Excuse my ignorance as I'm not American so may show some ignorance in regard to this BUT... (oh the eternal but)
Is this not what lead to the depression? People borrowed money to invest in a booming market as you ahve described. Then the market dropped, banks called in their debts and people ended up losing mroe money than they had?
There are essentially three types of investment. Risk free investment This is your savings account and unless you're unlucky enough to bank with bearings your money will be safe and you'll get your interest on top of that. Risky investment This is normal investment in the stock market. FTSE trackers and most people's shares. You go for the higher yield of the stock market but also accept the risk of losing everything. Investment in an idea This is the only time you should borrow money to invest. This is if you want to start a bussiness, expend a bussiness. Basically if you know a good plan but need cash to realise it you may borrow for it. This might be from a bank, venture capitalists, friends, whatever.
Lots of people have picked up on the paint only lastign 5 years.
Does anyone know how often buildings are painted/cleaned at the moment? and I mean commercial buildings, not houses.
There are a few buildings that are famously painted non-stop.
If buildings are painted twice as often as normal with this paint (for example) and there are subsidies for its use I am sure this technology can make a real difference in our cities.
But there are times when you need a precision to the language and people simply don't have the ability to write/understand it.
One recent example was in a public exam when the question they asked (grammatically) wasn't the question the meant to ask.
I don't have the question to hand, but it consisted of a section of background and then a question on the situation.
The question asked why "this" situation was the case.
The question was so badly worded that the "this" was not clearly defined. It was possibe to interperate the question in atleast two different ways becasue of that.
Also I cannot remember his name, but there is an english conman that works on grammer. He will insert a comma into a promise which changes its meaning completely but isn't noticed by the people who send him money.
But I can have 5 TVs on at once at home
**runs round house**
infact i do have 5 TVs on now.
So, at the moment I am covered by my TV liscence but if I were to turn on a portable TV it would suddenly be illegal?
A bit of a tanjent - but there are some interesting laws to do with lodgers. If you have a lock on your door you need your own TV liscence. Now, I know some people who still live with their parents (the 18 year old kind not the 44 year old virgin kind) who have locks on their doors.
They are renewing the BBCs charter in the next couple of years. Instead of trying to change the way the BBC works perhaps they should update the TV liscence to reflect the technology we currently and may soon have at our disposal.
This could include phones, PDAs, Webcasting, computers both roaming and tethered, Cars, and god knows what else.
Microsoft already has IE default to MSN and people still bother to google.
Technology is just that, technology. Google is very good at the moment, but could be easily suppased. (By easily i mean a couple of years and allot of money).
The big advantage that google has is that it has become a word. It has become part of the language people use day to day. People google and like to google. They tell their friends that they google.
Hoover became synomous with vacum cleaner and every vacum cleaner was known as a hoover. Google has achieved a similar thing. Even if MSN becomes good people may well use "to google" to describe it. This won't stop microsoft but it will be the real challenge.
When my grandma taught IT she used to drive 50 miles to the nearest computer (Hatfield) once i month to pick up the output and drop off the next lot.
Hatfield is also where the first computer text book was written. I met the guy once, he worked at the university and was asked to start running a new computing class. He agreed and looked into it and realised there was nothing for him to teach from so he had to write it.
It comes into it because we have a right to use the image and can use it legitamatly.
If there was a reliable way to screen for child porn (the only example i could think of) that didnt pick up on photos of kids in the bath or on the beach etc. than I would be all for it, because there is no legitamate use for the image.
Because there is a right that is being curtailed we cannot let it rest.
But currency isn't paper anymore and isnt produced by government. Its electronic and has been fro a long time.
In the UK, in the run up to Y2K, someone worked out that if everyone paniced and withdrew all their money from the bank then there would not be enough hard currency in existance.
all negatives, plates, positives, digitized storage medium, graphic files, magnetic medium, optical storage devices, and any other thing used in the making of the illustration that contain an image of the illustration or any part thereof are destroyed and/or deleted or erased after their final use. ...
So basically, even if you did it once, you'd have to destroy your printer and delete any storage medium used to make it.
Secret Service wins, good game!
(See bold text)
Unless your printer burns a copy of everything it pritns to ROM you won't have to destroy it.
There is also an argument abotu what is considered final use. You could always intend to use it again the day afetr you were arrested...
Just because a company implements something voluntarily doesn't mean we should accept it. If there is no outcry over this than soon every major graphics program and printer manufacturer could include it.
Then where will we have left to turn?
Censorship doesnt have to be forced on you for it to be bad.
The way to reduce forgery is to obviously make it harder to copy notes.
Thats what thsi software is doing, it is not, however, the only way to make it difficult. Rather than curtailing our rights couldn't the treasuries come up with solutions themselves. Use paper that feels obviously different from any normal paper. Use watermarks and UV inks, use microprinting and metal strips. There are a whole swathe of ways to make it difficult to copy currency and those are just the ones I can know of and can think of off the top of my head.
I have seen a few fake notes (UK and Scotish) and they were either way beyond what I could produce at home or they were obvious forgeries. If someone takes a note and doesn't check it than thats their own problem.
Unfortunatly stupidity can never be eradicated. A case in point is my old boss who accepted a scotish 20 that was two pieces of printed paper stuck together, the worst part was that they were peelign away from each other.
Why should we have our freedom of expression quashed to make up for the idiocy of others?
With spam one thing that has been discussed is claiming damages that amount to the cost of the connection used to download it. With spam this is always going to be a problem due to the nature of the messages and spammers.
When reputable companies start forcing content that users will this open the doors to real claims being filed for the bandwidth cost?
Will every website require a click through screen that instead of checking that your not under 18 makes you agree to accept the adverts?
Will companies that are concerned about their bandwidth start banning their staff form all websites that have these bloated adverts on? Will just checking the news/email/football results in your lunch hour become something of the past?
And I thought that adverts that pump soudn out over the top of whatever MP3s yoru listenign to were bad enough.
Surely if the adverts become a barrier to the enjoyable use of your machien they cease to do the company or website any favours.
With any luck online advertising like this will become the second dot com bubble and will disappear quickly.
We can but hope.
But what if you have multiple email addresses?
Would you be able to asign all of them to the same phone?
What if you only have one email address? Would that mean that you are giving your phone number to everyone on the internet?
Will we start getting spam to our phones?
I can just imagine answering the phone to a stephen hawking clone offering you viagra at a SUPER LOW PRICE!!!!!1!!
I, for one, don't think that voice should be integrated into the current communications over the internet. The Infrastructure I'm all for (As I just wrote here) but how it links in for the end-user is another issue entirely.
If VoIP is adopted it could affect everything.
- the phone numbers given out by companies and organisations.
- the way phone books are compiled and presented. Can you imagine a phone similar to those awful amstrad emailer phones that is linked to a complete online phone directory?
- the way we pay for our calls. If we're no longer payign for the line to be connected, simply for the service I could log into any phone anywhere and set it to recieve my calls and have any outgoing calls charged to me.
The hardware transistion will be straight foward and may well be well ont eh way. Its how the public sees and uses VoIP that is the real issue.
Who knows what technology will appear in the future.
For years we've heard about these pages of inteligent ink that moves to make up the words and pictures. If that technology ever materialises then perhaps newspapers will be replaced by somethign based on the net.
Although its hard to put your faith in a technology that could just be an etcha-sketcha.
Although I do think that this is the way things are moving it won't be that simple.
In the uk, where we don't have free local calls the home phone is on the point of dying out. Allot of people in their 20s already do without a home phone and simply rely on their mobiles. As the price of mobile calls drops and BT maintain their rediculous pricing it is not outragous to imagine the only place where phone lines are used are for small bussinesses.
Larger organisations are already switching to IP phones and its likely that this could become the normal for small bussinesses aswell.
I think any hardlines will be, within a few years, mostly broadband in one guise or another, with voice and data services both being run through the net. Thsi could lead to some interesting additions to the telephone service - more advanced caller ID, the ability to send bits of text and photos as part of the phone call(rather than telling someone to check their email), who knows what else.
Mobile phones will be far more difficult to predict. They are still very much an area of growth rather than decline. Even the future of 3G phones is uncertain but I can imagine some integration with the expansion of wifi. An interesting case to look at is that of Rabbit - a pre-mobile phone idea which ran phones through local hotspots. A bit like a cordless phone with base stations around the country. We could well see Nokia producing dual phones that run through wifi if its available.
One thing that is likely to happen is a diversification between the infrastructure and the services. You will have your mobile and hardlines provided by one company but then run your (god forbid) metred wifi access, phone calls, mobile calls and god knows what else through virtual companies. This can already seen through these companies offering cheap international calls such as OneTel.
It all boils down to confidence. I have to be confident that what I'm doing will work. I use a wireless keyboard but Im having to switch back because I find I have to check what I am typing because it doesn't always pick up every keypress
Voice to text are only of limited use while you have to re-read and correct any mistakes.
While this is only 80% accurate it can never be trusted. When this works at 95% it won't be trusted. I won't trust that this won't mistake Renal for Venal.
While this is a great step foward I can't see it being trustworthy for 2006 and I still think the same problems still apply to this as have always applied.
This is one of the flaws. It is soemthign that could be followed up. If a company is keepign records for suspect reasons it is possible to get the onbudsman involved.
If the data cannot be shown to be neccersary it will be forcibley deleted. Of course there is no way of ensuring that every copy is deleted but that would recquire a deliberate and organised breaking of the law which can never be protected fully against.
Something that is taken into account when working out how long is required is the spirit and circumstance under which the information is given. If information is given to have a refund sent to you then there is no legitimate reason for keepign the data for mroe than a year or so. If it is information on car ownership there is reason to keep the infolrmation for the life of the car plus a 'cussion period' afterwards.
Re:Persistance of information in a changing societ
on
OnStar Considered Harmful
·
· Score: 2, Informative
There is a way round this. In the UK the Data Protection Act (Here) Specifies that data is kept no longer than required. I'm not sure how enforcable this is, but the legislation is there.
I imagine your likely to be someone who wouldn't raise suspician.
There are allot of people who could be seen as suspect. From anyone with a muslim sounding name to the guy who went on an anti-war march to some poor guy on holiday in africa who gets mistaken for a wanted fraudster.
As soon as the data is collected we have no control over it. I get worried when I have no say in who knows more about myself than I do.
Slashdot Mirror
do the other sites not use the moderation then?
Only on /. would this get modded +5 Interesting.
Excuse my ignorance as I'm not American so may show some ignorance in regard to this BUT... (oh the eternal but)
Is this not what lead to the depression? People borrowed money to invest in a booming market as you ahve described. Then the market dropped, banks called in their debts and people ended up losing mroe money than they had?
There are essentially three types of investment.
Risk free investment This is your savings account and unless you're unlucky enough to bank with bearings your money will be safe and you'll get your interest on top of that.
Risky investment This is normal investment in the stock market. FTSE trackers and most people's shares. You go for the higher yield of the stock market but also accept the risk of losing everything.
Investment in an idea This is the only time you should borrow money to invest. This is if you want to start a bussiness, expend a bussiness. Basically if you know a good plan but need cash to realise it you may borrow for it. This might be from a bank, venture capitalists, friends, whatever.
Lots of people have picked up on the paint only lastign 5 years.
Does anyone know how often buildings are painted/cleaned at the moment? and I mean commercial buildings, not houses.
There are a few buildings that are famously painted non-stop.
If buildings are painted twice as often as normal with this paint (for example) and there are subsidies for its use I am sure this technology can make a real difference in our cities.
But there are times when you need a precision to the language and people simply don't have the ability to write/understand it.
One recent example was in a public exam when the question they asked (grammatically) wasn't the question the meant to ask.
I don't have the question to hand, but it consisted of a section of background and then a question on the situation.
The question asked why "this" situation was the case.
The question was so badly worded that the "this" was not clearly defined. It was possibe to interperate the question in atleast two different ways becasue of that.
Also I cannot remember his name, but there is an english conman that works on grammer. He will insert a comma into a promise which changes its meaning completely but isn't noticed by the people who send him money.
But I can have 5 TVs on at once at home
**runs round house**
infact i do have 5 TVs on now.
So, at the moment I am covered by my TV liscence but if I were to turn on a portable TV it would suddenly be illegal?
A bit of a tanjent - but there are some interesting laws to do with lodgers. If you have a lock on your door you need your own TV liscence. Now, I know some people who still live with their parents (the 18 year old kind not the 44 year old virgin kind) who have locks on their doors.
They are renewing the BBCs charter in the next couple of years. Instead of trying to change the way the BBC works perhaps they should update the TV liscence to reflect the technology we currently and may soon have at our disposal.
This could include phones, PDAs, Webcasting, computers both roaming and tethered, Cars, and god knows what else.
I'm sure he plays the lone ranger just as much as everyone else.
Microsoft already has IE default to MSN and people still bother to google.
Technology is just that, technology. Google is very good at the moment, but could be easily suppased. (By easily i mean a couple of years and allot of money).
The big advantage that google has is that it has become a word. It has become part of the language people use day to day. People google and like to google. They tell their friends that they google.
Hoover became synomous with vacum cleaner and every vacum cleaner was known as a hoover. Google has achieved a similar thing. Even if MSN becomes good people may well use "to google" to describe it. This won't stop microsoft but it will be the real challenge.
Not a bad job, but speaking of old systems...
When my grandma taught IT she used to drive 50 miles to the nearest computer (Hatfield) once i month to pick up the output and drop off the next lot.
Hatfield is also where the first computer text book was written. I met the guy once, he worked at the university and was asked to start running a new computing class. He agreed and looked into it and realised there was nothing for him to teach from so he had to write it.
It comes into it because we have a right to use the image and can use it legitamatly.
If there was a reliable way to screen for child porn (the only example i could think of) that didnt pick up on photos of kids in the bath or on the beach etc. than I would be all for it, because there is no legitamate use for the image.
Because there is a right that is being curtailed we cannot let it rest.
But currency isn't paper anymore and isnt produced by government. Its electronic and has been fro a long time.
In the UK, in the run up to Y2K, someone worked out that if everyone paniced and withdrew all their money from the bank then there would not be enough hard currency in existance.
all negatives, plates, positives, digitized storage medium, graphic files, magnetic medium, optical storage devices, and any other thing used in the making of the illustration that contain an image of the illustration or any part thereof are destroyed and/or deleted or erased after their final use.
...
So basically, even if you did it once, you'd have to destroy your printer and delete any storage medium used to make it. Secret Service wins, good game!
(See bold text)
Unless your printer burns a copy of everything it pritns to ROM you won't have to destroy it.
There is also an argument abotu what is considered final use. You could always intend to use it again the day afetr you were arrested...
Just because a company implements something voluntarily doesn't mean we should accept it. If there is no outcry over this than soon every major graphics program and printer manufacturer could include it.
Then where will we have left to turn?
Censorship doesnt have to be forced on you for it to be bad.
The way to reduce forgery is to obviously make it harder to copy notes.
Thats what thsi software is doing, it is not, however, the only way to make it difficult. Rather than curtailing our rights couldn't the treasuries come up with solutions themselves. Use paper that feels obviously different from any normal paper. Use watermarks and UV inks, use microprinting and metal strips. There are a whole swathe of ways to make it difficult to copy currency and those are just the ones I can know of and can think of off the top of my head.
I have seen a few fake notes (UK and Scotish) and they were either way beyond what I could produce at home or they were obvious forgeries. If someone takes a note and doesn't check it than thats their own problem.
Unfortunatly stupidity can never be eradicated. A case in point is my old boss who accepted a scotish 20 that was two pieces of printed paper stuck together, the worst part was that they were peelign away from each other.
Why should we have our freedom of expression quashed to make up for the idiocy of others?
With spam one thing that has been discussed is claiming damages that amount to the cost of the connection used to download it. With spam this is always going to be a problem due to the nature of the messages and spammers.
When reputable companies start forcing content that users will this open the doors to real claims being filed for the bandwidth cost?
Will every website require a click through screen that instead of checking that your not under 18 makes you agree to accept the adverts?
Will companies that are concerned about their bandwidth start banning their staff form all websites that have these bloated adverts on? Will just checking the news/email/football results in your lunch hour become something of the past?
And I thought that adverts that pump soudn out over the top of whatever MP3s yoru listenign to were bad enough.
Surely if the adverts become a barrier to the enjoyable use of your machien they cease to do the company or website any favours.
With any luck online advertising like this will become the second dot com bubble and will disappear quickly.
We can but hope.
Do you mean like Dmoz.org?
Dmoz is more or less a moderated, catagorized, directory which also includes a search function.
But what if you have multiple email addresses?
Would you be able to asign all of them to the same phone?
What if you only have one email address?
Would that mean that you are giving your phone number to everyone on the internet?
Will we start getting spam to our phones?
I can just imagine answering the phone to a stephen hawking clone offering you viagra at a SUPER LOW PRICE!!!!!1!!
I, for one, don't think that voice should be integrated into the current communications over the internet. The Infrastructure I'm all for (As I just wrote here) but how it links in for the end-user is another issue entirely.
If VoIP is adopted it could affect everything.
- the phone numbers given out by companies and organisations.
- the way phone books are compiled and presented. Can you imagine a phone similar to those awful amstrad emailer phones that is linked to a complete online phone directory?
- the way we pay for our calls. If we're no longer payign for the line to be connected, simply for the service I could log into any phone anywhere and set it to recieve my calls and have any outgoing calls charged to me.
The hardware transistion will be straight foward and may well be well ont eh way. Its how the public sees and uses VoIP that is the real issue.
Who knows what technology will appear in the future.
For years we've heard about these pages of inteligent ink that moves to make up the words and pictures. If that technology ever materialises then perhaps newspapers will be replaced by somethign based on the net.
Although its hard to put your faith in a technology that could just be an etcha-sketcha.
Theres nothing politically incorrect about sado-masochism.
Although I do think that this is the way things are moving it won't be that simple.
In the uk, where we don't have free local calls the home phone is on the point of dying out. Allot of people in their 20s already do without a home phone and simply rely on their mobiles. As the price of mobile calls drops and BT maintain their rediculous pricing it is not outragous to imagine the only place where phone lines are used are for small bussinesses.
Larger organisations are already switching to IP phones and its likely that this could become the normal for small bussinesses aswell.
I think any hardlines will be, within a few years, mostly broadband in one guise or another, with voice and data services both being run through the net. Thsi could lead to some interesting additions to the telephone service - more advanced caller ID, the ability to send bits of text and photos as part of the phone call(rather than telling someone to check their email), who knows what else.
Mobile phones will be far more difficult to predict. They are still very much an area of growth rather than decline. Even the future of 3G phones is uncertain but I can imagine some integration with the expansion of wifi. An interesting case to look at is that of Rabbit - a pre-mobile phone idea which ran phones through local hotspots. A bit like a cordless phone with base stations around the country. We could well see Nokia producing dual phones that run through wifi if its available.
One thing that is likely to happen is a diversification between the infrastructure and the services. You will have your mobile and hardlines provided by one company but then run your (god forbid) metred wifi access, phone calls, mobile calls and god knows what else through virtual companies. This can already seen through these companies offering cheap international calls such as OneTel.
It all boils down to confidence. I have to be confident that what I'm doing will work.
I use a wireless keyboard but Im having to switch back because I find I have to check what I am typing because it doesn't always pick up every keypress
Voice to text are only of limited use while you have to re-read and correct any mistakes.
While this is only 80% accurate it can never be trusted. When this works at 95% it won't be trusted. I won't trust that this won't mistake Renal for Venal.
While this is a great step foward I can't see it being trustworthy for 2006 and I still think the same problems still apply to this as have always applied.
This is one of the flaws. It is soemthign that could be followed up. If a company is keepign records for suspect reasons it is possible to get the onbudsman involved.
If the data cannot be shown to be neccersary it will be forcibley deleted. Of course there is no way of ensuring that every copy is deleted but that would recquire a deliberate and organised breaking of the law which can never be protected fully against.
Something that is taken into account when working out how long is required is the spirit and circumstance under which the information is given. If information is given to have a refund sent to you then there is no legitimate reason for keepign the data for mroe than a year or so. If it is information on car ownership there is reason to keep the infolrmation for the life of the car plus a 'cussion period' afterwards.
There is a way round this. In the UK the Data Protection Act (Here) Specifies that data is kept no longer than required.
I'm not sure how enforcable this is, but the legislation is there.
I imagine your likely to be someone who wouldn't raise suspician. There are allot of people who could be seen as suspect. From anyone with a muslim sounding name to the guy who went on an anti-war march to some poor guy on holiday in africa who gets mistaken for a wanted fraudster. As soon as the data is collected we have no control over it. I get worried when I have no say in who knows more about myself than I do.
pr0n stars are mostly silicon anyway.