, so total is a little over $100 + taxes so about $115 for everything.
"what happens when a teenager driving a car and listening to an ad isn't paying attention to the road. "
If you go by that logic then let's throw out the radios because they play ads too.
"These are drones that any guerrilla in an urban area is going to have a field day with. Trust me, they will have some serious weaknesses."
We're fighting people that build IEDs out of empty soda cans or strap bombs to themselves and suicide bomb a bus.
They're low tech, not running around the sand in iraq with a laptop and the high technology to hack this robot.
""This seems like it'd be a great idea in Iraq - breach a door"
and get hit with a chair. Millions of taxpayers dollars lost to breach a door lost to a $5 dollar chair."
Screw you flamebait. How about you go breach a door and have someone shoot back and see if you'd rather have the robot breach the next door.
And if you bothered to read the wikipedia article you'd see these robots are only $230,000, and could drop to 150k if ordered in large quantities. Dirt cheap compared to a couple of dead soldiers.
Also they're 100 lbs so they're not being knocked over easily and I really doubt a chair would seriously damage it... or if it did you'd risk setting the gun off. Would you hit a armed robot with a gun? Honestly you'd probably have better luck surprising a armed soldier with a swift chair to the chest than hitting this robot.
"Unless of course calls are free and unlimited."
Agreed! Gotta love this quote from the article:
""The average adult who can afford a cell phone is not going to want to listen to ads. So this is mainly for teenagers, twenty-somethings, high schoolers or people who can't afford a phone," "
Well then just add me to the list. By the time they add taxes, the cheapest text messaging plan and insurance I'm paying nearly $100 a month for a regular, "cheap" cellphone plan. Add me to the list of people who "can't afford a phone" because it's killing me. I would love to listen to a 30 second ad before making a call.
There was a 1-800 service I used many years ago called phonehog that provided a calling card for use at payphones if you listened to ads. For every 30 second ad I listened to I think I got a 3 minute call. Worked very well and I loved the service, but when payphones started disappearing and cellphone plans got cheaper I stopped using the service.
Google's free phone will kill the prepaid market. Who would pay $50 for 400 minutes when they can get the calls for free? I think I would like an option though, maybe if I press # and the number then deduct the minutes from prepaid minutes but if not then I'll listen to ads.
What about incoming calls? Some companies, like Sprint and US Cellular offer free incoming already with select plans. I suppose Google would have to implement something similar, they can't delay an incoming call so you can listen to some ads.
"all for the low price of $350 or more"
/.? The submitter is fake.
wtf? Every cellphone company offer free phones with a new plan. At&t / Cingular have 6 free phones that cost absolutely nothing with a 2 year agreement. And if you don't want a plan then why are you even getting a cellphone??
Why is this even on
"is Margaret Thatcher modelling it?"
:(
Who cares! Skin-tight space suits on fit, smart astronaut women?
That's every slashdotter's dream!
Bring on the skin-tight space suits Barbarella!!!
Dammit, if I would have known skin-tight spacesuits were really coming I would have studied Astro Physics and went for Airforce ROTC instead of comp sci
"work on your MBA so you can make good money while all the CS/IT majors and High School grads (a.k.a. sales) do all the work."
MBA's make money? On what planet? If I had a dollar for every person i knew with a MBA that wasn't using it (aka got MBA = now sells insurance) I'd have... 11 dollars.
"in particular when used for "nonprofit educational purposes"."
and before someone says "but there's a link to his website so he's technically profiting!"... no, he isn't. Anyone can watch those lessons online for free, he didn't sell it to you. Now if you decide you like his work and want more lessons and want to pay him for lessons that's fine, but you didn't pay him for the original lesson. Think of it as a teacher showing you something in a class, but then you decide to hire the teacher for private tutoring.
"Mayby someone should start a class-action lawsuit or something, just to get the message across."
Soon as I read the article I searched here for someone posting a link to a class-action lawsuit. You're the only one that mentioned the word "lawsuit".
Come on lawyers this is a easy one with deep pockets, just let us know where to sign up.
"Am I the only one who detects a distinct odor of hype around this story?"
yep... how come no one else realized this though? There's tons of Youtube videos on there that get hundreds of thousands of views, why aren't they getting a percentage too?
I don't see this going well. If youtube gives this guy a few bucks for his stupid "show" then 99% of all future videos will be people trying to make a quick buck. Every video will be either something shocking or barely dressed teen girls shaking their ass.
"Stop buying new CDs or MP3s is the first thing you can do."
/. do that 10 years ago?
Didn't everyone on
"All you need to run Vista happily is an Intel quad-core overclocked to 4GHz, 4Gb RAM and twin nVidia 8800 GTX video cards."
Great!! So we should all upgrade to Vista next summer?
Huh, this seems familiar, seems like with every Windows OS there's a bunch of groaning about the system requirements when it's first released, then a year later everyone eventually upgrades and everyone's happy.
"I'd assume they wouldn't want or need a pilot, but that's not mentioned."
what do you mean it's not mentioned??
FTFA:
"The new jet -- being referred to by some as the SR-72 -- is likely to be unmanned"
looks like it was mentioned to me...
"how many without a cell phone will be tagged because they have On Star."
More importantly, what's GM going to do about this? There's big money in OnStar, costs $200-$300/yr if you pay yearly. GM's just going to roll-over and take this?
What about all the bluetooth headset providers? Most people bought the headsets specifically for driving.
What about the National Association of Realtors? I can't imagine they're taking this sitting down and believe it or not they do have a pretty powerful lobbying group. Realtors live off their cellphone, business would be nearly impossible without being able to answer their phones 24/7.
"I see some great small MP3 players for really cheap and a real digital camera takes way better pictures and both of them last a lot longer."
I don't see why people need mp3 players in their phones but I've been actively searching for a cellphone that takes good photos, especially macro photos for clear full-page photos of documents. Why? Because I'm in real estate and it'd be nice to whip out a cameraphone and snap pictures of a contract or lease and have a copy on me and on the PC at all times. Never know when I'll have to take a second look at it or show it to an attorney or the original disappears 6 months down the road when the renter decides not to pay.
2mp would print a nice 8x10 document, and after playing with another agent's LG enV it's high on my list of future cellphones. It's also huge by today's standards but all that size includes a giant battery that lasts for days (4:30 talk time, 19 day standby) which is fine by me.
"There are still many notebooks being shipped with 32-bit Core Duo and Celeron M processors even today, and not just in low-end machines."
/. and my system is more than capable with a 1.8ghz clocked at 3ghz core 2 duo with 2gb ram and 1 tera hd. I won't need vista for awhile (if ever) and might not even run the next OS, just depends on what the market's like by then.
So? Honestly would you want to use the computer you're using now to run whatever bloatware M$ thinks up 3-5 years from now?
Who out there buys their computer and thinks "gee I sure hope I can run the new OS coming out in a few years!"
Besides, who cares if it'll run the next OS? I don't run Vista now after all the horrible crap I've heard about it on
To stop junk faxes you can GOOGLE IT
"stop junk faxes" or "how to stop junk faxes"
the very first page that pops up:
Basic information about junk faxes:
Do you...Want to have them pay you at least $500 and as much as $1,500 per fax?
"Many people get $2,500 per fax in small claims court. I recently got a judgment for over $40,000 for 16 junk faxes sent to me by an advertiser. The trial lasted about 15 minutes. Here's the proof it can be done: FirstChartered.pdf
Federal law applies in all 50 states and cannot be superceded by state law. You can sue in your local small claims court in many cases."
I only wish I had your problem of tons of junk faxes because I'd be a very rich man!
" if they are open minded with this thing, $10 *might* be acheivable.... Believe me, once upon a time I surfed the web, checked email, wrote papers, and generated spreadsheets just fine on a 486 25mhz and 4MB of ram - using a full GUI. "
This is more than a CPU issue. CPU, Ram, storage, motherboard, some kind of screen, keyboard and input device all cost $$$$. I don't believe for a second they can build a "laptop" for $10. Can you even buy a keyboard for $10? I'm talking new here, they can't build a million "used" 486 laptops. Even if you could get a brand new keyboard for $10 would you want it? How well would that work? Only half the keys would work and the other half would stick.
You can just barely purchase a brand new calculator for $10, and all that has is a few buttons, a watch battery, a one-line LCD screen, a cpu running at a few mhz and a few kilobytes of ram. Is that what they're calling a "laptop"? OH and prices aren't going to get cheaper, in 10 years it'll be even harder to get a $10 laptop because of inflation and labor costs, so this is impossible now and impossible in the future.
This is either a PR stunt or a scam.
From the article:
"The laptop would be made on a single board which would make it easy to find fault and rectify it, say sources."
Aren't calculators on a single board? They're building a large calculator, and even now the prices are at $47, 5x more than their goal of $10. A $47 oversized calculator-type "laptop" I could kinda see, but $10 isn't going to happen.
"I agree that the 3 month suspension punishment was over the top."
/. without any evidence?
/.?
Did anyone else notice there's no link to a article on this story? All we have is a link to the school district's website and nothing else.
How did this story get on
For all we know this is complete B.S. and just a kid trying to DOS the school's website or at least run up the bandwidth bill.
Who approved this to be on
3 months does sound like a lot but we don't know what happened or if it was really 3 months or 3 days.
There is a PDF that explains why they might be suspending kids for visiting myspace:
"One week ago, highly offense material including threats, very revealing pictures of local teenage girls, and personally identifiable information were found and widely publicized to many."
"Can somebody tell me how long will it take to hack into this box and reuse the code in some PC apps?
I don't think film studios are going to be particularly happy and enthusiastic about it."
Who cares? I'm still wondering why I can find a Redbox anywhere (nine less than 5 miles from me) and rent a new DVD for $1, a DVD with DRM that has been broken a million times over and I can duplicate easily, but I still can't frickin download one to watch on my PC or TV?? Hello? Consumer to movie studios, what are you doing? I should be able to go to walmart tonight and buy a set-top box for under $50 that allows me to download movies for $1 and watch them up to 24 hours.